How Deaf teacher Phillip King runs his primary school classroom

On the first day of school, Phillip King met his Year Six class and gave them all a “sign name”.

Sterling Thompson is known as the action of “throwing a ball”. Taylor is “tree” because he likes to climb and Kasper got a hand gesture swiping his brow, where he has a scar.

“It’s like a special thing that Deaf people can only do,” 10-year-old Sterling explains. "He was thinking of things that we liked."

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King, 46, is the only Deaf person teaching in a mainstream school in New Zealand. He was born Deaf and uses New Zealand Sign Language full-time, leading the class using every tool in his kit that is not the spoken word.

“I can read your lips and when the children are talking to me I can read their lips, but I don’t speak myself, I don’t use my voice,” King explains through an interpreter.

“As a professional teacher coming in with a history and background of struggles that I’ve had, there were definitely some barriers.

“…it's been very difficult, stressful, a lot of worry. There's been a lot of anxiety through that process. But I just thought, you know what, I have to put that behind me.”

King began working one day a week as a relief teacher at various Auckland schools back in 2023, picking up jobs via a casual teaching app called StaffSync.

“I accepted one of the reliever jobs, I just clicked, and three seconds later, it went approved and I was off to go, and I was like, ‘oh no, what have I just done?’”

After working with an interpreter throughout his studies and practical experience at AUT, this gig would be his first without that person there – he was nervous.

“I thought I might be judged or they may turn me away because I was Deaf, but actually that wasn't my experience at all.

“… the children were asking me to come back for the next day, and I was like, you want me to come back here?! I can't believe this worked so well and I didn't have the interpreter with me - that was all me.”

In 2024 King took on a relief job at Oranga School in One Tree Hill.

The primary school’s associate principal Laura Ferris says: “The kids absolutely loved him and they were so engaged… and we just saw that and thought ‘wow, what have we found here?’”

The school hired King into his first full-time teaching job mid-way through 2024, assigning him a class of 20, five and six-year-olds embarking on their first year of school. King met them, and their parents in term two.

“I asked them if they had any questions, we had a good chat about that. And it was all about building that relationship. And then when we moved into term three, the children were very excited to get started with their sign language learning,” King recalled.

To begin, King led the class from the front while an interpreter would stand at the back of the room speaking the words (the interpreter would also be around for staff meetings, parent/teacher interviews and seminars).

Gradually, King would ask the interpreter to “turn their voice off” in class – and over time, with plenty of preparation, planning and perseverance, their time in the classroom was wound back, until they did not need to be there at all.

“When I sign it has to go to the interpreter who then talks and it's quite a bit of time, whereas if we can sign together I can talk to you directly and so we can have that interaction and that builds a better relationship instead of having to go through another person,” King said.

“So last year … when the interpreter left, all of them [the students] were so happy to have the interpreters gone … and I actually took a picture and I will never forget that moment.

“I was so shocked … they were just … invested in having me as a teacher.”

This year, with a slightly older cohort of kids, it took just four weeks before King was running the show without any support in the room.

“I think because they're older it's a lot easier in terms of class management. Whereas when I was working with the younger children, of course, there's lots of distraction, lots of talking and so that needs a bit more, you need a bit more time to get those routines and expectations established,” King explains.

The father-of-three has built up rapport at Oranga School during his eight months teaching there – the community know who he is, they have now had interactions with a Deaf person and his confidence in the role has grown.

“At the start, I felt a bit overwhelmed, a bit like I was drowning a little bit with the extra demand of how are we going to communicate? You know, I've got this lesson plan. I've got these meetings. How am I going to manage this? I remember being quite exhausted at the start, but I've noticed… of course I'm still learning… but it's not feeling as heavy at the start of this year.”

King uses a raft of skills to communicate in the classroom. He is always wandering around, observing what is going on, ensuring the kids are focused on tasks. He has a bell he can ring for attention or uses a hands-on-head or “hands up” up motion: “so I can see everyone has their hands empty and then we start talking”.

King uses his laptop to read aloud, the whiteboard to write things down and pose questions and an app on his cellphone that transcribes words if the children have something they aren’t able to convey through sign. There’s also an online interpreter service that can be called upon if it’s needed for meetings with parents or staff as well as emails.

In the classroom, collaboration is key. Students eagerly raise their hands to answer questions and they sign out the spelling of words. Their peers correct them and they work together in a very dynamic, visually engaging way, which Ferris says is unique and effective.

“He's very good at recognising - and probably because his own experiences through education - he's very good to recognising individual strengths in children and then using that in that collaborative environment.

“There might be a louder child, but I feel like Phillip would see that as that child potentially having leadership and so that child might take on a role in the classroom for others.

“It's a real family-like context where everyone kind of has a role and contributes.

“I think we forget sometimes that kids learn in so many different ways and although Phillip doesn't have that verbal, he's got the visual. He's using a lot of visual prompts for learning… and that's what kids really respond to and you can really see that when he's teaching.”

King grew up in Christchurch, attending a mainstream primary school in Linwood where he learned alongside a teachers aid. King says he went on to have “a little bit of trauma going into university”.

“I passed, but still I had barriers and so that was something I gave up on and I felt like I wasted my time really. You know, I studied, but and when I started the plan for jobs, they were all so hesitant to hire a Deaf person,” he says.

“I vowed that I'd never go back to university.”

He moved to Auckland and worked at a Deaf Education Centre as a sign language tutor, visiting six or seven different schools in a week, role modelling, helping Deaf children develop their language.

“One teacher was watching me and said, ‘oh, you're fantastic!’ You should go to university and become a teacher’.

“I was like, 'oh, no, that's rubbish. I don't believe you. I don't want to go to university, rubbish. I couldn't be a teacher. I'd be rubbish'. Yeah. So I didn't believe them. But my wife said to me as well, 'oh, you should go. You should go'.

“They kept on putting the pressure on and so I finally gave in.”

When King first signed up to Oranga, parents were curious about how their child would learn from a Deaf teacher. He understands why.

“I wasn't surprised because I'm a brand new teacher… I think I'm the first teacher in New Zealand that fully uses New Zealand Sign Language, I think I'm the only one.”

The parents of one of King’s first students, a six-year-old, say they had questions about how the practicalities were going to work, but these were answered by some one-on-one meetings with him.

“It was really cool, it was the first time in my life that I ever talked to someone completely Deaf with an interpreter… it doesn’t take long to get used to it... but it was different," the child's father says.

“We would see him around before and after school and have little chats. It’s interesting the ‘sign language’ you can sort of do, you can get your point across really easily.”

The parent recalls being down at the school for assembly and spotting their son engaging with King.

“They had this conversation backwards and forwards, there were all sorts of signs happening, I just remember being blown away. They were having a complete conversation the two of them.”

The parents, the students and King all excitedly explain his version of the roll call – clearly one of the highlights of being in King’s class.

“There was one girl who loved wearing headbands, she always wore headbands, so that was their sign. One person who loved drawing, and so their sign name was drawing. One person loved cars and racing, so that was a name that they got,” King says.

“I think I had 20 students in my class and they all have their own unique sign name. It was linked to something like their favourite hobby or habits that they particularly have that are very unique to them, that distinguish them.”

This also becomes one of the first introductions to New Zealand Sign Language the children have.

“When we do the roll in class, I got the interpreters to start turning off their voices and I would sign their sign names. They [the students] would put their hands up … and then the next step was for them to take control of the roll [saying each other’s name in sign].

“It was a very slow progression. It's what we work to from going from using the voices to focusing more on the sign language. And some students I notice that their sign language was improving, that confidence was growing. It was great.”

Ferris recalls getting goosebumps at the school's award ceremony at the end of King's first year there, when the children stood up to sing the national anthem.

“We didn’t have the actions up or anything and we were up on stage and you could just see the sea of sign language. It started with Phillip’s class because they knew it… then you could see it grow across the hall it was amazing, just incredible to see that, we’re just embracing it.”