Exploring rural primary school teachers’ experiences of learning and participation in professional learning communities.

Abstract

Professional development of teachers is a concern internationally and locally, however, all tried professional development methods like workshops have not been much productive since they usually occur on a once-off rather than ongoing basis. The purpose of this study was to explore the different kinds of learning activities that teachers engage in, how these teachers learn from each other in their PLCs and to examine the types of skills and knowledge that teachers in a rural school context acquire in their PLCs. The study was framed by Kwakman’s (2003) professional learning activities and Grossman’s (1990) models of teacher knowledge. Purposive sampling was used to select six participants: three participants from the Foundation Phase PLC and three participants from the Intermediate and Senior Phase PLC. Data was generated through semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that in both PLCs, teachers engaged in reading curriculum support documents for lesson planning and regularly reflected on learners’ barriers and performance. Foundation Phase teachers collaboratively set assessment tasks, tackled addition in mathematics and developed their teaching aids. Intermediate and Senior Phase teachers demonstrated natural science experiments, created teaching aids and resources, and shared methods for using social media platforms to access resources. The findings also reveal that in both PLCs teachers collaborated; through sharing useful teaching resources and teaching strategies, through sharing content knowledge, through team teaching and peer teaching. In both PLCs teachers collaborated to implement the Department of Basic Education (DBE) programs, such as Jikimfundo for the Foundation Phase and PSRIP for the Intermediate and Senior Phases. The findings revealed that Foundation Phase teachers learnt pedagogical content knowledge for teaching phonics, while Intermediate and Senior Phase teachers gained pedagogical content knowledge for teaching the fundamentals of poetry in English as a First Additional Language. This study recommends that the PLCs should allocate more time for their PLCs in schools.