Free State maths, science teachers say US workshops will improve delivery of lessons

Free State maths and science teachers attending the three-week workshop hosted by volunteers from Teachers Across Borders of Southern Africa (TABSA) in Bloemfontein, say the different methods of teaching will improve how they deliver their lessons.

TABSA is running a three-week long workshop to train teachers in grade seven, eight and nine on different approaches to teach maths and science.

Teachers say they are learning practical and simplified ways of conducting lessons from the workshop, adding that their learners will benefit a lot from lessons learnt from the programme.

“The ways they are teaching us; seeing that most of our schools don’t have equipment to teach children experiments, for example. So they are teaching us different ways of how to give the information to learners in a practical, easy way for learners.”

“We as teachers we turn to think we know the content, we do know the content but we don’t know how to deliver it in the classroom. The program helps us to do experiments in class, how to approach some of the activities in the classroom.”

“Everything is so simplified that it would be so much easier to give it to our learners to understand to understand what we teach them.”

Responding to gaps

Meanwhile, the American volunteers say the workshop programme they are conducting aims to respond to gaps identified by local teachers.

Yunus Peer, Director for TABSA says the difference about the programme is that it responds to local needs rather than imposing.

“The difference about TABSA is that it responds to local needs. And because I understand CAPS and OBE and all the systems I realised that we need to bring assistance that furthers the local agenda. We have no agenda, TABSA has no agenda except to serve the local agenda and I think that is why we are successful. We also realised in rural schools they have to meet the same standards as they do in the urban schools and our jobs is to empower those teachers.”