Classroom practices associated with the new curriculum in South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study investigates the teaching practices that enhance or inhibit effective interaction in the classroom, and the study also provides an extension of an action-research study I conducted in my Honours project. In this current study, I worked with two teachers of mathematics who both taught grade 10 classes at two different schools. The two schools had varying, contextual, racial demographics. My focus was on similarities as well as differences between the two teachers in my study. This focus was done not to judge which teacher was better than the other, but rather to give an indication that there are a variety of practices that different teachers can and do use at particular times in their classrooms. Both teachers in my study had similarities as well as differences between them in the manner in which they employed particular practices in class, but looking thoroughly across the similarities showed that some of the similarities actually provided differences in the manner in which the two teachers employed the respective practices. Some of the practices that the teachers employed promoted reasoning in learners and some did not. It was from analyses of these differences and similarities that the notion of traditional teaching and reform-oriented teaching surfaced, and both teachers showed a mixture of traditional as well as reform practices in their teaching. It became evident from analysis that one of the teachers was more reform-oriented whilst the other one was more traditionally-oriented. A deeper analysis into the practices showed that both traditional and reform-oriented practices are important for teaching, depending on how the practices are interchangeably used in a lesson situation. What I found out from studying the two teachers was that the one teacher used traditional practices more in traditional ways, and used reform practices more in traditional ways. The other teacher used reform practices more in reform ways, and could also use traditional practices in reform ways.