Teacher Support Programme

Objective

To enable teachers to deepen subject knowledge, enhance professional and teaching skills and improve learning methods.

Overview and Main Activities

This teacher skills-empowerment programme is guided by the goal of demonstrating evidence-based improvements in learning outcomes. It is based on a seven-step professional development philosophy — which was implemented as a pilot study, selecting various grade-level cohorts and subject areas — that exposes teachers to the concept of:

1. Professional development as a long-term process: Teachers learn to be insightful in terms of themselves as educators.
2. Communities of practice: Teachers learn to see themselves as part of a body of subject experts and connect to other teachers based on their fields of expertise. This is characterized by a sense of professional belonging, trust and critical discussion.
3. Teaching good practice through structured and formal observation.
4. Support learning via in-person and web-based methods of teaching facilitation.
5. Collaborative lesson planning, measurement of lesson performance, and a collaborative guided reflection, based on the principle of a “reflection cycle”: The reflection cycle: (a) allows teachers to think about the learning process of their students and where in this process they are for a particular concept, and (b) gives teachers the space to reflect on how they are perceived, how their teaching is interpreted, how they teach and how they can improve as teachers, not only by new subject-specific skills, but by being more self-aware and student aware during preparation, classes and assessments.
6. Subject-specific workshops focusing on personal learning experiences.
7. Personal well-being: Teachers learn how to make the work environment as conducive to learning and well-being as possible.

Each programme component consists of three dimensions:

1. Core learning: Enables teachers to better master the content of their subject and to improve teaching techniques for specialised focus areas.
2. Curriculum planning and learner assessment: Enables teachers to plan classroom activities and experiences and learn how to assess child development through formative and summative assessment practices.
3. Classroom management and child development: Enhances teachers’ skills at managing learning in dynamic classrooms to identify teachers who need additional support to teach the required curriculum.

Success Factors and Challenges

Most critical success factors:

• Funding and budget support
• Support from top managers and team leaders
• Sufficient number of participants with requisite skills

Main challenges:

• Funding and budget support
• Addressing labour union concerns, such as the appearance of “interference”
• Lack of skilled facilitators

Recommendations for Others

Workshop-based sessions showed little impact on classroom practice. Allowing a single facilitator access to a group of teachers has limited success when teachers’ needs are diverse.

Thus, interventions need to be both politically neutral and demonstrably functional, with clear and very positive outcomes. In addition to concern with success of participating learners, there are other forces that must be legitimised if one wants to be able to operate such a programme as a non-government and non-private sector actor.

In addition, money, management and skills are key for such interventions to take place.

Replicability and Scalability

How easily could other organizations implement this initiative?
Difficult: Local governments may have skill and resource allocation problems. Independent education support services can emulate this initiative, but might face similar challenges.

How easily can this initiative be expanded to include a larger number of participants?
Easy

About the Organization

Website: www.bafokeng.com
Sector: Public Sector
Size (number of employees): Up to 1,000
Headquarters: Phokeng, Royal Bafokeng, South Africa