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.

On the 22^nd and 23^rd February, the Siyavula team ran a workshop at the ATKV Buffelspoort for Mathematics and Languages Subject Advisors for the North West Province’s Department of Education. This workshop was a joint undertaking in partnership with the Department of Education. They are providing the venue and catering as well as coordinating attendance.

The workshop was well attended with 50 subject advisors (also often called curriculum advisors) participating. We were missing some of the Mathematics advisors, as there was a parallel mathematics workshop elsewhere, but are expecting them to attend our next workshop.

Technical / Content Training

From the team’s side the event was a resounding success. On the technical front the stand-alone server and wireless network worked extremely well and we were able to conduct our training with more fluidity and focus than in previous workshops where internet access challenges had proved a large distraction.

A particular highlight of the opening technical session, our hula-hoop activity in which we explain all the Connexions concepts with rope, books and hula-hoops, was when one of the advisors pointed out that this was the ideal technical approach for realising the objectives of the outcomes-based national curriculum.

Community Building

The community-related activities of this workshop were different from our previous Siyavula workshops in that we focused our discussion more on what it takes to support a community as well as giving the participants an opportunity to discuss and present their own strategies for taking things forward. Subject advisors support many teachers in a learning area so they are in a superb position to create an enabling environment for communities to form.

The formation of communities, and ultimately communities of practice, amongst the teachers they support will have many benefits beyond improved sharing of content, classroom-practice, and ideas. Communities of practice provide a powerful support structure for participants as well as being a powerful vehicle for professional development. Subject advisors that are able to support the formation of communities of practice will automatically be working towards their mandate for curriculum delivery in the classroom.

Many of the advisors asked for more information, material and training sessions on how communities work and how best to support them, another highlight of the workshop.

The Way Forward

The participant had many group discussions on various topics. In the final session where they were discussing the way forward the groups unanimously identified the following needs:

• department support,
• recognition for participants,
• resources, and
• senior managment team (SMT) support.

The particularly exciting part was that all groups committed to:

• distributing the workbooks using the provided DVDs,
• introducing their teachers to Connexions, and
• supporting their teachers to form communities.

The participants remained engaged and enthusiastic right up until the end and my favourite piece of feedback during the closing session was when one subject advisor said it was the first workshop he’d been to where everyone had stayed until the very end.

Special thanks to Quinton Davis for all the photographs, click on any of them to browse the full set on flickr

The goal of Siyavula is to ensure that teachers in South Africa have access to a comprehensive set of free and open educational resources that are curriculum-aligned and sustainable. Key to the effective roll-out of such a project is ensuring that the project aligns with the needs and realities on the ground.

How is Siyavula going to achieve its goal?

The short answer is we will enable the appropriate use of technology to support the formation of new and enhance the process of existing communities of practice of teachers that share, adapt, develop, enhance and redistribute resources.

A simple schematic of the education system shows how the curriculum is determined by the Department of Education (DoE) and then propagates through the provinces, districts and ultimately to the Curriculum Advisors who are charged with ensuring and supporting its delivery in the classroom. When we look at the landscape of teachers we find that the majority of teachers feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. Issues like insufficient support, resources or training contribute to this and makes them feel isolated.

We do find groups of teachers (communities of practice) that come together to share resources, discuss curriculum and content and support each other. These groups swap and share information, resources and support. One notable feature of these groups is that they often seem to be formed by reasonably well-resourced teachers, so the access to resources is not the sole driver for their existence, and the sharing of information and support is important too. Sharing is fundamental to teaching and a core part of teachers’ values.
To enhance the effectiveness of groups and support the isolated teachers, given the the ideas Siyavula is building on, we need to provide:

This will allow Siyavula to create a framework that supports the education system. The framework needs to accept the curriculum, allow swap-and-share groups the ability to share resources and have the discussions they need, allow users like Curriculum Advisors to vet resources and ensure that the isolated teachers can get access to the resources.

One of the beautiful features of using a web-based platform to support the sharing is that the teachers who are creating material aren’t impacted by others downloading it whereas, with paper resources, they’d need to produce extra copies, transport them and actually push their content out. Now the resources can be accessed when and as needed with no extra work required by the original author.

To support as many teachers as possible from the launch of the project, Siyavula has acquired a set of curriculum resources which teachers can use, adapt, print and enhance in addition to adding their own resources to the project. The material that Siyavula has acquired so far covers:

• Foundation phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Intermediate phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Senior phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• FET phase – textbooks for Physical Science and Mathematics

The acquisition and sharing of this content allows Siyavula to engage with teachers as a sharing partner, in contrast to seeking donations of content in good faith or adopting a pure advocacy role.

Over time isolated teachers will also begin to share resources back, ensuring that their latent knowledge, especially around context challenges, starts to be shared, and then either form their own communities or join existing ones so that we eventually have communities of practice that are adapting and enhancing resources for all the imaginable contexts that exist within the South African education system. The wide variety of contexts is something that the traditional publishing model is unlikely to address and requires very localised and specific knowledge. This enabling feature of OERs is likely to have even more of an impact than the cost savings that are possible.

I talk a lot about communities of practice (CoP) in my work around Siyavula and the concept is key to the strategy and sustainability. Before talking about why we chose Connexions, our community strategy or the impact of the recent announcement by the Minister of Basic Education I need to make sure we’ve got a definition of CoPs handy. I would like to emphasise what CoPs are, their benefits and what they are not.

Communities of Practice

CoP research was pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave and Etienne has a nice, succinct definiton on his CoP page which I’ll reproduce here:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

CoPs have:

• a domain or area in which all members share an interest,
• members engage in discussion and activities, helping each other and sharing information and
• members who are practitioners and develop a shared set of resources, knowledge, experience, tool and techniques.

In working with teachers there is ample opportunity to support the formation of communities of practice. Teachers have a common domain, they can benefit from discussion and sharing information and their shared experience, tools and techniques will improve classroom practice. In fact, it has been shown (see for example: Zaslavsky, O., & Leikin, R. (2004)  Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, 5 – 32 and Graven, M. (2005) Pythagoras, 61, 2 – 10) that participating in communities of practice is a powerful form of professional development for teachers.

There has been a lot written on CoPs and I’m not going to delve into it here, what I do want to mention are a few anecdotes related to what communities of practice are not.

Forced Groups

I often suggest that people consider working together with the hope that a community of practice will emerge and this is often met with the standard refrain “One person ends up doing all the work!”. My own experience is similar. When forced to work in a group for projects one person often ended up doing all the work (I’m not even going to pretend it was me).

However, forced group-work failing is not a counter-argument to CoPs being useful. It is merely an illustration that you can’t force people to be a community. My own feeling about forced group-work is that nobody wants to be there, the group dynamics haven’t ironed themselves out yet, nobody feels comfortable and the pressure builds up until someone just wants out. After a while this behaviour is reinforced sufficiently that someone takes on the task as soon as the group forms and none of the group workings are ever sorted out.

Rapid Deployment

CoPs are communities, no matter which group development process you favour, all teams or communities grow and this takes time. The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing process, proposed by Bruce Tuckman, is one well known example of how the process has been categorised. What is important is that there is an organic process a group of people have to experience before they perform (i.e. they are a community, never mind a community of practice).

The challenge here is that even if an organisation has bought into the idea of communities, they take time to evolve and not all are successful. It is impossible to include communities as deliverables on a timeline. The harder you try the more frustrated you are likely to become.

Purpose

Communities consist of people, it’d be much easier, if much more boring, to manage them if they didn’t, but they do. So, assuming we get some people together and they overcome their group dynamics, achieve the ability to communicate effectively, share ideas, information and even criticism, they still need a purpose to bring them together to be community of practice. The thing about people is that they want to be able to choose.

If people are going to find the time and energy to participate, to overcome the group dynamics, accept and give criticism, then they need to resonate with the purpose of community. The easiest way to achieve this is to allow the communities to decide their own purpose. You will probably also have to accept that their purpose isn’t going to be identical to the one you’d like them to have.

Forcing a group together to immediately work on something they’re not interested in is clearly going to be a disaster. For success we have to rectify all the mistakes in that process, not just one of them. So if we’re somehow going to use CoPs in our work we need to keep this and much, much more in mind. With a lot of help from Hélène Smit, Layo Seriki and Judith Haupt,  I do try but I’ll save the details for another blog post.