This paper draws from a broad study that explored mathematics teachers' engagement with textbooks within the Lesson Study context. In the current paper, we report on teachers' use of mathematics textbook activities to inform their instructional decisions during collaborative lesson planning of numeric and geometric patterns. The study took place…

Background: Despite large-scale interventions aimed at developing literacy skills, children's reading competence levels in South Africa continue to remain an area of concern. In addition, the need to prepare learners for the increased demands of a fast-changing world of learning and working is gaining attention in educational policy and practice.…

This study aims to investigate the perspectives of primary school teachers in South Africa, who participated in a "Lesson Study" (LS) project, on this professional development process and about their professional learning. The study followed a mixed approach, with data collected through a questionnaire, followed up by interviews. A novel…

Technology education in South Africa provides learners with the opportunity to, inter alia, solve problems by applying creative skills using authentic contexts that are embedded in real-life situations. Effective lesson planning is rather imperative in exploiting this opportunity. The design process is considered to be the backbone of teaching…

South Africa's esteem is low with regard to current learner achievement in mathematics. Results from international studies, such as TIMMS and SACMEQ, continuously indicate that South African learners perform below international benchmarks in mathematics. Research and evaluation studies assert that teacher practices and poor early mathematics…

This study explored the relationship between teachers' content knowledge and their pedagogical skills, and reports on that relationship in the teaching of Assembly Drawing (AD) in a South African context. Given that Engineering Graphics Design (EGD) learners perform poorly in the AD section of the matriculation examination, we need to understand…

The current study seeks to examine how teachers plan teaching sequences to teach chemical bonding in the senior secondary phase of schooling. The study employs a learning demand tool as interpretive framework. A mixed method was used to guide the collection of data. Data were collected through a survey instrument with 227 practising physical…