Teacher Education

There are a number of ways of looking at curriculum and the issues central to thinking about curriculum and what and how learners should learn. In lo mthamo, we will ask you to look at curriculum by examining what you do in your classroom. You will also look at curriculum by reading about syllabi, and by analysing part of a textbook. You will have an opportunity to think about the kinds of learning areas, or fields, that you think should be included in an ideal curriculum.

The current umthamo focuses on curriculum change in South Africa. The main aim here is provide educators with an opportunity to look critically at the curriculum change process in South Africa.

Lo mthamo asks you to take whole school development out into the broader context of the community of schools in your district. We have spoken, in the Schools as Learning Communities strand, of 'Schools as Learning Organisations', of 'Learning Schools', of School Improvement', Whole School Development' and 'Healing the System'. All these have been approaches to developing our schools into 'Self-managing schools' - schools which are independent and can take initiative in solving their own difficulties within their own context.

This umthamo continues the discussion started in the previous umthamo on cluster development.

In this umthamo we explore learners' thinking about number. We have put together samples of research about how young children develop their mathematical concepts. Our aim is to enable you to have:

• a clearer understanding of basic number concepts
• an appreciation of how young children begin to make sense of numbers at home and in school
• a sense of how young children develop number concepts
• an understanding of how teachers can help their learners develop mathematical skills.

The main focus of this umthamo is to explore alternative ways to teach and facilitate the learning of mathematics in primary classrooms.

This umthamo takes the teachers through a process of engaging with their learners on the language of mathematics. Once the umthamo is completed you will have:

• experienced for yourself what it is like to think and talk about an aspect of Maths, and you will have a sense of the importance of creating opportunities for Maths talk in the classroom
• read several transcripts of teachers and their learners having Maths conversations, so that you will know what to aim for
• begun a process of having regular open-ended Maths conversations with your own learners.

This mthamo highlights the value of patterns to develop mathematical thinking. Patterns permeate our lives, and it is useful to explore them with our learners as we study mathematics together.

The main focus here is on reshaping our own ways of teaching, in order to allow learners to have space to explore and investigate mathematics. This is more likely to change our learners' attitudes towards mathematics. If maths is fun and exciting their attitude to mathematics is more likely to be positive.

This mthamo deals with ideas of how to teach data better. It introduces you to some ideas and approaches for a new area of the primary mathematics curriculum called data handling. Some of the questions that will be explored are:

• What is data? Where do we find data? Why is data handling important.

There will be activities that include:

• Using a model, or process of stages as a basis for getting learners productively interested in working with data
• Analysing learner responses to activities you have attempted with them and assessing progress.

The way schools are organized and managed affects the quality of learning which takes place in them. Ideally schools should be communities. They should be places where different people all have a part to play, and work together in a supportive way, like the members of a family. The first umthamo looks at the way schools are organized.

This umthamo will help teachers develop their own pictures of a quality school in the Eastern Cape.  This will be done through surveying the school stakeholders and examining an effectiveness, relevance and efficiency approach in studying quality.

In lo mthamo teachers are encouraged to work with their school management and other school stakeholders to develop their school. They will first look at their own personal development, then at organisational development in order to develop an improvement strategy.

Lo mthamo continues the series that aims to support personal and organizational development of teachers and schools. In the previous umthamo teachers were asked to to implement as many steps of their school development plan as possible In lo mthamo teachers are asked to reflect on the process of implementation and adjust their plans.

In this umthamo, we will try to understand policy, and the role of policy in the process of developing 'quality schools'. The umthamo will guide you in evaluating and re-creating policy in your own school.

Lo mthamo explores alternatives to corporal punishment and looks for strategies that suit teachers, their learners as well as their parents.

In this umthamo we continue to think about some of the science process skills. We will continue to base the work on the natural science strand, Matter and Materials, but this time it will also be linked to the strand Energy and change. In the previous umthamo the focus was on the science skills of observation and predication. This time the skills of inference and developing theories is added. We will be thinking of ways to encourage learners to think about how and why things happen.

In this umthato teachers and learners will build on the development of science process skills by trying activities that promote an inquiry-based approach to science learning.

This umthato focuses on the living world and emphasizes the value of integrating different learning areas.

The outcome of this umthamo relate to integrating the way children think and work scientifically in the classroom. There will be a focus on experimenting, as well as the related process skills of using time relationships and controlling and manipulating variables. Teachers will also be asked to reflect on their role as they help learners develop these science skills.