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www.thevillagenews.co.za
26 February 2020
Local’s maths project adds up to success throughout the province. This was followed by requests from the North West Education Department for all its schools and from Gauteng for 1 000 schools.
Writer & photographer Elaine Davie
H
ermanus will soon be represented on the international stage in Paris when resident Tracey Butchart and two of her associates do a presentation on their ground-breaking Reflective Learning maths project. The presentation will be given during Mobile Learning Week (MLW), the United Nations’ flagship event on digital technologies in education. This event has been organised by UNESCO for the past eight years. The 2020 conference will take place in Paris during the first week of March under the theme Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion. MLW 2020 will provide a global platform to demonstrate promising applications and practices that leverage AI to advance inclusion and equity in education and to ensure that the AI revolution will not further widen digital divides, gender gaps and inequalities in access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. In low-income countries, only 44 students in the poorest quintile complete primary school for every 100 in the richest. Of the 44 students, only 23 complete lower secondary and 11 complete upper secondary school. “The disparities in access to quality learning opportunities further exacerbate the income divide in many societies, presenting a multigenerational vicious cycle of learning poverty and financial poverty,” says UNESCO. These are exactly the problems Tracey’s Reflective Learning programme is addressing, with remarkable success. Our own Minister of Basic Education recently invited Tracey to give a presentation to all the provincial Education MECs and Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal have both already indicated they would like to implement the programme. Expressions of interest have also been received from the Indian Government. Tracey is over the moon about this invitation to attend the Paris conference. “Apart from the thrill of giving our own presentation, it will be a wonderful opportunity to attend some of the other stimulating inter-
Tracey began to feel as if the project was running away with her: she was writing all the materials herself and although teachers were taught how to use them, few were doing so effectively. But just as she was beginning to feel thoroughly disillusioned, she was approached by an Mpumalanga NGO, Uplands Outreach, in 2012. Like Penryn, Uplands is a private school in the Lowveld which reaches out to poorer schools to assist with teacher upskilling and learner enrichment programmes.
Tracey Butchart in her home study in Hermanus. national workshops and discussion groups,” she says. Tracey believes that any child can master maths. The key is to focus on learning, rather than teaching – there is a difference. Another cornerstone concept is that maths, unlike most other subjects, is incremental in structure. If there is no solid foundation, the building will collapse. Tracey’s life-long journey as a maths and science teacher has also been incremental, leading her step by step to the development of a very simple, yet ground-breaking approach to education and maths in particular. She had wanted to teach since she was a child, but when she arrived for her first job, expecting to teach biology, she was told that the school’s real need was for a maths and science teacher, take it or leave. She took it… never anticipating the exciting journey of discovery that would lie ahead. Fortunately, she was mentored by a senior teacher, later long-term Hermanus resident, Mary-Ann Evenhuis who encouraged her to explore creative, if unconventional ways of teaching science. However, she also noticed that in the maths department, the strugglers were receiving short shrift. The teachers tended to focus on the star pupils and the rest were left to flounder on until they dropped out of maths altogether. These were the children who challenged her. After marrying husband, Duncan (the well-known environmental-
ist, author and artist), the couple moved to Nelspruit in Mpumalanga, where Tracey was appointed as the first high school teacher at Penryn College, a newly-established private school between Nelspruit and White River where she took on the portfolio of maths, science, design and technology in 1994. When the outcomes-based curriculum was introduced in 2005, the headmaster, Roger Cameron challenged Tracey to give some thought to designing a formative assessment system in the classroom which placed the focus on learners. They would be able to assess for themselves what they knew, what they didn’t know and what they needed to know, and to navigate a teacher-guided pathway to achieve the best possible results. This concept so excited Tracey that she found a computer programmer who would be able to digitalise the tools she was writing. After a presentation on her science assessment programme at an IEB conference, 32 schools signed up to buy the software, and requests began streaming in for similar programmes for maths, accounting and English. By this time the work had begun to take over her life and she left Penryn to focus exclusively on developing assessment tools for the Foundation, Intermediate and Senior educational phases. She was invited to give a presentation at a conference organised by the Western Cape Education Department which indicated that it would like to introduce her system
In Annual National Assessments (ANAs) for maths, Grade 9 learners in Mpumalanga schools had achieved an average of 9%! Tracey had always felt chilcren like this would benefit from a more personalised approach to learning maths, so when Uplands asked her to design an intervention for them, she jumped at the opportunity. Fifty Grade 9 learners were selected to undergo a baseline diagnostic assessment. These were the 'best' maths students in their respective schools and had indicated that they wanted to continue with maths in Grade 10. The assessment results were shocking, yielding a 26% average. No pupil achieved more than 47% or was anywhere near Grade 9 level; most were somewhere between Grades 3 and 6 (five were even lower). Tracey asked to have these learners every Saturday morning for catch-up lessons. Her aim was to move away completely from rote learning to a state where the children could become independent and self-sustaining, capable of logical thinking and problem-solving. After working with them on Saturday mornings for one year, they had caught up by 4 to 6 grade levels and were able to continue with the regular Uplands programme until they wrote matric three year later. There had been a 98% retention rate over three years and 97% attendance. Two thirds achieved Bachelor passes, 10% achieved distinctions in maths (one was among the province’s top 10 achievers), all passed at diploma level and all achieved
three times the national average in maths. Most were granted university bursaries and went on to study pharmacy, medicine, law. Twelve chose education and, most exciting of all for Tracey, six have become specialist maths teachers. Since moving to Hermanus in 2014 her work on maths assessment and learning has gone into orbit. Along with LightSwitch, a tech company in Cape Town, she founded Reflective Learning which uses sophisticated algorithms to enable learners to track back to the source of their maths problems. Self-administered diagnostics measure their functional grade level in maths, rather than which grade they are actually in. Customised learning materials then enable individuals to progress from their functional grade level to their actual grade level, shoring up the foundations. In particular, she has been working with 2 000 learners in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape who are being supported by the Telkom Foundation and are showing greatly improved results. “The transformative assessment process is built around the 81 key mathematical concepts each child has to learn incrementally from Foundation Phase to Grade 9”, she explains. “If you can’t count, you can’t add, and if you can’t add, you can’t multiply and so on… If you miss out on something along the way, you will simply fall further and further behind.” Accordingly, she has written online concept-building materials personalised for each learner, based on their diagnostic results for each of the 81 maths concepts from Foundation Phase to Grade 9. Now working towards a doctorate, Tracey estimates that she has already written two thirds of the length of the Bible and is nowhere close to the finish line. With the maths programme almost completed, science is well on its way, to be followed by English next. In terms of world-wide educational development, Hermanus-based Tracey Butchart is up there with the leaders. And no country needs her skills more than ours. Further information is available on www.reflectivelearning.co.za or YouTube https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tB9947ye3I0&t=4s
