Establishing Professional Communities of Practice to Enhance Teacher Development in Technical Schools

Technical education with its diverse forms of procedural knowledge is becoming more and more important today, as it prepares learners for various trades and crafts involving various practical activities. However, these diverse forms of procedural knowledge are bound together in complex patterns and are situated in broader economic and social changes. In South Africa the provisioning of quality education remains a goal of the post-apartheid government with the education expenditure accounting for approximately 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 98.8% of children aged seven to fourteen enrolled in schools. Inequality reduction and poverty eradication has long been the cornerstone of South Africa’s development policy, however, in Limpopo; in the context of mining and development youth are considered to be economically inactive and residents surviving under the Upper Bound Poverty Line (UBPL) with scant opportunities for employment. The matriculation results in the Limpopo over the last six years show uneven performance against the national average with evidence that the province has been struggling to meet or surpass the national 70% average matriculation pass rate mark since 2014, with results further dropping by 3.4% in 2015. In order to engage with this multiplicity of challenges in the teaching profession, we would like to propose the development of communities of practice (CoPs). This work focuses on the efficacy of CoPs in terms of developing teachers’ subject knowledge, technological pedagogical skills and behavioral intention to share best practices on pedagogical issues. Therefore, the main focus of this systematic review is to critically analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of CoPs in teacher professional development in technical subjects. It also sought to uncover the nature of practices used in teacher CoPs to enhance school learning. The study used a combination of systematic review and meta-analysis, following the PRISMA approach. Implications and recommendations for CoPs are teased out for teacher professional development in technical subjects in South Africa and the developing world.