Teaching Teachers to Teach Physics to High School Learners

Abstract

To address the past inadequacies of high school teacher education in South Africa a course was taught to equip teachers with a basic understanding of Physics. This work discusses measures implemented in this module to increase cohort pass rates from around 40% to over 80%. The measures implemented include Problems Based Learning (PBL), technological learning (TL) and group learning (GL). This increased pass rate has a significant impact on throughput and also a far-wider reaching impact - that of improving the quality of education at high school level. In this work, we also highlight the difficulties faced by the students who are all in full-time employment with language barriers consequent of English being a second language. The methods employed while lecturing this cohort have been adopted by the cohort in their own classrooms with significant results noted. The study employs a mixed modal approach to quantify all data with qualitative responses.