Durban - Teachers’ unions have given the thumbs-down to the government’s “radical” new plan to use class time to train maths teachers.
The unions warn that allocating every Monday for maths teacher training was a “crisis” waiting to unfold because of the disruption to the school timetable.
The Basic Education Department has already issued an instruction to every school in the country to immediately implement the new training model.
Grade 8 and Grade 9 maths teachers are to gather at a central school in their area on a Monday, where they will be tested on what they ought to be teaching on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
The time frame for these extra lessons has not been disclosed.
After working through the curriculum for the week ahead, the teachers will have to submit to another test to assess their grasp of the content, and are required to score at least 80%.
The department has instructed schools to adapt their timetables to accommodate the days of the year that the maths teachers will be in the workshops and away from their classrooms.
“We need to be extremely radical and do ‘out of the normal’ in our determination to save our children,” department spokesman Elijah Mhlanga said.
The results of the Annual National Assessments (ANA) have been dismal for Grade 9.
South Africa’s Grade 9 pupils could manage an average mark of just 10.8% for maths in the latest assessments, while a paltry 2.9% of KwaZulu-Natal Grade 9 pupils were able to score 50% and higher.
The consensus among education researchers is that the root of the problem is in the foundation phase (grades 1 to 3), and that children accumulate learning deficits as they proceed from one grade to another.
Researchers thus argue that any interventions must be targeted at the foundation phase.
However, the department has countered that the state of maths in the senior phase (grades 7 to 9) demands action “right now”.
The department has established specialised teams of national officials, provincial co-ordinators and district subject advisers to oversee the implementation of the training.
But the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) said that while it was in favour of teacher training, the consequences of the department’s latest intervention would be ill-discipline at schools and increased workloads.
“The absence of teachers for a day would lead to disruptions. Schools need to be effective every day. The department should take into account that teachers teach more than one grade and more than one subject. This plan will solve a crisis by creating another crisis,” Sadtu general secretary Mugwena Maluleke said.
“If the department had consulted (us), a better model would have been agreed upon,” he argued.
Anthea Cereseto, the deputy president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa), said the department seemed to think that the teachers concerned taught only one grade and one subject.
She warned of the “enormous” consequences of having teachers absent from their classroom for a day a week, which included pupils across grades being without teachers.
She was also worried that the Monday training would not provide the “deep conceptual knowledge” which was lacking for many teachers across grades, and that the department was rushing into a “one size fits all” approach.
Cereseto said she had spoken to Grade 8 science teachers who this term were having to re-teach their pupils primary school maths, such as how to convert millilitres to litres.
“These are kids who come from good schools, who are wrestling with fundamental maths. The interventions must be targeted at every grade.”
She said Naptosa was willing to work with the department on developing a training model informed by teachers’ needs and their varying contexts, and which possibly took place after hours.
The SA Onderwysersunie believed the school day might have to be extended by two or three hours to make up for lost time, and said an urgent meeting of the Education Labour Relations Council had been called for to clarify a number of uncertainties, such as who would foot the bill for travel costs.
Asked whether teacher training should instead take place after school or at weekends, Chris Klopper, chief executive of the union, said this was among the issues requiring urgent discussion “at the highest levels”. At the very least, it would significantly affect the normal school day and week.
Professor Brahm Fleisch, of the University of Witwatersrand School of Education, explained that evidence of which teacher training models were effective was not particularly strong in South Africa. A lot more needed to be known about what worked, before implementing one model on such a large scale.
“But while we would like to see more evidence-informed policy-making, we cannot discount it. The department is at least doing something. There are no easy solutions,” Fleisch said.
The Mercury