Building teacher capacity to teach for advanced performance
During 2017, a first cohort of in-service teachers received training to equip them to create learning environments that would nurture advanced performance. Teaching for advanced performance focuses on empowering learners with skills and dispositions that enable them to be intellectually and socially confident, work place and life-ready with a global outlook and a concern for others.
The Cognitive Education Research Group (Optentia Research Focus Area) in Association with the International Association for Cognitive Education in Southern Africa (IACESA) presented a Short Learning Programme (SLP) as a one-year course for 25 SACE CPD points on 12 Saturdays (80 notional hours: 40 hours facilitation and 40 hours practical at own time), after which successful participants will receive a Certificate in Cognitive Education at NQF Level 6 endorsed by the NWU.
The final training session took place on 14 October 2017. Teachers were requested to reflect in writing about their experiences with the SLP. In essence, the teachers noted, among others, the following benefits about the training:
The training was an eye-opener to see how the world has changed and how teaching should be transformed to equip learners better for the future.
Realisation of the importance of cognitive education to achieve the objectives of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement.
Becoming aware of thefive minds of the future that learners need to acquire: The disciplined mind, the synthesising mind, the ethical mind, the creative mind, and the respectful mind.
Grasping importance of stimulating the brain through teaching, and how stimulating experiences grow the neural networks in the brain that contribute to better receiving, manipulating and storing of information.
Teachers noted that they understandtheir roles as teachers better in relation to explicitly nurturing thinking among learners to enable learners to become advanced performers.
The training enabled teachers to realise the importance of cognitive education to help learners to cope with the challenges of the 21st century, and to be workplace ready and life ready.
Teaching comprises more than just reading, writing and doing arithmetic. Teaching is enabling learners to learn and make meaning of information on their own.
Becoming familiar with a variety of teaching strategies to nurture thinking skills and dispositions.
Understanding that it is important to leave the learning process to learners.
Realising the importance of dispositions and attitudes for quality work.
Becoming aware of the fact that assessment lies at the heart of teaching, it guides teaching and should provoke thinking and not the mere recall of information.
The encouraging and positive feedback from the teachers prove that the SLP in Cognitive Education holds the latent potential to enable teachers to really understand what teaching to effect advanced performance implies, namely to facilitate thinking, to engage minds, to encourage questioning and taking risks, to support dealing with challenges, and in the first place, putting learners in the driver’s seat of learning.