lesson plan challenges faced by Botswana primary school teachers


Hello everyoneπŸ™‹πŸ’—  hope this latest installment finds you in good health. I felt i should for this blog post share with you an interesting issue on challenges of lesson planning faced by teachers and in particular elementary teachers in Botswana schools which might needlessly be relative to other contexts. It is something i previously did for my post graduate work pursuing my MEd. in Social Studies education. Feel free to read through and engage below.πŸ™†πŸ™†
  The first problem that concerns lesson planning is that supervisors seem to have different understandings of what to include and omit in preparation books. The problem emanates from the fact that members of the school management team as supervisors are traditionally from various schools, clusters, inspectorates and regions promoted on transfer as such they bring with them varied expectations on lesson planning. It is an unfortunate scenario because one would expect them to be oriented on school culture and practices congruent to policy requirements. As an example, some supervisors would append their signatures on lesson plans that may show activities in listed form like “group work” whereas another supervisor within the same institution would not do such dismissing the plan as vague and skeletal demanding an extension to say “group work on finding the causes of…” Needless to say teachers tend to like the former in the sense that it is short and hate the latter because it creates more writing.
  Unlike the old method of daily planning and evaluation, the status quo is such that teachers plan for the entire week and get to evaluate their teaching at the end of the week, a time where most of what transpired during the lessons may have been forgotten rendering such evaluation  as guess work and less meaningful in offering insight. This arrangement defeats the purpose of lesson evaluation more so that teachers have to rely on memory when trying to make connections between lessons. If this evaluation was done daily and recorded it would be easier for teachers and learners to make connections between the previous lesson and the current one.
  Changes in attitudes and feelings are valuable and legitimate educational aims yet these are very difficult to state and measure in behavioral terms pointing the challenge that teachers face when planning for lessons with objectives that require change in attitudes and behavior. This challenge is witnessed in subjects which advocate for concepts like civic education and multiculturalism which in the case of primary education are social studies, cultural studies, religious and moral education and Setswana. The challenge does not end here, it even extends to testing whether such objectives have been met because criterion referenced testing adopted for assessment by the education system is not suitable to measure these intended learning outcomes. For example, learners may be expected to show appreciation of their culture by a specific objective and it will be near impossible to check if they indeed appreciate their culture using multiple choice questions which are the alpha and omega of testing at elementary levels of education in Botswana.
  It is unfortunate to state here that among the challenges that engulf lesson planning in schools, lower primary teachers happen to be the root cause of the problem even though there are other elements to the challenge. It is the view of this paper that lower primary school learners graduate into upper classes with a rather shaky foundation in terms of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The expectation is that they should leave lower primary classes with a mastery of these skills, however the situation on the ground is the exact opposite. Upper primary class teachers therefore find it difficult to plan challenging activities for their learners and instead revert to teacher dominated teaching with little input from learners. Lesson plans are consequently a prerogative of the teacher meaning that learners do not take responsibility for their learning. Teachers thus have a challenge of using higher cognitive methods of teaching and find solace in low cognitive approaches because the former advocates for learner engagement using the previously mentioned skills whereas the latter reinforces rote learning which is against pragmatic and democratic education found within our education policies. It is dismaying that the section of activities in preparation books is filled with low cognitive tasks that are not in tandem with what the syllabus recommends under the methods of teaching.
  Although teachers have been blamed for being the root cause of the use of lower thinking skills above, part of the problem rests with the syllabus itself. A careful analysis of the objectives listed therein reveals that our educational ends are mainly within the cohort of low level thinking thus forcing teachers to use low level thinking approaches and activities when developing lesson plans. The Blooms Taxonomy which is a guide to behavioral objectives reveals that low level instructional objectives and teaching techniques require learners to merely recall, remember and memorize facts which is an antithesis of educational aims and objectives.
  Lastly, teachers are faced with an examination oriented syllabus which is to be finished within a stipulated time to test whether learners have grasped the taught concepts. School managers are being reprimanded with letters regarding low achievement by their superiors and they in turn place pressure on teachers to finish the syllabus quickly so that they do revision for tests. Consequently teachers are forced to rush over the instructional objectives and sometimes combining two or three separate leaning objectives in a single lesson. For example, a standard seven social studies lesson may incorporate an objective on continents of the world, lines of latitudes and longitudes, major continental physical features, world climatic regions and calculating time using longitudes. This fabrication is done merely to finish the syllabus and create more time for revision forgetting that it leads to confusing learners precipitating failure. Thanks for reading throughπŸ™

 with inspiration from
Boikhutso, K. (2010). The theory into practice dilemma: Lesson planning challenges facing           Botswana student teachers. Improving Schools, 13 (3), 205-220. doi: 10.1177/1365480210385668

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