More than 100 primary school teachers will gather in Cape Town next week work out a programme for a series of workshops next year aimed at assisting primary school teachers.
The workshops are part of the Primary Science Programme’s (PSP) Innovation Project, which offers courses on teacher development and classroom innovation in the natural sciences, mathematics, language, social sciences and the environment.
At each activity-based workshop — held during the first three-quarters of the school year — teachers are aided in building their content knowledge and given tips to help them with implementing their newfound skills in the classroom.
“We have found that many of the participants are not adequately trained to teach the subjects that they do, so we try and help them by finding innovative ways to implement what they have learnt at the workshops in to their classroom teaching,” Mascha Ainslie told the Mail & Guardian.
“We also draw on our engagements with the teachers to constantly develop teacher support materials which, together with the official textbooks, assist them in the classroom.”
PSP recently received the massive boost of a R579 000 donation from the Monsanto Fund towards the Innovation Project. Ainslie said this would contribute towards in-service teacher training for about 600 teachers from marginalised and previously disadvantaged areas in the Western Cape.
“PSP’s Innovation Project resonates with the Monsanto Fund’s mission to ‘Strengthen Farming Communities’,” said Kobus Lindeque, Monsanto’s managing director in South Africa. “Through the fund’s focus on ‘Basic Education Support’, we hope to improve the education standards of children in farming communities within South Africa.”
The programme has been running for 20 years and has helped thousands of teachers in that time. This hard work has not gone unnoticed by education officials and PSP has been granted the tenders to facilitate in-service science training workshops for the Western Cape Education Department.
“We have highly-skilled teachers — most of whom have been with us for more than 10 years — who serve as our facilitators and I think this is part of the reason for our success,” explained Ainslie.