Matseliso L. Mokhele

Does the Cascade Model Work for Teacher Training? Analysis of Teachers' Experiences

Abstract Throughout the world, education systems are changing, thus offering opportunities for serious and promising educational reforms. One of the key elements in most of these reforms is the continuing professional development of teachers. The real challenge facing most schools is no longer how to improve, but how to sustain the improvements these schools have made. Also, reform requires that teachers learn new roles and ways of teaching that translate into long-term developmental processes which require them to focus on changing their own practices. To meet all of these demands, the professional development of teachers is recognised as vital to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in schools. Using a quantitative approach, the researchers explore the experiences of teachers on cascade model. They concluded that, although this model has come to be accepted as the way of disseminating information in most in-service training programmes, it appears to have failed to significantly improve the performance of educators.

Empowering Teachers: An Alternative Model for Professional Development in South Africa

Abstract The paper aims at examining one example of a large and fairly successful professional development intervention programme, the Mpumalanga Secondary Science Initiative (MSSI), carried out within the South African context. The continuing professional development programme (CPD) for science and mathematics teachers was a six-year intervention programme that was carried out in one of the nine provinces of South Africa, Mpumalanga. The programme was fairly successful in enlisting large numbers of science and mathematics teachers, ensuring consistent participation of the teachers throughout the duration of the project, and in changing in some ways the teachers’ knowledge and approaches to the teaching of science and mathematics in many of the schools. In this paper, the researcher uses qualitative research approaches to develop an alternative model for professional development, from interviews with a group of South African teachers who participated in the MSSI project, the researcher explore their experiences with the CPD intervention. The researcher deposit that teachers should not only be involved in the planning of the CPD programmes, but that the programmes should be aligned with their own personal circumstances and motivations

The role of lead teachers in instructional leadership: A case study of environmental learning in South Africa

AbstractSouth Africa has a fairly centralised education system with a national curriculum. To expect that its instructional guidance system will be formal and centralised is thus not far-fetched. For the most part, that is indeed the case with most curriculum leadership vested formally in the various education specialists located at the national, provincial and district levels. Environmental Education (EE), however, is one area of learning that bucks the trend, where instructional guidance seems to be mostly decentralised to the schools and teachers. This article presents two qualitative case studies that illustrate the role of lead teachers in curriculum leadership for EE in primary schools. The cases suggest that instructional leadership is first and foremost a distributed practice that involves not only leaders in formal positions. Second, that in spite of the centralized education system in South Africa, instructional leadership may be decentralised to the schools in some of the subjects such as EE. T...

When Professional Development Works: South African Teachers' Perspectives

Abstract Despite the general acceptance of continuing professional development (CPD) programmes as essential to the improvement of education, reviews of professional development research constantly point to the ineffectiveness of most of these programmes. Furthermore, many teachers express dissatisfaction with the professional development opportunities made available to them in schools and insist that the most effective development programmes they have experienced have been self-initiated. There is consensus that many CPD programmes have yet to understand professional development from teachers’ perspectives. Such perspectives will enable one to understand what drives teachers to enlist in these programmes and how such programmes make a difference to them and their classrooms. This will help to throw light on how professional development programmes can be improved upon. This paper, therefore, returns the emphasis of professional development back to the teachers. It explores the perspectives of a group of South African teachers on CPD in general, their personal meaning of CPD, and its meaning in the context of their work. By interviewing a sample of teachers who were part of a science and mathematics professional development intervention, the researchers explored the teachers’ opinions of the intervention; its meaning to them and their work; and its impact on their classroom practices. The researchers present data from a longitudinal study of the teachers in greater detail. In discussing the data, the researchers argue that CPD, however well- intentioned and executed, is received differently by each teacher as a result of their personal circumstances and investment in the programme. The researchers then conclude that the greater the unity between the personal circumstances and motivations of the teachers and those of the CPD intervention, the more likely the outcome will be meaningful for the participating teachers. In turn, the ability to sustain the benefits of the intervention will be enhanced by such unity. An emergent recommendation is for policymakers and other providers of CPD to strive for such a unity of purpose.

Capacity Building for Teaching and Learning in Environmental Education : The Role of the Public/Private Partnerships in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa

A recently mandated focus on environmental education (EE) in the basic education curriculum of South Africa requires that all children in grades 1 to 9 be introduced to environmental concepts and related content. Not many schools and teachers have the necessary knowledge and experience to make this major shift workable. Similarly, the capacity of the provincial education departments to support schools in the expected integration of EE is limited. How then do schools and teachers cope with this dilemma and demand for change? In this paper, we use the concept of opportunities to learn (OTL) to understand the capacity building processes in two schools within the South African province of Mpumalanga. Specifically, we discuss the interactions between governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in building the capacity of schools (and specifically teachers) to provide quality learning in EE. Data for the study was collected through document analysis and interviews with teachers and officials in the province. Our findings suggest that, on their own, local education departments have limited intellectual and material resources to build the schools’ instructional capacity for EE. In conclusion to this paper we posit a possible approach to developing such capacity through interactions between public and private resources and programmes for EE.