Weathering the Storm Through School-Based Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

With the advent of COVID-19 and its control regulations, most schools, particularly in rural areas, suspended teaching and learning and had yet to make an immediate plan on how to continue with the academic programme. This revealed the failure of the South African education system to step up to different and unfamiliar territories of teaching and learning in order to continue with the academic program amidst a pandemic and beyond. Responding to the question: What are the experiences of teachers and school principals in implementing SBTPD in rural contexts to survive potential crises that disrupt the teaching and learning program? Embedded in the adult learning theory, the paper was underpinned by the interpretive qualitative approach and used a multiple case study as a mode of inquiry. This study generated data in two rural primary schools through focus group discussions (FGDs) and face-to-face interviews with teachers and school principals, respectively. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the researched schools did not have customised teacher development programmes tailored to the specific needs of their schools. The findings further revealed that there was a lack of intraschool and interschool collaborative cultures among the teachers. This paper concludes that SBTPD needs to be understood and conceptualized differently by all stakeholders if schools are to be able to withstand and survive beyond immediate crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Considering the findings, this paper recommends that schools initiate and design their own school-based teacher professional development programmes, tailor-made to the needs of the schools and teachers, to accommodate immediate crises and survive beyond unprecedented crises to ensure that the academic programme is not disrupted, and capacity building for school leaders to create a collaborative culture among teachers.