The tension between curriculum coverage and quality learning: The experiences of South African teachers

Highlights

• There is tension between a fast paced curriculum and slow pace of learners.

• Teachers believe that increasing pacing hampers the quality of the learning.

• Curriculum coverage trackers do not account for different school contexts.

• Curriculum coverage is a necessary, but not sufficient intervention.

• Teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogic strategies must be developed.

Abstract

In South Africa, there is increasing state monitoring of curriculum coverage. This is a response both to classroom research which shows that teachers do not always cover the official curriculum in the specified year and to learners’ poor achievement in international tests. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal from 2013 to 2016, the provincial department of education embarked on a systemic reform programme called Jika iMfundo in 1200 schools, which is focused on improving curriculum management and coverage. We interviewed 29 Heads of Department (who are also teachers) in fifteen schools who had participated in the Jika iMfundo programme for these three years, asking them about their experiences. The findings show that teachers experience tension between the fast pace required by the curriculum trackers and slow pace of learners and they believe that increasing pacing to cover the curriculum hampers the quality of the learning. Teachers also said that the curriculum coverage trackers do not account for different school contexts. We argue that while the programme has provided clear curriculum guidance to teachers who need it, it has not sufficiently acknowledged the huge variation in learners’ competence. Nor has it yet enabled teachers to develop the content knowledge and the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach learners who are not at the same grade level (although they are in the same classroom). Curriculum coverage is a necessary, but not sufficient intervention, unless there is also a focus on pedagogy and teaching at the right level. We recommend an intervention that enables teachers to identify individual learner’s existing learning gaps, and equips them to teach at the right level in order to provide learners with opportunities to develop foundational knowledge and skills to succeed in further education, rather than one whose primary focus is only curriculum coverage.

Introduction

The low achievement of South African learners is well-researched. Participation in international benchmarking tests show that learners are very close to the bottom of the achievement rankings in both mathematics and literacy (Spaull, 2013). International assessments indicate that South African learners perform much worse than learners from other middle to low income countries, in spite of large amounts of resources directed to previously disadvantaged schools since the dawn of democracy (Spaull, 2013). The recent data from the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) shows that 78 % of SA Grade 4 students cannot read for meaning (Mullis et al., 2017). This means that they could not locate and retrieve explicitly stated information or make straightforward inferences about events and reasons for actions given in a text. They will thus “never fully access the curriculum despite being promoted to higher grades” (van den Berg et al., 2016).

Schollar (2018) presents data from a range of mathematics assessments that show a similar trend, namely that 80 % of primary school learners are below the expected competency level for the grades in which they are enrolled. A review of the Annual National Assessments (ANA) data shows that learners’ mean score in mathematics declines from Grade 1 (where the mean score is 68 %) to Grade 9 where the mean score is just above 10 % (Simkins, 2013 cited by Schollar, 2018). Only 16 % of Grade 3 students in South Africa are performing at a Grade 3 level in mathematics (Spaull and Kotze, 2015). Thus the learning deficits ‘grow over time to the extent that they become insurmountable and preclude learners from following the curriculum at higher grades’ (Spaull, 2013, p. 8), although they may be automatically progressed to the next grade. The progression policy states that a child may only repeat one grade in a school phase,¹ and after that will be automatically progressed to the next grade.

In an attempt to improve learner achievement, there has been an increasing intervention by the state and other stakeholders to monitor curriculum coverage, to ensure that teachers are covering the curriculum and are providing their students with sufficient opportunities to learn. In this regard, Shalem and Hoadley (2009) note that “the state’s regulative role is to manage teachers’ time better – demanding more time on task from teachers, regulating curriculum coverage and standardizing assessment practices” (p. 125). The key contentious issue regarding systems that have strong external regulation of teachers’ work is that this may lessen teachers’ professional autonomy and may place them in the role of simply being ‘technicians’ who have to implement what they are told to do (Shalem et al., 2018).

In this paper, we engage with the teachers’ experiences of the strong curriculum pacing demands that the Jika iMfundo programme makes on teachers’ work and practice. We argue that a structured curriculum is necessary but not sufficient to improve learning in South African classrooms. Unless teachers also learn specific pedagogies and strategies to remediate the gaps in learners’ knowledge and skills, insisting on strong pacing and curriculum coverage is unlikely to be sufficient to help all children learn (Pritchett and Beatty, 2012). The data from this study indicates that teachers did not seem to have a range of strategies to teach learners who were not at the level of the curriculum.