The quality of pedagogic experiences

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday October 9, 2023 06:00

There may be other factors which may have indirect impact on learning outcomes but the quality of pedagogic experiences has been singled out as the one factor directly linked with improved student learning outcomes.

As school principals assume their leadership roles and navigate whatever competing interests coming with the territory, they must always keep in mind the fact that the teacher power is the ultimate game changer.

This clearly suggests that school principals should never allow anything, however tempting it may be, to distract attention on the issue how their teachers are executing and delivering content.

The main focus of a school principal is not merely delivery of content but how student engage in delivery, how it eases students’ understanding, retention and application.

Top notch teaching means impactful teaching, delivering content to make a difference. A teacher’s work is markedly different from the work of a struggling and lowly placed football team, which takes the field weekend in and out to honour the league fixtures and not to achieve results. Teaching is more than honouring the time table. Teaching is a result-oriented profession and it is remiss of school principals if they do not ensure teaching fulfils and lives up to its game changing reputation.

And the big question is how can school principals keep their school to ensure quality service to all students and place their school on top of the academic log? The answer lies in sustaining the focus and momentum on classroom matters. Of course, I would be the first to admit that running a school can be a depressing and heart breaking undertaking. School principals experience a lot unanticipated challenges and priorities competing for attention. If not managed, the issues which were not initially on the school principals radar can assume centre stage and dominate the school agenda while driving attention away from what was planned.

Distractions can become major pursuits claiming all the attention, resources and energies.

School principals must stay awake all the time so that they don’t sleep through the process of change and allow circumstances to derail them from the core business of watching and learning from the classroom experiences.

As a constant reminder of the purpose of the school, every school principal, should write in bold letters inside the door of the office the following words: WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME I VISITED THE CLASS ROOM AS THE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL TO OBSERVE INSTRUCTION? These words would prick the school principal’s conscience to speak and guide the principal into the most important critical aspect of his/her responsibilities.

Amidst all issues, the issue of classroom instruction should never be relegated to the background or play second fiddle to some unending emergencies. After all, as the Chinese philosopher and military strategist, Sun Tzu once intimated that leaders must choose their battles wisely. School leadership is essentially about making hard but informed choices, choosing one significant battle out of a whole menu of battles. Making an educated guess about what matters more and what matters less is the mark of good leadership.

The life of a school will always present a hotchpotch of issues competing for attention but the destiny of a school rests with the choices of the leader. The purpose of a school in our jurisdiction is to end the long night of underachievement.

Other battles may be insignificant but can wait because they are peripheral in nature. Important battles worth fighting are those having direct connections to student outcomes.

It is crucial for school leaders to draw a distinction between battles worth pursuing and those not worthy of the resources and energies of the school. Schools seeking to sit at the summit of the academic log should begin by developing and agreeing on a model of effective classroom instruction. This should be the first school principal’s port of call and no other business should take precedence over this. Where does one gets an effective model of effective instruction, one may ask? This is not a difficult task as the answer lies within the boundaries of every school.

It is not a matter of lifting eyes to the mountains or heaven to get a model instruction. I have had the privilege of serving students in many schools across the length and breadth of this country and I can confirm with confidence that each and every school (inclusive of low achieving school) is endowed with one or two star teachers whose results year in and out are towering above the rest.

In my almost 30 years of association with the teaching profession, I encountered many gifted teachers who were not only a marvel to watch, who made teaching a fulfilled and entertaining exercise but also produced outstanding learning outcomes. The teaching exploits of two exemplary teachers will suffice. One was Primrose Oteng, a Tirelo Setchaba participant plying her teaching trade at Sesholo Junior Secondary School in 1994 and the other was Pako Dibotelo at Lotsane Senior Secondary School in the late 1990s. The one common denominator about this rare gem of teachers was that they were temporary teachers and not products of any teacher producing college or university.

Yet their passion for teaching and mastery of pedagogy were second to none. They taught as if the issue of raising the quality of education rested on their shoulders alone.

The challenge was that the rigour of instruction which classes assigned to them enjoyed, was not replicated in other classrooms. This is the reality in many schools.

There is a disturbing problem of uneven teaching service. Even when data points to the fact that students in the same school are not subjected to the same rigour of instruction, there is no serious intervention to rectify and correct this anomaly. Sometimes schools take solace in the excuse that the one subject is more difficult than the other or simply put, the students are not ‘science people’.

Principals should know that learning outcomes suggest something about the quality of instruction and not necessarily the character of students or their like or dislike of this or that subject.

School principals should change the scenario, to stop a case of having two schools in one. Faced with the challenge of having a school blowing hot and cold, school principals are duty bound to be intentional about levelling the playing field.

As Rachel E. Curtis and Elizabeth A. City put it, the system should panel beat the situation by providing “a model of instruction of effective teaching to ensure consistency from classroom to classroom.” Teaching standards if set and universally applied in a school will ensure a rise in learning outcomes across all content areas and this will consequently raise the profile a school. Perpetuating silos does not do any school justice while collaborating to raise learning outcomes works wonders.