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It is firmly believed at the Maths Centre that
every innovation within a school challenges the whole school regardless
of the focus of intervention: subject based or school-development focused.
In order to maximise effectiveness for teaching and learning programmes,
while working intensively with the facilitation and cluster workshops programme
in the participating schools, the whole staff is drawn in at one time or
another as no classroom operates independent of the rest of the school.
The whole staff is supported to understand the rationale of Maths Centre
developmental work and their role in taking the developments further as
a whole school.
Maths Centre recognises and endorses teacher development: Knowledge - Skills
- Values - Attitudes as the key to influencing the speed of the change process.
Self-sustaining change can only result if the whole school as an organisation
brings together the development strategy, which may be influenced by several
role players. 
- The school
- Unions and SGBs
- Parents and the Community
- The Department of Education
- Development organisations providing INSET
The factors that may influence learner's received experience of learning,
unique capacity to construct knowledge and hence the effectiveness of such
experiences, are located within:
- the school as a whole organisation - its functions and mechanisms for curriculum
delivery;
- classroom as the learner's daily contact environment within which the teacher
support mechanisms such as parental partnership, department input and
INSET NGOs are evidently put into practice
There are many factors; sometimes overlapping - be it within the mathematics
classroom; any other subject or indeed the whole school. These are powerful
factors. It is also recognised that the damage inflicted by apartheid institutions
goes very deep and must be undone speedily and systematically before the
process of transformation can begin to have any meaning in terms of enhancement
of achievement.
However, Maths Centre believes that the teacher is the key to making most
influences in a learner's life. If the teacher development be enabling and
empowering; if the teacher be supported with the best possible INSET and
resources - learners will most certainly begin to succeed.
Indeed we believe that teachers can initiate and sustain whole school developments. |
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StaffZone
