Initial Teacher Education Research Project

1. Initial Teacher Education Research Project Presentation to PPC 4 November 2014

2. Conditions in schools Low levels of English proficiency among both teachers and learners → fundamental limit on academic progress, since English is the LOLT in 90% of schools. Lack of adequate reading pedagogies→ large numbers of learners reaching Grade 5 essentially illiterate. Lack of adequate pedagogies for basic numeracy → in Grade 7 learners continue to use ‘stick counting’ methods to perform arithmetic operations. Low levels of subject knowledge among teachers. Schools tend not to recruit and deploy primary school teachers according to subject specialisation → most primary school teachers will be required to teach maths and English.

3. The importance of ITE Evidence has accumulated over the last two decades to suggest that in-service interventions have had limited impact on these problems This understanding, in turn, has led to a growing realisation that the greatest opportunity for improving the quality of schooling lies with ITE programmes.

4. Purposes of ITERP Generate Informationto inform the debate about the quality of ITE Key Question: What knowledge and skills do teachers need in order to act professionally? Collaborative forum: EDF and ITE practitioners, DHET, DBE(SACE, CHE, unions?)

5. Research Questions 1. What range of practices exists in the ITE programmes offered by HEIs to prepare teachers to teach in South African schools? 2. To what extent do these practices adequately prepare teachers to teach in South African schools? 3. How do teachers who qualified from different institutions navigate the challenges they encounter in their first years of teaching? 4. How can the quality of the curricula offered by ITE programmes be improved?

6. Four Components of ITERP 1. Content of ITE programmes at 5 HEIs – this report 2. Case studies of NQTs from 5 HEIs in first two years of teaching 3. Survey of all final year BEd students in 2013, tracking them into the workplace for 2 years 4. Conclude and disseminate

7. Component I: Case studies on 5 campuses Criteria for selecting the five HEIs History, location, demography, size, delivery mode Broad overview of ITE programmes Design, conceptual coherence Analysis of TP instruments* Conception of the teacher and good teaching The intended and assessed curricula Maths* and English* courses for student teachers specialising in IP *available at www.jet.org.za

8. Maths courses for IP BEd maths specialists

9. Maths courses for non-maths specialists

10. Questions about Maths Shouldn’t ALL IP teachers be competent to teach Maths? Shouldn’t specialist Maths teachers spend more time on their specialisation? What should the content of these courses be? What kind of cognitive skills should the courses develop? Entrance criteria?

11. IP courses for BEd IP English Specialists

12. English courses for non-specialists in English

13. Total credits allocated for English courses (%)

14. English proficiency for all NQTs Shouldn’t all students should be required to take some English courses? in support of their on-going development as literate teachers in order to assist learners in using English to learn the subjects that they teach MRTEQ: [A]ll IP teachers must specialise to teach languages (comprising First Additional Language teaching in one of the official languages and First Additional English Language teaching) Government Gazette, No. 34467, 2011, p.21

15. Literature for Children According to Banks, Leach and Moon ‘school knowledge’ for English includes ‘the school canon of literature including children’s literature’. Given that IP English specialists will be teaching learners in grade 4-6 who are expected to engage with a range of literary genres Limited attention to literature for children and adolescents at the five institutions can be questioned

16. Reading Pedagogy In G4 learners should be in transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. However, results of PIRLS, SACMEQ, ANA, NEEDU indicate that few learners have learned how to read accurately and fluently by the end of G3 This suggests that inclusion of content on teaching beginner readers how to read, in terms of both decoding and interpreting texts could be useful in a B Ed curriculum for all IP teachers

17. Writing The curriculum expects teachers to guide learners’ development as writers of texts in a range of genres Only two of the five HEIs offer input on different approaches to teaching writing Research in schools: learners do very little writing Several possible reasons for this, but teacher under-preparedness for teaching writing is likely to be one

18. Findings A very wide variation in all dimensions of the curricula examined There are some excellent practices on each of the HEIs studied But it can be argued that none of the five institutions studied is rising fully to the challenge, particularly wrt student teachers not specialising in maths or English.

19. What next? A serious discussion among teacher educators in all sub-disciplines, but particularly in English and mathematics: covergence ≠ consensus Course design: coherence and directed to school needs the proficiencies – subject knowledge and pedagogy – required by teachers the curricula to achieve these standards how these proficiencies should be assessed