Curriculum adviser EMILIA POTENZA answers questions from teachers about outcomes-based education (OBE) and Curriculum 2005.
Q: I am a Grade 3 educator. I managed to attend a number of OBE workshops. My main problem is lesson planning for the three learning programmes: Literacy, Life Skills and Numeracy. I am puzzled as to whether I have to include English, Afrikaans and Sotho in Literacy. Does Life Skills include health, environment, religious education and handwriting? Do I have to integrate Numeracy into the above or do I plan Literacy, Numeracy and Life Skills programmes separately?
R Monareng, Dobsonville
A: Literacy in Grade 3 should include only two languages — home language or the language of instruction and a second or additional language. In your case, I would hope that Sotho would be the language of instruction and then English introduced as an additional language. Your school must decide which two languages will be offered as part of its language plan. In Gauteng, it has been recommended that Life Skills should include health, environment studies, religious education and handwriting. The reason handwriting has been included in Life Skills, and not Literacy, is that the technical skill of forming letters and stringing letters together to form words requires particular attention. There was concern that handwriting might not be given enough time in Literacy where the focus is likely to be on teaching reading and creative writing.
It makes more sense to plan each of your three learning programmes separately. This will help you to achieve the necessary coherence of concepts, skills, values and attitudes within each learning programme. Planning programmes separately allows you to integrate across all three learning programmes whenever it is meaningful to do so.
Q: My question is one of time allocation for the Language, Literacy and Communication Learning Area. We are doing three languages in Grade 7 at our school. They are South Sotho, English and Afrikaans. How should we allocate time to each language?
RE Koto, Ficksburg
A: 20% of contact time has been allocated to Language, Literacy and Communication (LLC) in the Senior Phase. Some provinces are recommending that this time should be divided up as follows: 7% primary language, 7% additional language 1 and 6% additional language 2. This makes a neat division that helps with timetabling. However, I feel that where the primary language is also the language of instruction it should probably be given at least 10%. Many people are asking whether we can afford to offer three languages when it’s hard enough to get learners to be functionally literate in two.
Q: Please send me a preparation plan showing how to go about planning a lesson in each of the eight Learning Areas. The problem is that we don’t know how to start preparing a lesson for Grade 7.
S Baqcua, Margoite
A: There are many different approaches to planning. In some cases, trainers have suggested that there is only one way and this has often been unhelpful.
My advice is that you should trust your own judgement. If an approach to planning suggested in training doesn’t work for you, don’t use it. It makes no sense to get so bogged down in the technical side of planning that there’s no time left to think about the educational side. Focus on three important questions: What are the outcomes I would like learners to achieve by the end of this lesson or set of lessons? (Lesson outcomes, sometimes also called performance indicators, could include things like read an aerial map, add and subtract simple fractions, design an advertisement, explain what HIV/Aids is, measure the pH of household products, explain why the first ”civilisations” developed where they did, etc.). What opportunities will I give my learners to achieve these outcomes? and, How will I assess to what extent learners have achieved these outcomes?
Try the following approach to lesson planning:
Step 1: Identify a programme organiser that will address the needs of your learners for this learning programme in this grade. (Ideally, this should be done in the context of a plan for a whole phase.)
Step 2: Brainstorm your programme organiser by thinking about the key knowledge, skills, values and attitudes (key performance indicators or lesson outcomes) you want learners to achieve.
Step 3: Identify possible phase organisers.
Step 4: Highlight the specific outcomes from the main Learning Area for this programme organiser. Consider specific outcomes from any other Learning Area that may be integrated.
Step 5: Decide how many weeks this programme organiser will last.
Step 6: Now decide on your performance indicators for a set of lessons or a week of teaching and learning. These arise out of the context of your programme organiser. They do not need to be the performance indicators listed in the policy document. State your performance indicators upfront. Include knowledge, skills, values and attitudes.
Step 7: Design activities for each day. Use whatever existing resources are available (including textbooks) to assist you. Be guided by the three key questions listed in the previous column.
Step 8: Once you have designed lessons for the first week, move on to the second and so on. Step 9: Assess how things are going. Record how learners respond to the activities and materials. Feedback from learners tells you about their achievements as well as your teaching.
If this approach works for you, great. If it doesn’t, try another one.
Are you one of the many teachers at sea about understanding and implementing OBE and Curriculum 2005? Send in your questions to our curriculum adviser, Emilia Potenza, c/o The Teacher, PO Box 91667, Auckland Park, 2006, or e-mail her at [email protected]
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, April 2000.