The Practice of Improvement Getting from Here to There Panel discussion – 28 Sept 2017 - RESEP

Reflecting on SA: 1994-2017 The Minister of Basic Education of Ganduli - a fictitious country just coming out of apartheid - asks you for advice based on our experience as a country: What did we do right in SA post-apartheid? (max 1 things) What did we do wrong in SA post-apartheid? (max 1 things)

“In its simplest form, the practice of large-scale improvement is the mobilization of knowledge, skill, incentives, resources and capacities within schools and school systems to increase student learning. Strictly speaking, the practice of improvement is the sharing of a set of proven practices and their collective deployment for a common end.” - Richard Elmore 2002 ‘Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Accountability” (1) In your view which is these (1 or 2) is the leading candidate / best explanation for why SA learning outcomes improved between 2002 and 2015? (2)… worst candidate / worst explanation for why SA learning outcomes improved between 2002 and 2015?

Learning to read in South Africa prePIRLS 2011

“We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us; we already know more than we need to do that; and whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.” - Ronald Edmonds Can we successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us? If not, is it because: their schooling is not really of interest to us? we do not actually know ‘more than we need to’ how to do it? or of how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far? (do we care enough?)

“As a country how do we get from where we are now in education to where we need to be by 2030?”

June/July 2017 Who? Graduate/post-graduate students in education departments Lecturers / Professors in education departments Government officials NGO M&E employees Where? Stellenbosch University How to stay updated on course? Email silker@sun.ac.za

“Schools, as organisations, aren’t designed as places where people are expected to engage in sustained improvement of their practice, where they are supported in this improvement, or where they are expected to subject their practice to the scrutiny of peers or the discipline of evaluations based on student achievement” -Elmore 2002 ‘Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Accountability”