Prof Lizette de Jager presented a keynote address titled ‘Building bridges: adapting to the changing landscape of teacher development’ at a high-level event of the South African-Finnish Partnership in Early Childhood Development and Teacher Training, which was hosted by the Finnish Ministry of Education at the Future Africa Campus, University of Pretoria, on 12 October 2022.

Through teacher development, teachers are expected to become capable of engaging with and transforming the world around them and touching and shaping their students’ lives, which is an enormous responsibility. In her address, Prof Lizette de Jager supported Wally Morrow’s view that the fundamental aim of teaching is to prepare the child to function in the modern world (a world of technology and the 4th IR), which she suggested may be the reason for the strong focus on technology integration in teacher development, and also in schooling. Further to this, the fundamental aim of teaching particular lessons is not to teach children the content of the subject, but to teach them how to learn and how to make links about content.

Prof De Jager mentioned that we are often addicted to content, especially in a digital/online learning space, probably because of habit—it is what we know—but also because of technology. We deliver knowledge transfer pedagogy on Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, etc and tend to forget that learners need to DO things to learn. We almost always deliver too much content, typically in the 80%/10%/10% format, where 80% is content (videos, audio recordings, images and texts), 10% is activity (MCQ, quizzes, forms, worksheets), and 10% is feedback (automated or responsive feedback on activities). This is bad for learners, and bad for us. In this scenario learners are passive, there is a cognitive overload, and they learn little. To help reduce content overload, Prof De Jager suggested using the Minimal Viable Content (MVC) approach to designing content that will significantly improve outcomes while reducing design costs and saving time.

In the MVC approach, we aim for 10%/80%/10% format, where 10% is content, 80% is activity, and 10% is feedback, thus creating learning experiences that are optimised for real, increased skills and knowledge development through more active and immersive learning. Such learning is more likely to be active and participatory, to engage learners, deliver personalised and adaptive learning experiences, and effectively manage learners’ cognitive overload. Ideally, teachers themselves need to be excellent and possess the above-mentioned skills. Stakeholders should focus all their attention and spending on building a strong foundation, with teachers who have excellent subject knowledge, strong pedagogical knowledge and the ability to teach learners in a way they can understand.

Prof De Jager emphasised that if we are serious about changing education for all, we need those excellent teachers in our weakest schools, which are often our rural schools. How could we achieve this? By moving from the individual to the collective. It is in the collective where the magic happens, where real changes occur. She suggested that this can be achieved through a collective mentoring project, a mutual mentoring, where teachers mentor teachers at the schools where our learners need it the most. A mutual mentoring project requires serious consideration in order to harness the existing experience and expertise in our schools, namely teachers, and not by adding more content to the curriculum. This will require change in mind, attitude and practice.

An effective method for change is one that looks for indigenous sources of change. Prof De Jager claims that there are people in our institution or school or group who are already doing things in a radically better way. She suggests bringing these isolated success strategies of the so-called positive deviants into the mainstream so that they will not be overlooked. In this way we can intentionally change in ways that increase our capacity to bring about the just and liberated world we long for. We therefore need to look at our curriculum and ask: Will this enable our students to take the country forward? Can they be critical citizens?

When answering the multi-tiered questions about teacher development and schooling, an awareness of the tensions that exist may help with the reimagining and refocusing of teacher development. Tensions exist between what it is to teach, and the roles and responsibilities we ascribe to those employed as teachers. We should reconsider the burden placed on teachers as they are our most precious resource.

Prof De Jager is an associate professor in English Education (literature, language and methodology) in the Department of Humanities Education, Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria. She is a Fulbright scholar for SETI (2006) and a Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) fellow (2019). She serves on the HELTASA Coordinating Council and the National Framework for Enhancing Academics as University Teachers (NFfEAUT), both for the project National University Teaching Awards (NUTA). Her research interests, publications, and supervision are in the field of English education, pragmatics, instructional design and pedagogy, multilingualism and translanguaging, and technology integration in language teaching.