Chapter 5: INDUCTIVE ANALYSIS OF DATA
5.2 Background and context of clusters
For the purposes of this study, a cluster is a grouping of teachers who gather at the circuit, district and provincial level for professional learning purposes. The cluster, therefore, is circuit, district and provincial gathering of the teachers. This is where learning takes place.
119
Figure 8: Structure of the Mpumalanga Department of Education showing the different levels at which the cluster members operate.
The diagram above locates the clusters in the Department of Education structure.
The Deputy Director General (DDG), also known as the Head of Department (HoD) is the accounting officer with the Chief Director (CD) responsible for the districts, reporting to the HoD. The four district Directors report to the Chief Director: District Coordination. The number of Circuits in the four districts varies. District One has 14 Circuits, District Two has 16 Circuits, District Three has 20 Circuits and District Four has 18 Circuits. The clusters are at the Circuit level and have the Circuit managers as the official heads of those Circuits. The clusters are led by the Cluster Leaders who report directly to the Subject Advisors and sometimes have direct links to the
MEC
Superintendent General Deputy Director General
Chief Dir District Coordination
& Management
Chief Dir Curriculum Services
District Director
District Director
District Director
District Director
SA LS (x2)
SA LS = Subject Advisor Life Sciences Circuit
Mngr (x13)
SA LS (x2) Circuit
Mngr (x18) SA LS (x2) Circuit
Mngr (x16)
SA LS (x2) Circuit
Mngr (x20)
Dir Maths Science Tech
Dir Teacher Development Dir Curriculum Enrichment
Dir FET Dir GET
Cluster Leader
Subject Head: Life Science
Cluster Leader
Cluster Leader
Cluster Leader
120 Subject Head. The membership in these clusters varies from 10-25. The relevant cluster that a teacher belongs to is informed by the subject that they teach. The total number of circuits/clusters and cluster leaders is the same. The cluster that I am focusing on belongs to District 1 (Sangxa district) which has 14 circuits, and is divided into 3 sub-districts. In line with the other provinces, the MDoE facilitated the establishment of the structures that would coordinate the activities that are meant to manage the delivery of the syllabus, the implementation of the policies and teachers’
professional development.
There are three types of engagement: the content workshop at provincial level is the first one, the content enrichment workshop at district level is the second one and the moderation workshop that takes place at cluster level is the third one where teachers gather to focus on a practice. For the purposes of this study the practice refers to the cluster meetings, the workshops, the examinations guides that they use, CAPS and the Annual Teaching Plan that guides their teaching activities. These take place on a regular basis.
5.2.1 Professional development activity at provincial level
The first professional development activity that is offered each year is a subject content workshop which takes place at provincial level. The focus is on content development, focusing on content knowledge (as there is a belief that the poor performance of learners is linked to a lack of content knowledge among the teachers) for all the Life Sciences teachers. It takes place at the beginning of the first and second semesters. The MDoE convenes two content workshops (at provincial level), aimed at dealing with the problem areas as identified from the previous year’s results. The problem areas are identified and discussed. The provincial content intervention workshops are targeted at the cluster leaders and the teachers of underperforming schools. The teachers’ number varies from cluster to cluster. They range from 10 to 30 teachers per cluster. The objective of this workshop is to set the tone for the topics to be covered per semester, mainly focusing on the content. The teachers whose learners are not performing well (about two hundred teachers) are usually targeted and invited to attend this workshop. Teachers from the clusters attend the workshop at this level. Not all of them attend, due to financial constraints on the part of the MDoE, however, they are all invited to attend. As a result of this
121 inconsistent attendance the numbers always fluctuate. The organisation of this workshop is the responsibility of Head Office. The subject head does this with the assistance of the subject advisors who focus on the coordination of the logistics.
5.2.2 Professional development activity at the district level
The second activity is the content enrichment workshop that takes place at district level. It follows immediately after the provincial content workshop, taking its cue from the content workshop. The main objective is to focus on content and pedagogy, focusing on taking teachers through the content and helping teachers with various methods of teaching challenging topics. These workshops are organised and coordinated by the subject advisors, with the assistance of the cluster leaders. These workshops take place at the sub-district level and are attended by the teachers in that sub-district, together with the cluster leaders.
At the district level the subject advisor is responsible for organising a content enrichment workshop. These workshops are a follow-up from the content workshops:
their agenda is set by the content workshops. The objective of the content enrichment workshop is to guide teachers on how to teach the topics to be covered in that particular quarter. This usually takes place after the content workshop. In essence, there are four content enrichment workshops per year; others will take place should there be an urgent need to hold one. The purpose of the content enrichment workshops is to equip teachers with skills to conduct moderation, assess the examinations of the previous term and teach the topics that are meant to be covered in the current term. The subject advisor supports this assertion in his interview on the importance of professional development:
My identification is that they need support in the content, because most of the teachers are from the old system of education and content was very poor, so they need support and content enrichment. (Mbinzi, Subject advisor)
Mbinzi is the Subject advisor who has a Master’s degree in Science and has taught Grades 10-12 for 13 years. He lectured in one of the Colleges in the province.
Biology was his major subject when he was a student at tertiary level. He still teaches the subject on a part time basis, over weekends.
122 The Subject advisor explains how the workshops assist the teachers in the delivery of the curriculum and ensure that the syllabus is covered and they receive support from the department and through interacting with the other teachers.
The content enrichment workshops are held four times a year or when the need arises. The cluster leaders are active in these workshops, even though they are meant for all the attendees. The cluster leaders have the responsibility of distributing the handouts to all those that are in attendance, leading and facilitating discussion on selected topics, sharing best practices in their clusters, presenting their moderation plans and presenting challenges identified in the analysis of the results and the remedial measures to apply together with the resources to use.
5.2.3 Professional development activity at circuit level
At the circuit level the engagement is on moderation (this is the third form of engagement), which focuses on the activities of the cluster. The responsibility of organising and coordinating lies with the cluster leader. The focus is on the previous quarter’s school work. The main activity is the moderation of the previous quarter’s work. This activity involves only the teachers of a specific cluster: in this case it involves the 25 Life Sciences teachers. Among other things, the discussions revolve around:
• Marks allocation by the teachers;
• Assessment standards;
• Phrasing of the questions. This is aligned to the three levels of questioning, e.g., high level, which entails testing critical analytical skills from the learners, medium level, where learners are expected to match the correct answers and Low level which focuses on short questions and asking learners to list characteristics.
The cluster groups are active at the three levels, i.e., the district and the province (mainly through workshops) and Circuit (moderation of school based assessment) level.
At cluster level, holding a meeting is dependent on whether all the teachers in the cluster attended the content intervention workshop or not, so that the cluster leader
123 can take them through what was covered at the workshop. For those that could not attend, the content and/or the content enrichment workshop, the Cluster Leader has the responsibility of ensuring that they receive the tasks that would have been distributed at the workshop. These tasks are part of the work that is supposed to be covered in the current quarter. At the cluster level the regular meetings are those that are meant for moderation. The Cluster Leader moderates the marking process, the allocation of marks and the adherence to the memorandum when the teacher was marking the scripts.
WhatsApp groups complement what happens in the cluster meetings. When teachers experience problems that were not discussed or that are raised by the learners as they are teaching them, teachers help each other by raising the question in the WhatsApp group chat. The WhatsApp group is not as interactive as the workshops. It is usually the Subject advisor that responds and sometimes would refer the teachers that are asking the question to another teacher who is deemed to be knowledgeable in the topic.