6.3 ANSWERS TO RESEARCH QUESTION 2
6.3.1 The teachers’ personal philosophy of learner-centred teaching did not
The three teachers’ views about learner-centred teaching is the fact that the teacher guides learners as they access information. However, despite their articulation of learner-centred teaching, classroom observation showed that to a large extent the three teachers’ personal enactment of “learner-centred” teaching did not match their descriptions. Whilst Themba’s teaching practice was closely aligned to his conception of learner-centred teaching, in the case of Milton and Sabelo, there was a clear disjuncture between what they said during the interviews, and their actual classroom practices.
During his lesson, Themba constantly asked learners questions whilst they were seated in small groups. When asking them the questions, he was in fact
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displaying his conception that during learner-centred teaching, the teacher guides learners by asking them questions. However, his conception of guiding by asking learners aligned to the use of probing questions during learner-centred teaching. According to Badham (1994), a teacher would ask learners probing questions in a task or problem situation when their responses are inadequate or rather say incomplete with the aim of supporting them. However, Themba used the technique of asking questions to direct his learners how to arrive at the answer he wanted, without getting ideas from learners on how to get to the answer. He did not even encourage meaningful participation among the learners.
During his lesson, Themba guided learners through a question and answer discussion to make a generalisation. For example after dividing a quadrilateral that seemed to be a square into two halves along a diagonal (as in Figure 5.19), he guided them to realise that the sum of the interior angles of the resultant two triangles is 3600. Hence they concluded that the sum of interior angles of a quadrilateral is 3600. This activity resonated with what he said about learner- centred teaching during my interview with him. Themba said that the teacher should guide learners by asking learners questions. Hence it may have been Themba’s belief of the teacher-as-guide that translated into his practice of leading the discussions and ask learners questions to arrive at the answer.
Themba’s questions were phrased in such a way so as to lead the learners to the answers that he wanted. He had a clear idea of where he wanted the lesson to lead to. Hence the type of questions that Themba asked them during this activity were not just probing questions emanating from his observation of what learners were doing in their groups.
According to (Badham, 1994; Ernest, 1989; Harden & Crosby, 2000; Webb et al., 2009), probing questions are asked by a teacher after observing that learners’
responses to a given task are inadequate or inappropriate. Probing questions would be wanting learners to express their ideas and say more about their ideas that they have already expressed (Badham, 1994). The main aim of asking learners probing questions is to stimulate their thinking as you guide them in the learning process. In short, probing questions would be thought provoking questions like How?, Why?, What if…?, What about…? in order to elicit
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learners’ ideas. However, in the case of Themba, his questions were rather from a stand view of teacher dominated question and answer session where the teacher makes some effort to guide leaners to make a generalisation.
Furthermore, Themba’s guiding of learners during the lesson was not done from a constructivist perspective where learners share ideas in a social setting (Clements & Battista, 1990). In a constructivist class, learners are involved in discussing, explaining and exchanging ideas whilst the teacher guides the focus of their attention as articulated by Clements and Battista. However, during Themba’s lesson, learners were responding to him as individuals from their groups without engaging with one another in their small groups, leading them to the answers that he wanted.
Milton and Sabelo’s interpretation of guiding was different as observed in their lessons. Classroom observation showed that Milton wanted learners to display their own individual understanding of the content, and not one that was developed by a shared understanding of the group. In his lesson, he encouraged individual learners to do some geometric constructions of a triangle whilst the other learners watched without participating. He assisted the individual learner who was doing the construction on chalkboard by holding the pair of compasses (see Figure 5.6). His focus was on an individual learner showing some understanding of ideas. Furthermore, Milton’s interactions with the learners conveyed an attitude that he owned knowledge and it was his right to direct the learners on the next move during his teaching. This was an indication that he did not clearly understand his role as a teacher in a learner-centred lesson. A wider interpretation of his assertion during the interview was that the teacher guides and assists learners in learner-centred teaching may be that Milton actually meant the teacher guides and assist an individual learner. In his lesson seemingly Milton was not encouraging collaborative work among his learners which is a crucial mechanism for learning. During collaborative work, learners work together, and critique each other’s solutions suggesting improvements and clarifications (Badger et al., 2012; Mtika & Gates, 2010). And the teacher encourages learners to collaborate in their learning by asking them to discuss and participate in their small groups (Brodie et al., 2002b). In addition, the teacher offers some guidance and assistance as learners collaborate with one
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another. Duarte (2013) mentions that in a classroom situation, collaborative work enables learners to acknowledge that they also possess knowledge that they can share with one another to build up common understandings. Classroom observation had shown that Milton encouraged individual understanding in his lesson and did not allow understanding built from group members.
On the other hand Sabelo did not guide any of the learners as they worked in small groups on the problem that he had given them to work out. He insisted that the learners should work in groups and asked them to discuss in their groups.
However, despite learners sitting in small groups, there were no discussions amongst them. Instead, similar to Milton’s lesson, one learner worked on the problem whilst the other group members watched (see Figure 5.31). This resonated with Badger et al.’s (2012) observation that as learners work on a task or problem in small groups, one of the group members may be working out the problem while the others watch without participating. The teachers’ inability to intervene to ensure that the groups worked together, points to the fact that the teachers were not trained about the steps they needed to take to help groups work optimally or how to recognise whether groups were working as well as they could (Theobald et al., 2017). When the teacher engages learners into a group work activity, learners’ roles and responsibilities in the groups have to be explained clearly to them. In particular that every group member has to participate in the group discussions and in the process one member must write down a product of the group. This will constitute team work among the groups.
In my interview with Sabelo, he mentioned that in learner-centred teaching the teacher is not the master of the class and similarly in his lesson he watched the groups working on a task as can be seen in Figure 5.32. Sabelo never bothered about whether there were discussions among the learners, let alone making some meaningful intervention among the groups. In other words, he did not interfere with the groups as they worked on the problem that he gave them yet during the interview he submitted that the role of the teacher in learner-centred teaching is that of a guide. To him, guiding learners in learner-centred teaching was observing them as they work in their groups.
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