Help more South African children achieve in Maths

Term 2 is well underway at the two schools supported by the Project "Help more South African children achieve in Maths.” It was a successful Term 1 for the schools supported by this project, both St Mary’s Primary and Mzamomhle Primary have completed 80% of their Maths lessons. At the beginning of the term we had our termly PLC (Professional Learning Community) at St Mary’s Primary. PLCs are workshops held with groups of educators and the school management to review the real-time data (per learner, per question feedback data) they receive from our organisation. PLCs facilitates data informed decisions that leads to change in Maths teaching and ultimately improves Maths results.

PLCs are usually facilitated by one of our curriculum specialists, but this PLC was a bit different from previous PLCs. According to our facilitator her experience at this specific PLC was heartening, “It was very encouraging to see that through the mentoring of PLCs the past few years educators have reached a level of sustainability.”

The head of Maths and her team prepared a well-planned session by themselves with no intervention from our curriculum specialist. Her presentation was not needed as educators had their questions and formatted data ready to review the assessment results. They discussed the questions which learners struggled with and looked at the various reasons. They then planned an intervention strategy to implement across all grades for the following few weeks as a result of their findings. Teachers are taking greater ownership of the project and of their Maths teaching.

Thanks to your generous donations, this project "Help more South African children achieve in Maths” is able to mentor and support 23 teachers to improve their quality of their Maths teaching. In turn this enables then to provide a better for 1, 062 learners, making their big dreams a possibility.