Using the Capacity Approach to improve the sustainability of teacher inservice training 9 Occupational valued functioning #2: Being able to help students learn

A number of teachers discussed this topic at length as well as ranked it highly on questionnaires. As one teacher stated:

I want to see that my pupils understand me. If they don't, I feel as if I cheat people who I came teach. You know, this is my profession, so when I do it, I think it's good to see a good yield. If I don't see it, I feel bad. So in my career, I want to see that students understand what I teach them. Otherwise, if they fail, I feel bad (Peri-urban Male Teacher).

This quote demonstrates how ‘being able to help students learn’ can be motivated through a vocational and ethical injunction. At the urban school, another teacher commented:

You have to make sure every student understands and performs on the exams well. And that they understand what the teacher is teaching in class (Urban Female Teacher).

This extract also shows how there is a temporal element to this functioning, whereby immediate achievement is having students understand concepts in class (which was evidenced through classroom question and answer sessions and daily exercises); and the longer-term achievement is seen through students’ performance in exams. Unfortunately, it might prove difficult to convince teachers that national Standard 7 exam scores will improve due to EGR practices. However, immediate achievement in student understanding (through improved question and answer sessions, increased participation and improvements in formative assessments) is much more plausible.

When teachers were asked about constraints on ‘being able to help students learn’, the general discourse of ‘poor working conditions’ was apparent, with complaints pointing to a variety of constraining environmental conversion factors such as lack of teaching materials, textbooks and over-crowded classrooms. In addition to this, many teachers articulated a lack of confidence in their subjects, as they are often assigned subjects they do not know well, due to a lack of teachers at their schools. Teachers often contended with this constraint by following the textbook page by page, almost as if it were an instruction manual. It appeared that teachers were not trained to be creative with lessons or exercises, so when this was compounded by a lack of confidence or content knowledge, a very routinised, rote method of teaching was used. Thus, we can start to see how ‘being able to help students learn’ was constrained not only in a material sense through environmental conversion factors, but also through the social conversion factors of systems and structures that force teachers to contend with large classes and subjects they did not choose.

Given these constraints, designing EGR training to be sustained by teachers entails reducing constraint through addressing material environmental conversion factors. For example, the provision of requisite resources, such as levelled and decodable readers, as well as the materials needed to make teaching aids such as letter cards, words cards and teachers’ own read-aloud books. With regard to over-crowded classrooms, it is imperative that all EGR strategies introduced in training can be used in and applied to large classes (of over 100+). This also includes explicit instructions on how to group students in a class of 100 if it is necessary to the EGR strategy (such classroom management techniques should not be assumed), because otherwise teachers will think the strategy is not relevant to their large-class context.

With regard to teachers’ lack of confidence in subject knowledge, particularly in EGR instructional practices, EGR modules can offer a great deal of scaffolding through providing practical, explicit strategies