Spotlight on training teachers

LEARNING: Education alists know that attitudes and values are what count, not what can be reduced to bookkeeping. Change in education takes a long time, says the writer.

LEARNING: Education alists know that attitudes and values are what count, not what can be reduced to bookkeeping. Change in education takes a long time, says the writer.

Published Aug 28, 2014

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Michael Rice

The RECENT Stellenbosch/Wits report into the state of maths teaching confirms what has been known for some time: nearly 80 percent of Grade 6 maths teachers are incapable of doing what they are supposedly teaching. It puts much of the blame on the “highly variable quality of in-service teacher training”.

In-service teacher education (INSET) and Continuing Professional Development are essential for the effective functioning of any educational system. Teachers need to be continually upgraded and motivated if they are to retain their focus and enthusiasm. Above all, they need to feel they are getting something worthwhile out of INSET. Unless they have a positive attitude and high expectations that their needs are going to be fulfilled, efforts to upgrade them are likely to be a waste of time and money. Buy-in is essential.

How can buy-in be assured? Firstly, the teachers must want to attend the courses on offer. They must be volunteers, committed to putting back into the classroom what they have learned. Given the realities of education in South Africa, this constitutes a very small group.

But it is pointless working with anyone else. The committed, if nurtured and supported, can become catalysts for change. Instead of throwing money at the problem what is needed is courage and imagination. Educationists know that attitudes and values are what count, not what can be reduced to bookkeeping. Change in education takes a long time.

In May 2012, Penny Vinjevold, Western Cape director-general of education, challenged me to experiment with the PETS Foundation’s alternative approach to in-service teacher education in Barrydale. She had one request: any course material should include components on teaching fractions. Fractions is one of the earliest and most important intellectual hurdles children encounter in the primary phase. It is the basis of all mathematics throughout the education system.

How does the Barrydale experiment differ from what is done at present?

Firstly, it is not coercive. All the participants are volunteers. All the volunteer teachers follow the programme in their private free time. In other words, the programme is aimed at committed teachers who are prepared to make sacrifices to improve their professional performance.

We are not interested in anyone else. The moment teachers are forced to attend courses they become resistant and resentful. Learning suffers. And vast amounts of money are wasted to no purpose.

Our course material is not one-size-fits-all, but is tailored for specific teachers with specific needs. It has been developed with the teachers, by the teachers and for the teachers. It addresses their needs, capacities and limitations.

Our approach is not disruptive. Teachers remain in their schools and communities. Their professional and private lives are not interrupted. And, they can test and implement immediately what they are learning. This is important, because as things now stand there is little if any follow-up.

Teachers are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning and professional growth.

They are not treated as passive recipients of information, as is the case with top-down approaches in most up-grading programmes. They are empowered to take charge of their own lives.

Properly managed there should be no costs to the state for transport, accommodation, catering and the hiring of experts.

The Barrydale model is essentially a facilitated hybrid form of self-help distance learning supported by information communications technology (ICT). An interactive website hosted and managed by SchoolNet SA – trainingteachers.org.za – tablets, e-readers, cellphones, a CoZaCares E-learning kiosk, and an interactive mobi-site called Bambisa, which is being developed by Rethink Education, all support the learning process.

While ICT is important, it is not the focus of the model, which is and will remain teachers’ needs, capacities and performance.

We recruited 23 volunteers from two schools, three farm schools and a youth development centre. Two years later we have retained 17 volunteers – a 70 percent retention rate.

We decided early on that one of the ways we could counter the sense of isolation and waning motivation that bedevils all distance learning was to send a text message (“Tips for Teachers”) to the teachers’ cellphones once a week about some aspect of the fractions course they were doing, or aimed at some aspect of classroom practice related to it.

The aim was to implement an interactive mobile learning and communications platform for teachers in the Western Cape. A specifically designed app called Bambisa has already been designed for this purpose.

Text messages can be received on lower-end cell phones from a platform that delivers educational content broken down into “bite-size bits” and presented through a chat interface completely free to the Western Cape Education Department’s (WCED) 33 000 teachers.

The service could be implemented across all schools in the Western Cape almost immediately, for free. We believe it is a world first.

In future, the WCED could use the same system to inform teachers of items of news concerning education and related topics and to communicate directly with all its teachers to inform them of administrative developments, circulars, changes in policy etc, which means enormous savings in costs.

Contrary to expectation, there is a dearth of digital material specifically written for South African teachers on the internet. This might come as a surprise as any random trawl of the internet will reveal an avalanche of courses, programmes, videos, e-textbooks etc.

The problem is little of this material has been created by people with recent classroom experience of township or rural schools.

Language and culture are, and will always remain, central to teaching and learning. Nor have most of the e-textbooks been designed with the internet in mind. Most e-textbooks are simply reproduced in the same format as their hard-copy originals.

The Verstaan Breuke/Understanding Fractions course on http://trainingteachers.org.za is open source. The WCED can use it at no cost.

It is the first course of its kind in Afrikaans and English developed for teachers by teachers and with teachers, specifically intended as digital content. Work is in progress to expand it to include decimals and percentages.

Hard copy, not in the same format, is available as a supplement to the digital version. Connectivity is and will remain a problem, especially in rural areas, for some time to come. And, of course, many teachers feel insecure without having a hard copy to fall back on.

It is quite clear that there is an urgent need for a new model of in-service teacher training. The PETS Foundation’s approach provides just such a model. It is cost-effective, professionally viable and educationally sound.

Further, it is based on a proven self-help model that encourages learners to become active creators of meaning and to take charge of their professional development. It is not a silver bullet, nor is it a quick fix.

We believe that over time it could make a meaningful contribution to the improvement of teaching in our schools and substantially improve examination performance throughout the system.

It is essential to take a long view, to identify the jewels among our teachers, to nurture and support them, and use them as catalysts for change.

l Dr Rice, chairman of the PETS Foundation, was formerly Associate Head of English at the Johannesburg College of Education, and latterly Special Adviser to the Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal.

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