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Teacher development for reducing educational inequalities in South Africa: Do we have a theory of change?

Mon, April 15, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific C

Proposal

The distribution of educational inequalities in South Africa clearly reflects economic and social patterns of inequalities, whereby poorly resourced schools are the ones with the less able or less knowledgeable teachers. This suggests that access to meaningful learning opportunities is a fundamental equality distribution imperative in South Africa, for historical reasons of poor schooling and racially segregated and unequal training system, the majority of teachers possess weak professional knowledge.

Since 2010, a new model of change targeting specifically teachers from poorly performing primary schools has appeared which foregrounds curriculum coverage and tight regulation of a set of teaching practices (some of which are completely new) in the specific gateway subjects – language and mathematics.

This paper has two objectives: first, to unpack different teacher development models that have been tried since the early 1990s. Second, to critically examine what begins to be agreed upon and what remains in dispute in the context of the international and national literature about this new model of teacher development, with specific reference to teaching in disadvantaged schools.

We start with a descriptive historical analysis of the different teacher development models that have been tried in South Africa since the early 1990s, culminating with this new model of teacher change underlining different large-scale programmes emerging today in South Africa. In a much tighter way than anything before, this model of change provides standardized lesson plans (SLPs), learners’ material and training or coaching within a complex framework of accountability and support. Each lesson plan specified the topics and objectives, work to be completed by the end of the calendar week, teaching methodology to be followed, teaching activities with its specific pacing and resources needed for each lesson and learner assessment.

We argue that the idea of improving the performance of the most disadvantaged teachers by scripting a new practice and putting emphasis on a mix of teacher accountability and support is understandable given the failure of previous teacher development programmes at making a meaningful difference to teachers’ practice especially in poorly performing schools. However, by examining the idea of meaningful learning opportunity from the perspective of teacher knowledge and reciprocal accountability, a more nuanced view of teachers’ practice emerges, which has implications for evaluating the learning opportunities foregrounded by the theory of change which underpins these large-scale programmes. We demonstrate this by borrowing Elmore’s (2005) idea of ‘reciprocal accountability’, which he defines as: for every unit of change performance that is required, an equivalent unit of support and capacity building is expected to be invested.

As argued by some proponents of SLPs(Hiebert, 2017; Hiebert & Morris, 2012), by providing guidelines about the curriculum knowledge to teach, by complementing the national curriculum with the sequence and pace of what is taught, and by providing a new repertoire of teaching routines, SLPs mediated and monitored by coaches guide teachers’ learning of what is important in the curriculum (Fleisch, 2016). We also agree that, by following pre-annotated teaching routines, teachers could learn the routines in the context of “the surrounding feature of the lesson” rather than as a technique in isolation. Eventually, by testing the routines in their own context, teachers would learn to generalise; they will “induce that the routine is a more general skill that might play a useful role in lessons not yet taught” (Hiebert & Morris, 2012, p. 96). However, we show that the SLPs currently used in South Africa do not allow for this form of teacher learning.

To understand fully the principles of practice improvement, we review the relationship between demand and support, or what we call the theory of change that informs these programmes. We show that it is important to distinguish between two clusters of teaching routines: ways of organizing one’s teaching over time; and pedagogical means of helping learners to understand the meanings, rules, and procedures of the subject matter. The former cluster is knowledge of sequencing and pacing of the content required to be covered and can be covered by lesson plans. The latter is a far more specialized knowledge about enabling learners to learn. This knowledge does not develop by following a protocol that tells the teacher what to say and do, but from a deep understanding of the telos of the practice the teacher is intending to teach i.e. the rules and procedures that have developed over time in the history of the practice. So, the question for us is: to what extent this model of teacher development relies on an already quite developed resource, which is teacher knowledge.

We conclude that this large-scale model of teacher change targeting the most disadvantaged teachers points to the value of ‘expanded’ lesson plans, but that these should be offered together with systematic, high quality in-service training to improve teacher knowledge. Variants of such combination of support which also focuses on the knowledge structures embodied in instructional knowledge are likely to assist in reducing the inequalities in teacher development.

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