Mixed-mode Further Diplomas in Education and their Effects

Summary Report on Major Findings of a Three-Year Research Project: 1996 – 1998

The research project

In 1996, the University of the Witwatersrand launched a new Further Diploma in Education (FDE) programme in Mathematics, Science, and English Language Teaching. At the same time, the FDE team began a research project to examine whether and how teachers’ classroom practices benefited from their participation in the FDE programme. Like so many aspects of South African society, teacher education is undergoing change. The research team wanted to learn about teachers’ experiences in the programme, so that we could:

• improve the programme for future teachers;
• inform in-service teacher education policy and practice in South Africa; and
• inform international debates on in-service professional development.

• What resources were available and how were they used?
• How did teachers work with subject knowledge? What kinds of tasks were set? What kinds of cognitive demands were made on learners? What strategies did teachers use in their subject teaching? What were their approaches to learners and learning?
• What language practices did teachers use in their bilingual or multilingual classroom settings?
• How did teachers reflect on their practice?

AVAIILABIILITY AND USE OF RESOURCES

v We observed many teachers make interesting and extended use of existing resources particularly the chalkboard. The maths, science, and English teachers had learners use the chalkboard to display their knowledge and working. This gave teachers and learners opportunity to see and work with learners’ different solutions.

v In all three subjects, and particularly at the primary level, teachers brought additional material resources into their lessons, for example, seeds in primary science lessons. Often teachers had found or made these materials themselves. Sometimes, there weren’t enough materials for all the learners. We also found that, in most cases, teachers did not optimize the use of these materials. They found it difficult to link the resource to clear lesson purposes, to the mathematics, science, or language skills being taught.

v We also saw that in some primary and secondary classes there were not enough textbooks. And even when there were some textbooks, we found that teachers were not using these to help their teaching.

The FDE programme could do more to assist teachers, and their schools, to:

• make better use of the resources they have (like chalkboards, textbooks and exercise books);
• plan how to develop, accumulate, and use additional material resources in an ongoing and sustainable way.

• Working in more than one language takes time. Teachers and learners use learners’ main languages together with English to rephrase instructions or to explain ideas and concepts.
• It appeared that in most of the schools there was a relatively large number of absentees each day, though not the same learners each day. Under these circumstances, teachers find it difficult to plan for continuity and development in learning.
• The background knowledge of many learners is poor. This causes time problems for teachers, particularly in the higher grades. Teachers find they cannot always teach new concepts, as learners don’t have the background knowledge. They are then forced to go back to the work of earlier grades, and they then run out of time for the new work.
• Homework is either not given or not consistently done. This restricts time for learning and teaching to in-class time. Yet, success in a subject like mathematics at school depends on learners having time to work on mathematical problems themselves, and homework time is needed for this. Similarly, success in learning English depends on learners having time to read and write, and again homework time is needed for some of this.

The FDE programme needs to build the following into the courses:

• Some work with teachers on making better use of the time they have available;
• How to work with gaps in learners’ background knowledge;
• How to structure homework into the school programme.

• Content take-up from the programme was different for different teachers. Content take-up was heterogeneous.
• Teachers from the same school and in the same subject did not necessarily benefit from the content courses in the same way.
• Teachers in different school conditions faced different constraints in their schools.
• Different teachers enjoyed different parts of the content courses and were stimulated in different ways to broaden and deepen their subject teaching.

In-service programmes for teachers, especially those that are offered in mixed-mode delivery are forced to treat participating teachers as similar in their interests, their backgrounds, and their contexts. Yet, we have learnt that this is not the case. The FDE programme will need to reflect carefully on how it is working with diversity amongst teachers.

• All teachers expressed increased confidence in their subject knowledge, and felt that it had helped them with their subject teaching.
• We also observed greater subject confidence - English teachers were more fluent in their own use of the language, and in some topics, maths and science teachers were able to work more flexibly with the content they were teaching.
• Some teachers were able to tackle topics that they used to leave out because they felt more confident after their FDE courses.
• All the teachers became more successful at eliciting of learners’ productions (e.g. getting learners to verbalize what they were doing, to give answers, and to express their meanings, their initial conceptions or recall of a topic). At the same time, however, most of the teachers had difficulty probing what their learners said or did, and with providing constructive feedback. In some instances what learners said was skipped over, or ignored.

• Across all the teachers in the research we saw limited coverage of the required syllabus. In some cases, topics were left out.
• We also saw some teachers include too many different concepts in one lesson, and as a result, they dealt with these concepts too superficially.
• Across the board, conceptual depth was rarely expected or demanded of learners.

The FDE programme needs to attend to this serious issue of how to work when teachers face learners with serious gaps in their background knowledge.

• Some teachers attempted to construct tasks and lessons that drew on these orientations to knowledge. Nevertheless, in general, knowledge was still treated as fragmented, procedural, and factual.

• Many of the teachers found it difficult to state clear teaching purposes. They showed this difficulty in how they selected and sequenced tasks in their lessons. This was most acute when teachers tried to work with new kinds of tasks.
• Some teachers selected tasks that were both at the appropriate level and that were graded in difficulty. Most of the tasks set in the lessons we observed, and those we saw in learners’ books, were at a low level of cognitive demand. This was more of an issue in primary classrooms.
• Secondary mathematics and science teachers kept to current textbooks and thus displayed fewer content selection difficulties.

The FDE programme needs to offer in its Subject and in its Theory and Practice courses, more focused opportunities for teachers to work on selecting, sequencing, and grading tasks for learners. This is particularly important for new kinds of tasks or approaches to subject knowledge. This needs to be done in two ways: in relation to how concepts or skills develop in the subject (for example how the concept of a fraction develops within mathematics); and in relation to how learners develop such concepts themselves.

• Code-switching practices were different in urban and rural schools, and in primary and secondary schools.
• One of the most significant things we learnt through this research project was just how complex language issues are in rural schools where there is very limited English infrastructure in the surrounding community for teachers to build on in school. Exposure to English is via the teacher. This puts pressure on teachers to use English as much as possible. Teachers in rural schools, particularly in the senior primary and junior secondary levels, argued quite strongly against frequent code-switching in class.
• We also found that primary maths and science teachers in urban and rural schools feel the pressure to teach in English because their learners are still learning English.

Within this general challenge for all teachers

• More code-switching was observed across classrooms as the research progressed. As a result of participation in the programme teachers felt more comfortable using code-switching to assist their learners, and their teaching.
• At the same time, we noticed that teachers used English with greater confidence as the research progressed.

• whether teachers were able to get their learners to talk more, and to use their main languages for this purpose.
• whether learners also had opportunities to develop English, or maths and science in English.

• The most visible change that we saw over the three years was the increase in group work across most classes. Learners had more discussions with each other in their groups or in pairs in their main language.
• However, in most maths and science classes, there were few opportunities for learners to report on their group work. There were few opportunities for them to use English. In science, such language was used mainly by the teacher.
• Linked to this, the chanting that was prominent in primary maths and science classrooms in 1996, disappeared from most of those classrooms in 1997 and 1998. Chanting was a practice where learners did use English.
• Partly through group work, but also in whole class teaching, teachers did elicit more talk from their learners. In some of the English classes in particular there was a significant increase in oral work, and in the ability of learners to use English for extended speaking turns when addressing the whole class.

Working in two or more languages in school learning is not easy, and the challenge is different for rural/urban contexts; and for primary/secondary contexts. The FDE programme could assist teachers with more ideas and strategies to

• elicit learner talk in their main language;
• develop learners’ competence and confi-dence in using subject-specific language, like mathematical language, in English.

• the tasks teachers set made contact with learners’ current or background knowledge, and at the same time provided for the required development.
• scaffolding took place in setting up the tasks and while learners were working on tasks.
• assessment practices reflected what was taught, learners’ knowledge and competence and enough challenge for learners.

• We observed differences in reflective capabilities across the teachers. There were differences in how teachers reflected on new ideas from the FDE programme, in how teachers reflected on their contexts, and in how teachers reflected on lesson purposes.
• The majority of teachers talked enthusiastically about some of the new ideas in the FDE programme, such as group work. Only a few said that they considered group work a good idea in theory, but too difficult to implement in practice. Some of the teachers used group work selectively, and they were able to explain why they did so. Others used group work, but without sufficient reflection on the kinds of tasks that were suited to group work. They did not reflect sufficiently on the links between group tasks and other parts of lessons, nor on the reporting or recording of group work. This is an instance of the form-substance tension.
• All of the teachers spoke reflectively about some features of their context, and how these enabled, though mostly constrained their practice. We found a strong relationship between the presence or absence of support from colleagues in their own or neighbouring schools, and how teachers responded to their contexts.
• Some of the teachers were able to provide a coherent account of what their teaching purposes were, and how they planned their lessons. Many, however, could not.
• All the teachers, even those who were demoralized by their context, were enthusiastic about their own professional development as a result of the FDE programme. But it is difficult for us to know whether some of the teachers were telling the researchers what they thought we wanted to hear.
• Reflective capabilities are a combination of whether teachers are in supportive and collegial environments, the depth of their subject knowledge and their subject teaching knowledge.

The FDE programme needs to offer teachers more support for developing their reflective capabilities. Reflective capabilities need to be learned. The difficulty is that support is best offered in school. Mixed-mode programmes can’t provide in-school support.

We think we could provide some support through having teachers reflect on a classroom scenario (seen on a video, for example). Programme materials could also demonstrate to teachers how to think about what they read, what they view, and what they experience.

In order to implement Curriculum 2005, teachers are expected to be able to specify the learning outcomes for their lessons and to describe performance indicators that they will use in their assessment of whether or not learners have achieved these outcomes.

One of the main concerns of the research project team is that many teachers find it difficult to plan lessons with a clear purpose, to make links between one lesson and another, and to consider the resources that would assist them to achieve their purpose.

The FDE courses need to take this difficulty into account to a greater extent than was the case when the courses were first developed. While more support for teachers could be included in the written materials, workshops during the residential sessions of the courses could provide opportunities for teachers to

• explore exemplars of (videotaped) sequences of lessons together
• learn from one another and the course tutors and lecturers.

• To the participating teachers, their principals and colleagues: for welcoming us into their schools and classrooms, and generously sharing with us their time, experiences and ideas
• To the National Research Foundation: for funding this research project. The views contained in this report, however, are those of the research team.
• To the Phalaborwa Foundation and Leboneng Centre for their ongoing assistance to the project.