Glimpses into Primary School Teacher Education in South Africa

Sarah Gravett, Elizabeth Henning, Sarah Gravett, Elizabeth Henning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000219883
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the current landscape of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in primary schools in South Africa. Considering recent policy directives and initiatives, it highlights the dilemmas of ITE for the primary school and gives a thorough account of innovations and initiatives to improve ITE.

The book presents what works best for quality preparation of teachers in the Global South, where many children rely on their teachers and school life to break the cycle of poverty. Chapters draw on evidence from workplace learning, pre-service study, and primary school teacher education policy to highlight examples of promising change in teacher education in South Africa, addressing the clichés of "theory versus practice" head-on. This book successfully brings out the challenging aspects of teacher education for childhood learning which has otherwise been regarded as the softer option for a career in education.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of teacher education, African education, educational policy, international education, and comparative education.

Chapter 1

How we teach is what we teach

Catherine Snow

Introduction

In this chapter, we will make a very simple argument based on research and practice. The first claim is that we need to provide students with opportunities for active processing of new information, to ensure that they understand what they hear or read and can integrate it into their permanent knowledge stores. The second claim is that procedures to generate active processing emerge during certain kinds of interactions within classrooms, specifically when students have opportunities to engage in authentic discussion of important questions. Such engagement motivates the search for knowledge and the construction of a personal perspective on those questions. The third claim, based on observational research, is that such opportunities for engaged student discussion are very rare in the typical classroom.

We document the three claims introduced above, from the research literature as well as from our own research, in the next three sections. The implications for teacher preparation and professional development are ones that every teacher education programme and school can and should explore on its own.

Active learning

Whereas rote memorisation continues to dominate learning in many classrooms, especially in post-colonial settings and in instruction designed for second language speakers of the school language, it is increasingly being recognised that memorisation skills are of little use in the 21st century. Success in higher education and in employment requires problem-solving abilities, creativity, and transfer of old knowledge to new domains – all capacities that are undermined rather than nurtured by recitation-focused pedagogies. Of course, the need to focus on problem-solving and creativity does not detract from the value of ensuring that students learn content. Factual knowledge about science, history, psychology, and other topics is a key contributor to effective problem-solving. The issue is how to ensure that students acquire and retain that factual knowledge while also building crucial 21st century skills.

The evidence is quite clear that active learning techniques are more effective than passive learning, or learning just by listening or reading (Prince, 2004). Students who are curious about a topic and are highly motivated engage in active learning spontaneously. But often the responsibility to generate the motivation and support the active learning falls to the teacher. Fortunately, there are approaches to teaching that have been shown to stimulate active learning. For example, one study showed that pausing twice during a 45-minute lecture to give students 2 minutes to clarify their notes with their classmates improved short-term retention of the new material by 25% and long-term retention by 10% (Ruhl, Hughes, & Schloss, 1987). Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur has developed an approach he calls Peer Instruction, according to which students take the responsibility for explaining difficult content to one another (Crouch, Watkins, Fagen, & Mazur, 2007). Collaborative and co-operative learning arrangements, in which students work together to answer questions or solve problems, generate reliably better learning of content than individual study (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1998a, 1998b). The exact mechanism through which the added value ensues is not entirely clear. Certainly, students are more active in group learning contexts, and they are also demonstrably more engaged, and there is considerable evidence that engagement itself predicts good learning outcomes (Astin, 1993; Hake, 1998).

Much of the research discussed so far pertains to university students. There is considerable evidence that the same principles of active learning, engagement, and collaboration apply to younger learners as well. The evidence about mature learners is in a sense more striking because we might assume that self-directed and motivated young adults can thrive even in passive learning environments. If university students are disadvantaged by passive learning, younger learners are in even greater need of activity, engagement, and interaction to support their learning.

Engaged discussion

What counts as knowledge has shifted away from inert information passively received from books and teachers toward dynamic understanding that is collaboratively constructed in discussion among students...Education’s new emphasis on the ability to communicate requires that classroom interaction changes dramatically to foster such ability.

(Cazden & Beck, 2008, p. 165)

There is increasing recognition that high-quality classroom interactions — between teacher and learners and among learners – are prime determinants of educational outcomes. Participation in high-quality classroom discussions helps learners comprehend texts, internalise content knowledge, and build reasoning capabilities. But what exactly is high quality classroom talk? It has been analysed in various ways, and given various names: accountable talk (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008), exploratory talk (Mercer & Littleton, 2007), collaborative reasoning (Reznitskaya, 2012), Quality Talk (Murphy & Firetto, 2018; Murphy, Firetto, Greene, & Butler, 2017) the Paideia Seminar (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2003), dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2005, 2018; Alexander, Hardman, Hardman, Rajab, & Longmore, 2017), and academically productive talk (Donovan & Snow, 2019). Although these forms of talk vary in detail, they do all have some features in common: use of open-ended discussions, rich opportunities for learners to talk; attention to the necessity of backing up claims with evidence; and a commitment to the notion that hearing multiple perspectives on an issue increases one’s ability to think and learn about it.

There is considerable evidence that learner talk contributes to learning (Andriessen, 2006; Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Chi, 2009; Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009; Osborne, 2010; Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015; Sfard, 2008; Sfard, Nesher, Streefland, Cobb, & Mason, 1998; Sims, 2008; Vygotsky, 1968; Wanzek et al., 2014; Wertsch, 1991); that the traditional Initiate-Respond-Evaluate form of classroom discourse can be effective for checking understanding but not for stimulating thinking (Cazden, 2001; Mehan, 1998); and that preparing students for active, critical participation in deliberative democracy requires giving them a voice in their own classrooms (Fielding, 2004; Hess & McAvoy, 2015). High quality classroom talk has also been shown to relate to student learning across content areas: in science (Andriessen, 2006; Osborne, 2010); in literacy (Applebee et al., 2003); in mathematics (Sims, 2008); and in history (Goldman, Vaughn, & Snow, 2016; Reisman, et al., 2019).

The pattern of results indicating the importance of giving students of all ages recurrent opportunities inside the classroom to talk about matters of importance to them is now incontrovertible. In light of the breadth of evidence, the paucity of classroom discourse is both a puzzle and a challenge.

The rarity of authentic discussion in the classroom

Lampert reports that, even today, the most common approach to instruction in secondary schools across the U.S. is one in which

the teacher talks, usually to the whole class from the front of the room; the talk ‘explains’ facts or procedures; and the class, sitting in desks facing the teacher, takes notes on what the teacher says or writes on the board. If students talk at all, they provide answers to the teacher’s questions, which the teacher judges to be correct or incorrect.

(Lampert, 2015, p. 3)

Researchers lament both the low frequency of classroom discussion, and the poor quality thereof (Murphy et al., 2009). Sfard et al. (1998, p. 50) note that, “there are many ways to turn classroom discussion or group work into a great supplier of learning opportunities; there are even more ways to turn them into...a barrier to learning”. Berland and Hammer (2012) point out that activities which ostensibly appear to add to the discussion can often do the opposite, so that the activity is often more about following the teacher’s instructions than about engaging in meaningful dialogue.

Involving learners in discussion that supports deeper learning requires considerable expertise – the abilities to find or formulate an engaging and challenging question relevant to the content to be taught, to elicit learner thinking, and to help learners engage with one another in challenge and critique. Furthermore, teachers need to be sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of learners while building the language of precision and argumentation required in academic disciplines.

Obstacles and impediments

We argue that the absence of a common level of professional competence at fulfilling these tasks is deeply worrying, but at the same time unsurprising. The fact is that teachers are for the most part not educated in a way that would prepare them to launch and guide discussion. Their lack of preparation, together with the lack of rich support in most curricular resources, and the absence of incentives in most schools to hold discussion, constitute impediments to launching discussion even for teachers who espouse its value. Thus, we have a sizable gap between research consensus about what should be happening in classrooms on the one hand, and actual classroom practice on the other. In fact, in schools where quiet classrooms are considered to be model classrooms, there are strong disincentives to launch into an activity that might become as lively as a typical classroom discussion or debate often turns out to be.

We must also recognise that launching a discussion can be scary. Teachers we have interviewed often mention fears that the discussion will fall flat because no one talks, or conversely that the discussion will get out of hand and take up much time, that learners will say rude or inappropriate things in the heat of the moment, or perhaps that learners will divert the discussion in unexpected directions and thus leave the teacher not knowing how to regain control. Of course, these are all real dangers, especially if teachers are poorly prepared to manage discussions. There are, though, many strategies and techniques that can minimise these risks and that can aid teachers to manage them if they emerge. For example, teachers could involve learners in a discussion of classroom norms, so that the learners themselves formulate guidelines for how they will interact with one another during discussion time. Further, teachers can learn to redirect discussion so that it remains lively and on track.

We are not suggesting that simple exhortations to have more discussion are enough to change teacher practice. Rather, we suggest that teachers who are convinced that discussion is worth trying are offered concrete support. This includes well-structured curricular resources that offer open-ended topics with which to launch discussion, texts that support different positions on each unit’s topic so that learners can gather evidence for and against, and activities that scaffold the learners into the formal discussion. Such resources exist. For example, Word Generation (https://wordgen.serpmedia.org/) has curricular resources for Grades 4–8 (students aged 10–14). The Collaborative Reasoning effort has provided rich guidance to teachers in using brief narratives as well as their own experiences to provoke moral discussions (Clark et al., 2003). Philosophy for Children (P4C; https://www.thephilosophyman.com/p4c-questions) makes free resources available for teachers. These resources are easily available, along with many others, as supports to teachers who want to introduce discussion into their classrooms.

Further, we suggest that professional development sessions incorporate discussion as a standard activity, to ensure that teachers learn about how to participate. It is almost inevitable that teachers who themselves have never experienced classroom discussion as student teachers will not use it spontaneously in the lessons they teach. Of course, professional development often incorporates time for discussion, but those activities do not always have the features required for good discussion. Thus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 How we teach is what we teach
• 2 Mentor teachers matter in the ecosystem of the school practicum
• 3 Disparate understandings of the nature, purpose, and practices of reflection in teacher education
• 4 Lessons from large-scale reading studies for initial and continuous teacher development
• 5 What future teachers need to know about executive functions in the early grades’ learner
• 6 A school–university partnership for teacher education in Soweto, Johannesburg
• 7 How a rural school was developed to become a practice learning site for pre-service teachers
• 8 Teacher educators of numeracy: ‘Signifying’ standards of pedagogy
• 9 Theory-based early numeracy programme adapted to learners’ pre-knowledge: the ‘Meerkat Maths’ programme
• 10 Student teachers’ mathematical knowledge gains through a problem-solving instructional approach
• 11 Film as teacher education genre: developing student agency in the production of #Taximaths
• 12 Where schools and universities (can) meet in work-integrated teacher learning
• 13 Border-crossings of indigenous knowledge in science teacher education
• Conclusion
• Index