Kaiako Companion · teaching the unit without flattening it

This page is the teacher-side memory of the unit: formative checks, likely misconceptions, differentiation, local adaptation, cultural / source guardrails, and evidence to collect from real classroom use. It is designed so the unit remains coherent when taught by someone who did not author it.

What should improve across the six weeks?

Causation

From: “the assassination caused WW1”.

Toward: weighted explanation using conditions, trigger, decisions and escalation.

Perspective

From: “people supported / opposed the war”.

Toward: historically situated reasons, with evidence separated from invented interiority.

Source use

From: “reliable / unreliable”.

Toward: observation · inference · claim · evidence · limit · corroboration · confidence.

Identity

From: “WW1 made New Zealand independent / ANZAC created NZ identity”.

Toward: evidence-based, plural and bounded interpretations.

Classroom kōrero has its own tikanga

Te Akomanga’s current Learning through talk guidance recommends making the ground rules for classroom dialogue explicit and visible. Co-construct a short version with the class before the first continuum / disagreement task.

Possible shared tikanga: whakamana others · listen generously · do not interrupt · give thinking time · challenge ideas with reasons / evidence · changing your mind is allowed · no one is required to disclose personal / whānau experience to participate.

Invite

What do you notice? What do you think? Why might…? What would happen if…?

Probe

What makes you say that? How do we know? Can you point to the evidence? What do you mean by…?

Expand

Who can add to that? Is there another explanation? Does this source fit? What counter-example could challenge us?

Participation is broader than speaking first. Use think/write before pair talk, processing / ready / new-direction signals, mini-whiteboards, written responses and deliberate wait time so confident speakers do not become the evidence base for what “the class thinks”.

Historical empathy ≠ pretend role-play

Te Akomanga warns against an unrestrained “let’s pretend” version of historical empathy. In this unit, Would You Go? and the conscription hearing give students bounded historical contexts and first-hand / authoritative evidence. Students explain what makes an action intelligible in its time; they do not claim “I know exactly how this historical person felt”.

Teacher prompt: “What could this person reasonably have known at this point?” is usually better than “How would you feel?”

Weekly formative checks

Week 1 · Ngā take

Listen for:

MAIN treated as four equal causes;
alliance determinism;
trigger confused with cause.

2-minute check: “Remove one factor. What changes? What still makes war possible?”

Week 2 · Choice / Empire

Listen for:

“Britain forced NZ” versus “NZ freely chose” binary;
“Māori wanted / didn’t want to fight” generalisations;
role-card assumptions presented as facts;
“propaganda = lies”.

2-minute check: label one sentence evidence and one inference.

Week 3 · Experience / Total War

Listen for:

Gallipoli = whole NZ war;
trenches = every soldier’s life;
Pioneer = safe support role;
women = “replaced men” only.

2-minute check: “Which source would you need to answer this question better?”

Week 4 · Contested loyalty

Listen for:

Te Puea = anti-war / Pōmare = pro-British;
raupatu mentioned with no explanatory mechanism;
conscientious objection treated as Māori-only.

2-minute check: “What earlier event makes this 1917 choice more intelligible?”

Week 5 · Peace

Listen for:

Versailles = one leader’s plan;
Germany “admitted sole guilt”;
self-determination treated as universally applied;
NZ signature = instant sovereignty.

2-minute check: “Who gained power from this term, and who had little say?”

Week 6 · Aftermath / memory

Listen for:

armistice = suffering ends;
memorial = direct record of wartime experience;
Samoa treated as unrelated extra;
ANZAC either accepted or rejected on ideology rather than evidence.

2-minute check: “Does this evidence support, complicate, or do both to the nationhood story?”

Retrieval spiral

Retrieval should interleave concepts, not become a weekly vocabulary quiz.

Bring back	Later use
Nationalism	Recruitment → conscription → ANZAC memory
Empire	Samoa 1914 → Versailles → Samoa mandate
Source limits	Recruitment posters → school sources → soldier dossiers → newspapers → memorials
Causation	War origins → Versailles consequences → influenza / colonial administration
Who has power?	Conscription → Paris → Samoa → memorial curation

Differentiation · same thinking, different access

Support reading

read aloud / partner read;
chunk source physically;
highlight one carrier feature at a time;
pre-teach only vocabulary required for the task;
model the first row, not the whole worksheet.

Support writing

oral rehearsal before writing;
claim/evidence/limit sentence frame;
allow bullet evidence before paragraph;
speech-to-text where useful;
teacher conference to choose strongest evidence.

Extend

add contradictory source;
compare historian interpretations;
trace a source upstream;
local Papers Past search;
question whether categories themselves work.

Avoid the “easy worksheet / hard inquiry” split. Students needing literacy support should still get the historical problem. Change the reading load, not the intellectual dignity.

Reo / mātauranga guardrails

Use a small set of classroom reo repeatedly enough that students learn it through use.
Do not translate complex Māori concepts into convenient English school values.
Use te reo Māori primary-source language where it exists; label translation / translator / uncertainty.
Where an interpretation depends on iwi/hapū history, prefer local or Māori-authored authority.
Do not use “Māori perspective” in the singular.
Do not add a whakataukī simply to make the page feel Māori.

Rohe / local curriculum fork

The canonical resource is national. The local substitution should change at least one evidence carrier, not merely the place name in a question.

Find a local memorial / honour roll / service person / school record.
Check whether local iwi / hapū histories alter the national framing.
Use Papers Past to search the school / town / rohe during 1914–18.
Record creator, date, custodian / archive and what use rights allow.

Waikato example: Tāpapa soldier-settlement material, Kīngitanga / Waikato conscription history, Rukuhia / district memorials or other verified local carriers can make the national unit concretely local without pretending they represent all Waikato experience.

Trauma / classroom safety

Use humanising evidence, not gore.
Warn before material involving death, punishment or racist historical language.
Do not force students to disclose family military histories or positions on war.
Role activities are analytic simulations, never mock combat or cultural impersonation.
Allow a student to step out of an embodied debate while still completing the evidence task.

Evidence to capture for real classroom refinement

These are future evidence fields, not claims about use:

Which Week 1 factor students overweight before / after evidence?
How many role-card responses distinguish evidence from inference by Week 2?
Whether students can match source carrier to claim by Week 3.
What changed in conscription reasoning after Waikato context was introduced.
Whether the Versailles simulation improves explanation of compromise / unequal power.
How the final Identity Ledger differs from the Week 1 baseline.
Which local source produced the strongest engagement or historical reasoning.
Mentor / associate teacher feedback and the revision made because of it.

Emerald principle: classroom success cannot be authored into existence. Preserve student misconceptions, feedback and revisions as evidence, then let later independent review decide what level the unit has earned.

Pedagogy authorities: Te Akomanga / NZHistory: Learning through talk; Historical empathy; historical significance planning. These support the teaching methods here rather than becoming extra content students must memorise.

Answer keys & expected findings

Guidance, not scripts: accept well-reasoned student answers that differ from these. For named people and press framing, follow the linked NZHistory and Papers Past source carriers; the student handouts do not supply verbatim quotations, so do not improvise quotes from memory.

Europe 1914 map task — expected memberships

Eventually Allies/Entente: Britain & Empire (Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada…), France, Russia (to 1917), Serbia, Belgium, Japan; Italy from 1915 (pre-war Triple Alliance member — the classic retrieval trap), Romania (1916), USA (1917), Greece (1917). Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire (late 1914), Bulgaria (1915). Long neutrals: Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, the Scandinavian states. Key teaching point: pre-war alliance blocks and wartime sides are related but not identical.

MAIN cause-chain lab — what a defensible allocation looks like

There is no correct 100-point split. Look for: a reasoned distribution across militarism, alliances, imperialism and nationalism; alliances credited with the speed of spread rather than the inevitability of war; the July Crisis treated as a chain of decisions (trigger ≠ cause); and New Zealand's distance from the causes acknowledged before Phase 2 asks why it participated.

War-experience source lab — expected readings

Students should surface provenance, audience and purpose for each source, corroborate across accounts rather than trusting one, and expect different experiences by place (Gallipoli vs Western Front), role (infantry, nurse, pioneer, officer) and 1914 vs 1918 conditions. A strong lab notes what a source cannot tell us, not only what it says.

Conscription perspectives — keeping the three distinct

Māui Pōmare and the Native Contingent Committee: service argued as a pathway to recognition and equality claims. Āpirana Ngata: a leading promoter of Māori enlistment who later used the standing Māori servicemen had won to press for inquiries into land grievances; use the linked Manatū Taonga profile for this interpretation rather than inventing a quotation. Te Puea Hērangi and Waikato: refusal grounded in the 1863 invasion and raupatu — she supported men who resisted the ballot. None of the three is a stand-in for "the Māori view"; iwi experiences of nineteenth-century Crown action shaped different responses.

Versailles negotiation — reveal guidance

Compare, don't score: each Big Four position should be argued from its role card before the reveal. Watch for the Article 231 oversimplification (reparations ≠ the whole treaty; "war guilt clause" is a label, not the treaty). Aotearoa connection: New Zealand's separate signature marks a changing international position — and the League mandate it accepted over Sāmoa complicates any tidy "New Zealand became independent" story.

Identity matrix — checkpoint expectations

Mid-unit entries typically lean Gallipoli-heavy and story-shaped; that is the diagnostic, not a fault. Final entries should widen to Māori service and resistance, the home front, dissent, Sāmoa and memory-making. Strong final judgements treat "the war made the nation" as a claim argued from evidence — including evidence of who was left out of the story — never as settled fact.

Whose WW1? final task — assessment

Assess against the Whose WW1? rubric: evidence range, perspective balance, identity reasoning, and curation/communication. The museum brief rewards justified exclusions as much as inclusions.