Beginning with a focus on South Africa, this section provides valuable coverage of approaches to school ‘effectiveness’ and school ‘improvement’. We learn more about schools as learning organizations.
Ideas on understanding change are taken forward into approaches to leading and managing change. School-as-organization approaches are compared with the school-as-community approach.
This module is about the management of teaching and learning. We begin by exploring the school as a learning organization and promoting a culture of learning and teaching, which is dedicated to constant renewal and improvement. We will also tackle the issue of context, and will look at the ways in which the physical environment of the school impacts on the quality of learning. This leads us into an exploration of the challenges of effectively planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating a curriculum that needs constantly to change and reinvent itself in line with the changing needs of a changing society. In particular, we focus on what is required to improve teaching and learning in order to produce enhanced learner outcomes. This paves the way for the identification and development of the skills and processes needed to lead and manage effective teaching and learning.
This module aims at empowering school managers and teachers to develop and implement appropriate mentoring programmes. The learning guide of this module addresses three key questions as follows: What is mentoring? What are the personal and professional qualities of effective mentors? How can we managing the establishment, monitoring and evaluation of a school mentoring programme?
This video is linked to Creating People Centred Schools learning guide, but carries debates which could also be used in a free-standing way by anyone interested in school organization and change.
This module gives an overview of what management and leadership is about in a school setting. As an aspiring principal it begins a process of developing understanding about the challenges that face principals on a daily basis and allows you to also explore your own realities and decide on new and better action. In addition, you will look at some of the international trends in management and leadership and will compare what is happening in the South Africa scene to others.
This paper addresses the question: how do mathematics teachers make meaning from curriculum statements in relation to their teaching practices. We report on a teacher development activity in which teachers mapped test items from an international test against the national curriculum statement in mathematics. About 50 mathematics teachers across Grades 3-9 worked in small groups with a graduate student or staff member as a group leader. Drawing on focus group interviews with the teachers and the group leaders we show that the activity focused the teachers on the relationships between the intended curriculum and their teaching, i.e. the enacted curriculum, in four areas: content coverage; cognitive challenge; developing meaning for the assessment standards; and sequence and progression. We argue that the activity illuminates ways in which international tests can provide a medium for teacher growth rather than teacher denigration and alienation.
The Data-Informed Practice Improvement Project (DIPIP) aims to improve teaching and learning in mathematics. One way of communicating with teachers has been through a newsletter.This issue deals with learner misconceptions, learner errors in the ICAS tests, teaching with errors and misconceptions, ratio, rate, ratio and proportional reasoning at grades 8, 7 and 9 respectively.
In this edition of the DIPIP Newsletter we have chosen to discuss a section of algebra that confuses many of our learners – that of solving number sentences and equations, which falls into the National Curriculum Statement Learning Outcome 2 (LO2): Patterns, functions and algebra.
In this second part of Volume 2 we focus on the meaning of the word ‘misconceptions’and compare it to the general understanding of the meaning of ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’. These different words have different concepts associated with them. We tend to use the word ‘misconception’ indiscriminately when talking to colleagues, and more often than not, we are talking about learner errors or mistakes rather than misconceptions.
The Data-Informed Practice Improvement Project (DIPIP) aims to improve teaching and learning in mathematics. One way of communicating with teachers has been through a newsletter.
In our third issue of the 2009 newsletter we have chosen to talk about how learners work with problems based on space, shape and measurement. We will focus on solving problems in which learners have to work with what they know about areas and perimeters of basic shapes to calculate areas and perimeters of the complex shapes.
This newsletter continues the discussion of the previous newsletter of learners' spatial reasoning, and how to support the development of spatial reasoning in learners.
In this paper, I illuminate the notion of mathematics for teaching (its matter) and argue that it matters (it is important), particularly for mathematics teacher education. Two examples from studies of mathematics classrooms in South Africa are described, and used to illustrate what mathematics teachers use, or need to use, and how they use it in their practice: in other words, the substance of their mathematical work. Similarities and differences across these examples, in turn, illuminate the notion of mathematics for teaching, enabling a return to, and critical reflection on, mathematics teacher education.
The GICD material is thematically presented mathematical content (in line with C2005 thinking) with separate learner’s material and teacher’s guides. The learner’s material has background information necessary for the completion of the activities which is concisely presented prior to each activity sheet. Activities are primarily mathematical but some of them are purely thematic. The teacher’s guides begin with C2005 introductory notes. These notes are followed by notes for teachers relating to each unit in the learner’s material. The teacher’s notes give information on time required for the activity, resources needed, class organisation suggested, unit outcomes, unit activity outline and activity solutions. There were four Grade 7 sets of materials that we thought may still be useful
The GICD material is thematically presented mathematical content (in line with C2005 thinking) with separate learner’s material and teacher’s guides. The learner’s material has background information necessary for the completion of the activities which is concisely presented prior to each activity sheet. Activities are primarily mathematical but some of them are purely thematic. The teacher’s guides begin with C2005 introductory notes. These notes are followed by notes for teachers relating to each unit in the learner’s material. The teacher’s notes give information on time required for the activity, resources needed, class organisation suggested, unit outcomes, unit activity outline and activity solutions. There were four Grade 7 sets of materials that we thought may still be useful.
The GICD material is thematically presented mathematical content (in line with C2005 thinking) with separate learner’s material and teacher’s guides. The learner’s material has background information necessary for the completion of the activities which is concisely presented prior to each activity sheet. Activities are primarily mathematical but some of them are purely thematic. The teacher’s guides begin with C2005 introductory notes. These notes are followed by notes for teachers relating to each unit in the learner’s material. The teacher’s notes give information on time required for the activity, resources needed, class organisation suggested, unit outcomes, unit activity outline and activity solutions. There were four Grade 7 sets of materials that we thought may still be useful
This is the second recommended reading for Saide's Education Studies module "Being a Teacher"
This is the third reading for Saide's Education Studies module "Being a Teacher". The history of teaching in South Africa has been one in which the most significant single factor has been the enormous differences in the experiences of teachers – dependent primarily on whether they were identified as ‘black’, ‘coloured’, ‘Asiatic’, or ‘white’; male or female; rural-, township-, or suburban-based, and so on.In this article, Heather Jacklin analyses how such factors have affected – and still affect – the identities and experiences of teachers in South Africa.
This is the fourth reading for Saide's Education Studies module "Being a Teacher".
Fataar and Patterson’s study looks at how teachers in such schools experience teaching, how they see themselves, and how this influences their practice.
