Background
South Peninsula High School is a secondary school in Diep River, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It has about 1000 learners on roll. Statistics about the school were taken from the Western Cape Education Department website; click on the image below.
The school opened in 1950.
What’s happened so far…
We met Berenice on 19th November 2014. We arrived at South Peninsula High School just before 10:30. Berenice took us to a small meeting room where we discussed her involvement in the project. Although she had mentioned the project to some of her colleagues none of them joined us but she said that she would talk to them again and perhaps some of the younger ones would still join.
Berenice taught an ordinary lesson on adding and subtracting integers on 2nd March, to her Grade 8 class of 37 learners. We took observation notes and produced a report on the lesson. Berenice was given the report and invited to comment, but it seems she was happy with the report.
Adnaan joined the project after this and we have not yet observed an ordinary lesson.
First research lesson
Both teachers wanted to teach a lesson on positive and negative numbers in context for the research lesson. We used one of the lessons from the Mathematics Assessment Project, which requires learners to find the difference between temperatures for different cities in the USA.
For both these lessons, we produced research reports which we have shared with the teachers.
Second research lesson
When we asked Berenice and Adnaan what they would like to do for their second research lesson, they told us that their classes were beginning work on equations. We suggested a MAP lesson on matching equations to descriptions. We met for a planning meeting and went through the lesson: Berenice suggested a few changes; mainly she said that she did not want blank cards apart from one pair that the learners could use to make up their own matches. Both teachers taught the lesson on 25th May.
Third research lesson
Berenice and Adnaan had seen the quadrilaterals lesson at the second cluster meeting and both decided they would like to teach it with their Grade 8 classes. We visited them to plan the lesson and then they both taught it on 24th August. Berenice did a follow-up lesson the following day but we did not observe this.
Finishing off
We asked Berenice and Adnaan if they would like us to prepare a video montage for the learners and to come to school to show it to them. They said they would like us to do one for both classes. We prepared this and went in to show it to the two classes on 20th November. We also gave each of the learners a pack of NikNaks.