You will be providing young people with opportunities to activate critical thinking and reasoning skills through results-driven, active-learning pedagogies, such as Project-Based Learning. This learner-centred learning methodology will bring your learners and the curriculum closer together by keeping them actively involved through self-teaching elements. In this way, you will move into the role of a facilitator rather than the source of all knowledge. Learners will work on relevant, extended projects that enable real learning for the real-world. These projects, designed to give them authentic, practical life situations based on the CAPS curriculum, leave little room for you to teach in the traditional way. Instead, they create a way for you to design and manage the learning activities. Your changing role will ensure that learners are prepared for life after school. This means that you will find exciting ways to design stimulating learning experiences. You will be creative and equip your learners with appropriate tools they need to solve their problems and develop their projects, and you will ensure that your classroom is a positive learning space.
Teachers
Imagine a classroom where every learner is engaged in their learning and able to study with curiosity and confidence
- thus becoming equipped to study further, be employed and start an enterprise.
You stand in the perfect position to bring about positive change to create a skilled nation that will create a flourishing tomorrow.
Now, more than ever, we need to re-imagine the way we provide education to the young growing minds of South Africa
We know you work tirelessly to prepare lessons by studying textbooks and looking at all possible means to equip your learners with everything they need to know. In the classroom you are seen as the source of all knowledge, presenting information and answering questions. The time has come to transform teaching away from a one-way transmission, from you to the learner, to a give-and-take exchange where you create a learning environment rather than a teaching environment. In a learning environment, the focus is less on absorbing information and knowledge, and more on enabling learners to actively engage in their learning process.
All of this changes the culture of the classroom to better align with the greater outcome of education: that 100% of learners complete school, able to carry themselves through life and beyond, and that addresses our one compelling goal, to reduce youth unemployment in our country. When learners are actively engaged in these learning processes it enables them to gain the following 21st Century Competencies that are essential for their future success:
CHARACTER: Citizenship, curiosity and resilience- THINKING: Creativity, critical thinking and reasoning
- CONNECTION: Collaboration, communication and empathy
As a result of being fully engaged in real-world and authentic learning, these young people will be aware of their role as citizens, and they will be curious and resilient. Working on real-world issues they will become agile, develop creative thinking, good communication skills and the ability to solve real-world problems. These attributes and skills will prepare learners to be actively engaged in their own futures and they will leave school able to become meaningfully engaged in the South African society and economy and make their own way in this ever-changing world. They will develop agency and take responsibility for their own success story, truly believing: “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me!”
You might want to know what this means in practical terms. You could start finding answers to this by asking yourself some questions:
- Considering my current teaching methods, would I enjoy being a learner in my class?
- Are there ways for me to invite new, creative methods of teaching into my classroom to broaden the knowledge and perspective of my learners?
- How can I prioritise fostering a learner-centred approach, with learners inquiring and not merely listening?
- How can I ensure that my learners have opportunities to be creative?
- How can I model good citizenship in the way I connect with learners in the classroom?
- How can my learners be allowed to display their learning in different ways?
- In what ways can my learners document and reflect on their learning?
- What can I do to get my learners to exchange ideas and collaborate with others?
- How can my learners display and track their progress?
We need YOU!
We invite YOU to work with us to help develop and produce engaged and motivated youth by driving the use of active learning in the classroom. We invite YOU to help us foster future nation-builders and help solve the problem of unemployment through new ways of teaching that dissolves fixed mindsets and makes way for solution-seeking and growth mindsets. Through working together, we can help ensure that learners are better prepared for life after school, whether their future plans include studying further, being employed in the workplace or establishing their own enterprises
Download ProspectusMr Ian le Roux’s inspirational story
Ian discovered our active learning methods at E3’s first conference in the Western Cape and instantly recognised the potential it offered. He immediately applied what he had learned about the E3 theories and ideas around student-centred learning into his classroom. He encouraged his Grade 10 Business Studies learners to come up with creative songs, poems or other productions. He assigned his Grade 11 learners with the task of making products out of recycled materials. Ian noticed a marked improvement in his students’ creative thinking and problem-solving skills and that this led to a significant change in their academic achievements. These changes led to Ian receiving the National Teachers Award (NTA) in Excellence in secondary school teaching.
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