Teachers are doing their best – study

Where they fail, it’s because ‘they are poorly educated’

POOR school leadership is failing South African pupils. While most teachers and principals are doing their best, some school leaders are merely “going through the motions”, with little impact, says education researcher Nick Taylor.

“The problem is they themselves are poorly educated,” he said.

“Their best is not good enough because they don’t understand the curriculum themselves.”

Taylor is the former head of the National Education Evaluation Development Unit (Needu), and is now with research organisation Jet Education Services.

The quantity and quality of pupils’ writing was one example: schools reported that this crucial learning activity was satisfactorily monitored, but pupils’ writing books revealed that the work done deviated significantly from what the curriculum prescribed.

The implication, said Taylor, was those responsible for monitoring pupils’ writing work either did not understand the curriculum or were not paying attention.

It was not true that the majority of teachers did not care.

“My research tells me that this perception, widely held around the country, is wrong.”

Speaking on the quality of high school education, Taylor said that because so much in-service training was failing to bridge that capacity gap, the monitoring of teaching and learning was weak.

“There is a great deal of instructional leadership activity, but most of it is undertaken at too superficial a level to make an impact on teaching and learning,” Taylor said.

Instructional leaders managed time and resources, identified areas of weakness for teachers and pupils, and devised interventions to address these.

They monitored the pace and progress of learning, and ensured that learning activities were set at the right level of complexity for each grade, and that pupils were stimulated.

Time management was one of the most important indicators of good leadership.

Many schools were not allocating even the minimum time for the teaching of maths and English. This meant that schools were not complying with the Caps curriculum.

Another key aspect of time management was absenteeism.

Taylor said that for a significant number of schools, teacher absenteeism was also a problem.