The Cape Town Siyavula team was met with wintry weather in Durban as we touched down early on Friday morning. This did not dampen our spirits as we made our way to the Southern Sun North Beach Hotel to set up for the workshop. With a turnout of 21 AMESA teachers, we were A-for away and the workshop began.

As often happens when one has a set agenda, we veered off course straight away and got stuck into building topic trees, for assigned school Grades. Amidst much discussion the topic trees emerged, and it was then felt that a break for tea was well deserved. This was followed by an interesting talk by Prof Michael de Villiers of UKZN, who spoke about maths and symmetry in everyday life. As early evening approached, Mark initiated the introduction to uploading questions to the FullMarks website (agenda item 1!). He also demonstrated how to create equations using MathML, and how to take screenshots to upload diagrams.

This brought us to 19h10 which meant we had to hot foot it to uShaka for our dinner reservation at the Cargo Hold. There we spent an enjoyable evening getting to know one another and watching the fish and sharks swimming peacefully past us in the aquarium, as our 3 course meal was served. Despite our previous threats that the slow uploaders or those who misbehaved may end up being shark food, I am pleased to announce that everyone behaved themselves and so were spared this terrifying fate.

We were greeted by a beautiful summer’s day on Day Two, which began with a lovely breakfast buffet in the dining room of the hotel. The workshop then kicked off just after 09h00, with the goal for the day being to upload as many questions as possible.This had also been the goal from Day One which unfortunately was not realised, but we were determined to see success by the end of the afternoon. With a quick revision to start with, and internet voucher numbers entered, the teachers were ready to go.

The Siyavula team were on hand to provide tech support to the uploaders, especially as they attempted to use the maths editor on the FullMarks website. The maths editor is not particularly difficult to work with, it just takes a bit of practice to understand how to enter the data. It didn’t take long before everyone was getting the hang of things, and so the team agreed it was time to throw a spanner in the works and show the AMESA teachers a new system for uploading questions and answers!This was presented to them in the form of an OpenOffice template, which Mark promised was a very simple and far more efficient system to use. A fairly quick demonstration was given, which was greeted with exclamations of “why didn’t you show us this from the start?” and “this is so much easier than the other way!”. So much for being worried about confusing everyone further!

We had a very productive afternoon as the teachers’ confidence increased as they practiced using the OpenOffice template, and uploaded multiple questions and answers to the FullMarks website. As the sounds of success echoed around the room, another tea break was due and the chance to discuss our learnings amongst ourselves. It’s amazing what milktart and tea can do for conversation!

That was to be the final feeding and watering of the troops, and so once that was over Mark began the wrap up of the workshop weekend. Tasks were assigned to different teachers, and a discussion took place over what the next step would be. With tentative plans in place for the next workshop, everyone went their separate ways amidst smiles and hugs, and the Siyavula team was left feeling satisfied at the knowledge that was imparted and the progress that was made.

The Southern Sun North Beach Hotel provided a great venue for the workshop, despite the issues with holding an online workshop using internet vouchers. The vouchers had to be purchased in denominations of minutes to spend online, as opposed to MB or GB usage. It didn’t take long before vouchers were expiring and thus logging the users out of the FullMarks page, usually mid-upload; or if the page was left idle for too long, the same thing would happen. This hindered progress somewhat and caused frustration, especially as the uploading process is relatively painless and straightforward. However, the teachers were very patient, and understood that when they upload from a stable line, they will not have this problem.

Overall the Siyavula team had a great weekend of meeting new people, imparting knowledge, eating far too much delicious food, and most likely not getting enough sleep! Well done to everyone that attended and to the Siyavula team for organising this great event.

AMESA is the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa, making mathematics the only school subject for which there is a national association in South Africa. I think that educators in all subject areas should have a national body that organises an annual conference to help drive their subject area as well as the professional development of educators.

I was invited to participate on a panel at the AMESA Congress this year on a panel on professional development. One of my colleagues, upon hearing this, immediately said to me “What do you know about that?”. Formally, nothing. Given the Siyavula roll-out plan, my time with the community facilitators, the research the Foundation did into teaching teachers and my time working on a big physics experiment I thought I could find something to contribute.

I went to talk about a less formal approach to professional development; more a process and environment that ensures that professional development is happening continuously rather than a paper chase for formal qualifications. A process built on things that you already know, that have already proven themselves and that harnesses the latent knowledge and experience of teachers in the field (at the chalk-face if you like). A process that will also create a sense of belonging and inclusion.

Education

Education is evolving continuously, perhaps slowly, but continuously. Need for change is becoming more urgent all the time, especially with South Africa wanting to migrate to a knowledge-based economy which will require entirely different skills from a resource-based economy.

Needs, methodologies, resources and tools are all changing as well as the circumstances in which they need to be applied. This is further complicated by the fact that a variety of circumstances need to be addressed, often simultaneously.

Not to forget the fact that at the moment, in South Africa, we are struggling to address basic numeracy and literacy needs, irrespective of your preferred economy! Taking this into account and the fact that the perfect education system is something many more developed countries are still in search of, makes a lot of educators feel like nobody has the answer and that little progress is being made.

Science

Modern science has many of the same challenges:

• constantly shifting goals,
• constantly changing methodologies, and
• no knowledge of final solution.

Yet progress is made continuously despite these obstacles – impressive and often astounding progress – everything from expanding our understanding of fundamental particles to the devices you have in your pockets that connect wirelessly through 3G, bluetooth, wifi, and more with GPS’s, cameras and radios.

How is this achieved?

All participants work tirelessly towards the goal without a well defined roadmap but rather a well-defined process of layered peer-review, continuously doing their best, testing the results and comparing methodologies etc., providing each other with constraints, ideas and challenges to continuously make progress.

In science the critical assessment of ideas is conducted in ever expanding circles of review – first local groups or departments – then workshops – then local conferences – then international conferences and then international peer-reviewed journals. It is important to not that the the informal peer review, which takes place long before formal journals, results in significant benefit and progress through critical assessment.

Professionals

Professional organisations/people continuously assess how effective they are at their core duties, continuously adapting their methodologies to be better, faster, more effective, more efficient, and more sensitive to the ever changing needs of their clients and the broader environment in which they work.

This typically happens through continuous review at all levels, personal review with a sense of personal accountability, local peer-review within their current group, department etc., institutional peer-review within their broader organisation, national peer-review at local conferences and international or global peer-review at international conferences. Then, of course, we also have peer-reviewed journals.

The many layers of review also ensure that information flows globally as well.

Groups that are effective at defining their purpose, sharing effectively and creating a communal knowledge-base of resources, ideas, methodologies and technologies are called communities of practice (COP). Scientists and other professionals typically form many layers of communities of practice.

Communities of Practice

We need to create an enabling environment for educators to form the same layered structures of communities of practice. AMESA has got half of the problem solved, they have a national congress, and have chapters in each province. What would take things to the next level would be many small grass-roots communities of practice that are affiliated with the provincial structures.

If teachers come together in an environment of trust they would be able to discuss what works and share ideas, if they consider the environment informal with no punitive measures for performance, then they can also share what doesn’t work, what they don’t understand and be more transparent about their weaknesses. This is essential if these weaknesses are to be addressed effectively, or at all.

In the current environment a lot of trust is lacking with things like classroom observation being hated because they can lead to punitive measures against under-performing teachers. It is precisely this information that needs to be shared so that we can support those teachers to overcome their weaknesses. This sort of trust is typical of a true community. The environment where teachers can receive in-classroom review, without fear, needs to be created from the policy side, or done informally by the teaching body themselves.

There really is no need to make a case for communities of practice as the benefits are well documented in many peer-reviewed journals across many disciplines. What is important to emphasise is the voluntary nature of the communities and that it is impossible to enforce their formation.

Seeds for Communities of Practice

In my work to support teachers and curriculum advisors to be more effective, I adopt an approach that focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which immediately allows for the re-packaging, contextualisation and improvement of educational resources, by communities of practice, which supports load-sharing, professional development, empowerment and the development of a sense of belonging for the participants.

To do this effectively we need to support the communities in ways that are reinforcing and this is done by providing a suite of complementary projects that support the essence of the full teaching value chain:

Wrapping communities of practice around an open, collaborative approach to sharing content, knowledge, ideas, techniques and challenges will have benefits for all the participants and provide opportunities for development. Using technology appropriately will allow processes and communities of practice to co-exist at many levels. For example, teachers could participate in the local community of practice for their geographical area, as well as a provincial community of practice and then also a national one.

The bottom-line is that participation in a community of practice is an incredibly powerful driver for continuous professional development.