'Wii Gaay' means Clever Child in the Gamilaraay Aboriginal language of north-western NSW.

INFORMATION FROM:g
Dr Graham Chaffey, Honorary Fellow, School of Education, University of New England and deviser of the Coolabah Dynamic Assessment (CDA) method
Sharon Cooke, Consultant for Aboriginal Education in the Armidale Diocese and Indigenous Commissioner for the Catholic Education Commission of NSW
Cate Taylor, Wii Gaay Project Coordinator, Catholic Schools Office, Armidale
Karen Barker, teacher Moree High School and a Wii Gaay mentor
Liz Ryan, Aboriginal Education Assistant, St Xaviers PS, Gunnedah
Ed Lewis, Lecturer, School of Education, ACU National
Des Matejka, Lecturer, School of Education, ACU National
Jedda, Year 6 student, St Josephs PS, Glen Innes
Brandon, Year 6 student, St Francis Xavier PS, Narrabri

WHAT IT IS
A program for gifted Aboriginal students in Years 3-6 from Catholic schools in the northern New South Wales towns of Walgett, Moree, Narrabri, Gunnedah, Tamworth, Armidale, Uralla, Barraba, Werris Creek, Inverell, Glen Innes and Walcha.

The Wii Gaay project began in 2002. It targets Aboriginal students in Years 3, 4 and 5 attending schools within the Armidale Catholic Diocese who are identified as underachieving in the classroom but having high learning potential. These students are invited to attend two residential education camps per year. The camps focus on literacy, numeracy and ICT, with strong emphasis on scaffolding strategies to enable each student to achieve success on each activity before moving on to the next activity.

In-school support is also part of the project. Additionally, the students are matched with an Aboriginal mentor who provides motivation and encouragement throughout the project.

HOW IT WORKS
Potential Wii Gaay students are identified using a tool designed by Dr Graham Chaffey to identify learning potential in students aged eight to eleven, the Coolabah Dynamic Assessment (CDA). He designed it specifically to work effectively with Aboriginal children and children from low socio-economic backgrounds. Dynamic testing represents a paradigm shift in the identification of academic giftedness in children who are 'invisible' underachievers - children who underperform in the classroom and on tasks meant to inform the identification process such as IQ tests. It uses a test-intervention-test dynamic assessment approach. The intervention focuses on improving cognitive efficiency, developing self-efficacy and overcoming issues such as fear of testing.
"It is about giving the child the tools to work with," Dr Chaffey said. "Our goal is for the child to do all the cognitive processing after we give them metacognitive tools - but we have to build up self-efficacy so they can do this, and overcome all the barriers that inhibit performance of these kids on tests and in the classroom.

"Identifying gifted children who possess low self-efficacy toward school is difficult. These children will often not engage in cognitive processes and when they do, give up very quickly. This is not an ideal formula for achieving on tests or impressing a teacher, two of the most common ways that children are identified as gifted."

This identification is a small reversal of long-term underachievement. The next step is to attack skill gaps, cognitive inefficiency and low self-efficacy on a long-term basis to permanently reverse underachievement. The identified task is to take these bright minds and help them work towards their potential. This was the thinking behind Wii Gaay.

"Wii Gaay began as a way to use CDA modelling. The inhibitors (to excelling on the test) that I identified are the same inhibitors that stop children operating to their full potential in the classroom. We used the same modelling to close skill gaps, engage in academic learning and improve self-efficacy."

WHY IT IS NEEDED
"Too often, internationally, Indigenous kids were not turning up on standard IQ tests," Dr Chaffey said. "It seemed obvious that there had to be a reason for this, and that reason wasn't that they were not intelligent enough. This is the only significant program for gifted Indigenous students in the world."

Dr Chaffey wrote in Australasian Journal of Gifted Education (Vol. 17, No. 1, June 2008) that, "evidence is emerging that the gifted cohort are underachieving to a far greater degree than the rest of the Indigenous population." He added that, "fundamentally, gifted education is based on what high ability children can do, an approach diametrically opposed to the largely deficit based approaches that too often have dominated Indigenous education."

According to Sharon Cooke, "Wii Gaay is important for equity. There are so many incredibly clever kids out there, but every gifted and talented program you look at there are no black kids. I refuse to believe for a second that there is not one gifted Aboriginal child who doesn't qualify for a mainstream gifted and talented program.

"But it is more than that - it is about these being the next leaders not just of Indigenous Australia, but of Australia. The fact they are Aboriginal is by the by; they know they are pretty special kids. We shouldn't have to run a program to convince our kids that they are special and invaluable members of the Australian community, but we do."

Karen Barker was a school student in Brewarrina and is now the only Aboriginal teacher at Moree High school. "Aboriginal kids who are gifted and talented are not picked up in school because they don't fit the image of giftedness," she said. "I strongly believe programs like Wii Gaay give good opportunities for children to take their own educational journey. We embrace the uniqueness and talents of each and every single one of them."

"Indigenous children have learning masks," program coordinator Cate Taylor said. "Being a teacher, and as a parent of Aboriginal children, I realised that the general belief is that Aboriginal children are average or below average."

WHAT HAPPENS AT CAMP
"We engage children and we make it fun," Dr Chaffey said. "We are getting the really bright minds now."

For Mrs Taylor, it starts with trust. "We develop trust with the kids - that is so important. The same adult faces turn up to Wii Gaay every time which reinforces to the kids how they are valued."

Liz Ryan works at Gunnedah's St Xavier's PS and has been attending Wii Gaay for five years. "When I started I noticed a lack of confidence in the kids before they came here, then they would come back with a positive attitude," she said. "They shared their experiences when they came back to school. I think it is fantastic. When we do assignments they try to think of the biggest words, look them up in the dictionary, push themselves. As soon as they get back home they say, 'When is the next camp?'
"Their spirits have lifted with the confidence it gives them. It is like they are in another world when they come here. It brings out their ability, what they can really do, compared to what happens in class. It is more positive development."

"We prop them up, give them the tools, give them the expectations," Ms Barker said. "If you just prop them up but don't give any tools, that is when they fall on their faces."

"I think (mainstream) teachers think we do Aboriginal art and paint ourselves up and dance here," Ms Cooke said. "We integrate cultural perspectives by acknowledging country, acknowledging language, but we are not here teaching Aboriginal culture.
"Teachers come here and look at what we do - explicit, scaffolded, supported learning, taken from learned experiences. That could be done in any classroom. It is not brain surgery. There are no text books used here. It is just good teachers teaching."

THE WORK
Des Matejka and Ed Lewis are both lecturers in the School of Education at ACU National, and both have been attending Wii Gaay for many years. Mr Matejka handles ICT and Mr Lewis works with numeracy.

Mr Matejka: "One of the approaches is to set up diverse and challenging IT experiences. For example, creating a 'play' space where they can experiment with different types of tools: problem solving games; spatial relations; artistic tools where they can simulate layers of paint, manipulate shapes and textures; peer to peer communication with text, video and audio.
"What it does is lift their general technology literacy and also provide an understanding of the information space - within a computer, information can be held in many different forms. They can manipulate that based on what they want to do with the information: calculate, communicate, investigate, express.

"Getting as much "hands on" experience as possible is important, but it has to be thought through, organised, managed and supported, so at the end of the day they have moved from their level of understanding to greater confidence, efficacy and success. That is the springboard for the creative use of technology.

"I would argue this is a good approach for all children, but with a group of children that have particular potential, they are more likely to understand the possibilities and engage in more sophisticated ways with the technology.

"It is a classic case of more is better - 'more' being more diverse applications, not just more of the same. You wouldn't necessarily have a task that just got harder; you'd have a task that led to a more challenging task that then built in another set of tasks. For example, working with numeric data you might go from simple tasks such as accessing, ranking, sorting data, to more complicated tasks: graphing, predicting, simulating; and finally to more open-ended tasks: expressing. It is not just getting more difficult; it is bringing in more diverse applications."

Mr Lewis: "We wanted to do things that would engage the kids and complement their learning styles. That meant doing a lot of investigation in problem solving, doing outdoor maths, using equipment to solve problems. The relevance was about finding contexts to apply mathematics rather than this somewhat vain hope that you could teach them skills in the classroom and hope one day they would apply them.

"It is like learning to swim in the water rather than out of the water.
"We operate along Graham's principles: the students needed to be engaged, they needed to have success, they needed to be given permission to succeed. The results were staggering after the first couple of camps. We had a lot of teachers saying, 'I don't now what you're doing there, but I've got a different kid in my class.'

"We have had some tremendous fun with using meaningful contexts. I got hold of some fossil bones from a diprotodon, the megafauna hunted until about 50,000 years ago. We buried the fossil bones and gave the kids the experience of being palaeontologists - they dug the bones up, weighed them, measured them, from a skeletal model they inferred what part of the skeleton the bones were from, and from that they then calculated possible height. Their conclusion was 2.8-3.0m. We then went to the internet, checked the size of the creature - and it was 2.8-3.0m high. So they had the experience of being forensic palaeontologists.

"Last year we did some work with fish traps, how they worked with the tides, down at Arrawarra. We made scale models with pebbles and Blutack and talked about the mathematical idea of scale. We generally try to do stuff that is different to run of the mill classroom mathematics. We embed all the skills, concepts and understandings inside real-life contexts."

WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN CAMPS
Contact is maintained between camps in several ways. Firstly, students communicate with each other over email. Secondly, each student is assigned an Aboriginal mentor who keeps in touch with them. Thirdly, there is some in-class work coordinated by Cate Taylor. Ms Taylor is also busy testing, searching for the next cohort of Wii Gaay kids.

"The challenge was to go into schools and say 'This needs to change'," Mrs Taylor said. "In the first year I hit brick walls, the second year I climbed brick walls, and by the third year I was on top of the brick wall. I jut kept turning up because I believed in it. Originally I had trouble setting up appointments to run tests in schools, but I kept persevering and it's at the stage now where I can say to schools, 'I'm passing through and I'll drop in'.

"The schools have become believers. There is an online learning dimension because we have 28 schools in the diocese. We want to keep bright minds in touch.

Currently for the Year 3 kids we work in the classroom with teachers and online, then they go into residential camps at Year 4.
"I've started to go to secondary schools to work with transition of our kids. High schools are really keen to know more, to help these kids stay up. They are realising now that this scaffolding and best practice teaching helps all kids. They have become convinced because they have seen the growth in the kids and in the BST results."

Ms Barker is a mentor. "As part of the role as a mentor I email them, ask what they want to do, how they are going at school, don't force education down their throat, but in a discreet way show them they can believe in themselves," she said.

WHAT IT HAS ACHIEVED AND IS ACHIEVING
"I was pretty sure it was going to work, but was blown away by the power of this model in the field," Dr Chaffey said. "Few believe it is going to work in the first camp but I tell them, 'We'll be right' - and it always works.

"Once you establish an achieving cohort of bright Indigenous kids, this repeats itself time and again, then it starts changing the culture on both sides of the fence. For both the Indigenous community and the non-Indigenous community, it changes how they perceive the kids and how they react. I believe this is a crucial tool in reshaping expectations and outcomes in education for Indigenous kids."

Ms Barker said, "We have to give them the tools. Wii Gaay is a partnership - we give them the tools to bring out the best in who they are. These kids have nothing to be ashamed of. They come from the oldest culture in the world and should be proud of that. We need to teach them to walk with their heads high, not walk with their heads down."

Mrs Taylor said, "With Dare to Lead we have tracked Year 3, 5, 7 and 9. The data show all our kids are consistently rising, even in high school, and while that is not huge growth, it is very different to state averages. We plant the seed, sometimes we don't see it start to grow, but it will one day. Our first cohort of kids in Year 10 has done so well. Their academic results remain good. With the challenges these young people have faced and overcome, they now trust education that it will take them somewhere."

WHO BENEFITS
The Wii Gaay people have innumerable stories about past students. Ms Barker remembers that, "In one of the first groups there was a boy who is now at St Joseph's in Hunters Hill. His ambition at primary school was to be a pilot. For a young Aboriginal kid it seemed an impossible dream, but he has had the courage to move from his community to further his education and realise his potential as a citizen when he graduates. He is in Year 9 now, one of the first group of Wii Gaay kids to come through.
"You can see the growth in them between when they arrive and when they leave. One child can tell you the life cycle of a magpie like a scientist. They bring this different knowledge then bounce off each other. Once we've had them in, they'll always be a Wii Gaay kid. The friendships they build and the rapport they develop with each other is just amazing.

"In that transition period into high school our gifted and talented kids disappear like ghosts off the radar. This is where we lose them. They get caught up in insecurity, all the other pressures of being an adolescent with no ambitions to stand out. It's not cool to be smart when you're a teenager. We try to get to these little kids and let them know that it is cool to know stuff."
Mrs Taylor recalls, "There was one student, the teachers laughed at us when we chose him. He was on an additional needs program with a shocking attendance rate, very quiet and withdrawn. We identified him and even his Mum said, 'I don't know why you think he has a high learning potential'. At the first camp he was totally disengaged and homesick. He was so used to failing he didn't want to try any more. But he developed self belief through succeeding in doing tasks, and he is a real leader now."
Two of the graduating Wii Gaay students of 2008, Jedda (a Year 6 from St Joseph's Glen Innes) and Brandon (a year 6 from St Francis Xavier, Narrabri), gave their perspectives.

Jedda: "I met Mrs Taylor in Year 3 and did the puzzles. I didn't even know what the puzzles were for, I just did them. I have been coming for three years. It was quite scary at first. I had lots of fun on the first day.

"My older sister Courtenay had been to Wii Gaay but she didn't tell me much about it. I like meeting new people. I remember on the bus when I first saw Shannon, me and Simone were sitting at the back. Shannon and me really connected, lots of talking.
"We're all nice to each other - we are only here for a little bit and are happy to be with each other. We are supposed to stay in touch on email but my email doesn't work.

"My favourite Wii Gaay thing so far would be the start of this year at Dubbo because we went to the zoo and I knew a lot about the animals. When we did the zoo report I did a puppet and then I talked about giraffes."

Brandon: "This is my fourth year coming. It's fun meeting up with all the other Wii Gaay students and meeting up with the other teachers. The work is all okay.

"The best thing I remember is the time we went to Echidna Gully and went yabbying. I caught a few. We put them in a bucket, took them back and ate them.

"We have an emailing process thing we do. The other kids at my school don't know much about Wii Gaay. My best subject is mathematics. I'd like to become a chef. I've helped Dad cook dinner at home.

WHAT HAS BEEN LEARNED
Cate Taylor: "I've learned the importance of trust and establishing trust before you can go any further. This is true of all kids, but especially Indigenous kids.

"You have to give children small successes to build on. I have learned that you can set kids up for failure very easily without realising it.

"I have learned not to judge a book by its cover. Don't be so judgmental as a person and as a teacher.

"There are a lot of people out there who want to do good things for kids but sit back because they don't know how to break through the barriers.

"I have learned that we can make a difference. The Wii Gaay motto is: Believe it. Achieve it."

Des Matejka: "I have been coming to Wii Gaay for five years. I am convinced that education, along with health, is the key agent of change for Indigenous communities.

"The other reason I come along is I am seeing really positive changes amongst the Indigenous adults involved in this project, particularly AEAs and the Aboriginal parents. There is a strong connection between the growth and efficacy of the children and the pride, growth and sense of fulfilment amongst the parents. They have proved to themselves that their kids can - and do - and will, whereas in the beginning they thought at best their kids might.

"Other outcomes include scholarships into private and other schools, high achievement in social groupings, high academic attainment, and changes in behaviour so the kids are good school citizens, participators. That has an impact on parents in terms of their pride.

"There is a history in this country we have to address and we won't do it by engaging in political dialogue about right or wrong, or sitting around and feeling bad about it. At the end of the day, someone has to do something. The children we have here are from schools where racism is alive, from communities and often families that are in crisis - it is not about ticking boxes, it is about doing something."

Ed Lewis: "I have found it very compelling. I keep coming every year. I believe in the kids. I believe they need a fair go. Their gifts and talents need to be recognised and nurtured. You get drawn in by the warmth and generosity of spirit, and the way they welcome you as someone who wants to contribute."

Brandon: "Wii Gaay has really changed my life. If I hadn't have come I wouldn't have met all the people I've met. It's been a great experience."