Teachers and principals' assessment of schools as professional learning communities in a district in the North-West Province of South Africa

A comparison of principals' and teachers' responses

Source: compiled by the authors

The effect size in the shared supportive leadership component is statistically significant (0.42 medium effect). For collective creativity and shared values and vision, the effect sizes were also statistically significant, but with small effects (0.23 and 0.20 respectively). This is an indication that teachers are more critical of the functioning of PLCs in schools, and this is a component that promotes debate and helps build continuous enquiry in schools. In a similar study by S.C. Thompson et al. (2004), principals, similar to “U2”, rated teachers higher in collective learning. As noted, team meetings were attended, and PLC objectives were discussed alongside teachers' expectations. The principal meets with learners and lets them know what to do. Principals brainstorm how certain concepts can be taught differently during meetings with teachers, and they use professional development sessions to bring people together.

Few respondents commented in each section; however, these comments provided some insight into the quantitative data to better understand the potential issues. The discussion focuses on the South African context since the data had to be interpreted in the context of the respondents. As shown in Table 2, 55% of the respondents “agreed” with the statements on all the core components, which was a good sign as it indicated that these schools were heading in the right direction. Moreover, respondents who “strongly agreed” and those who “agreed” with the statements on the core components of PLCs made up more than 80% of each component. PLCs have been linked to improved learner performance in schools. To some extent, it explains why the North-West province has been successful in the matric exams. According to the 2014 matric results, the NorthWest province was the second in the country (84.6%) and the district selected for this study scored more than 83% (Matshediso, 2015).

The positive attitude reflected by the “strongly agree” and even the matriculation results need some contextual perspectives. The Annual National Assessment (ANA) results for Grades 1 to 9 demonstrate a different situation for the district in which the research was conducted. The score of schools in the North-West Province in all the tests for Grades 1 to 9 is lower than the average of all nine provinces (Department of Basic Education, 2014). It is therefore important to reflect the statistical data against the qualitative comments in this project as well as related research in South Africa.

Table 2 above shows that, while 21% to 28% of the respondents “strongly agreed” with the statements on all the core components of PLCs, only 1% to 6% of the respondents “strongly disagreed”. Table 2 indicates that teachers are less positive about the supportive leadership in schools. The qualitative comments concur with these sentiments for example, that there must be more support from the governing body, and that there is not sufficient collaboration from the governing body. Five teachers reported that the principal made all the decisions and communicated to the rest of the staff during staff meetings without seeking the opinions of the teachers, stating that “democracy is still not fully practised” and that “key people decide on everything”. According to these teachers, some heads of departments (HoDs) did not meet regularly, and some did not do their jobs well as they also taught. A similar sentiment is also espoused by S.R. Naicker, and R. Mestry (2013) while J. Heystek (2014) indicated that principals do not always get the support of teachers. According to J. Heystek (2014), principals find it difficult to decide and also lack collaboration in changing underperforming schools.

It seemed as if the collective approach did not work well, because business owners and some parents did not attend parents' meetings, and some parents did not support their children. Most parents in township schools did not visit the school or listen to learners' problems. SGBs did not motivate parents and much work had been left in the hands of teachers and principals. Only teachers, and not all the stakeholders, were working together. Parents were not committed enough to teaching the children basic values parents expected the teachers to do it. Some teachers still worked individually with little collaboration. The findings support the views of other researchers, such as B.D. Bantwini (2012), stating that teacher commitment and professional conduct are a problem in many schools, specifically in rural and township schools. L. Ni et al. (2023) suggested that where there is isolation of teachers, Professional Development should be provided to encourage teacher collaboration and the development of their networks.

Even though most comments were positive, there was a perception that some learners were not living up to the school values, like respect for teachers. One teacher expressed that, “there is disrespect of educators by learners in some schools”, which indicates that all role players still do not have one common vision. The problems with collaboration expressed in the previous section are an indication that all role players are not fully committed to the visions of their schools.

The supportive conditions concerning the structures that focus on infrastructure and management structures were the one component that received the most negative responses (Table 1). This is understandable in the South African context, where many schools, specifically in rural areas (as in the North-West province), do not have sufficient facilities such as electricity and water. Basic equipment, for example, computers and books, are not readily available in many schools, hence the following comments were expected (Statistics South Africa, 2014). Respondents in some schools said that more computers and photocopiers were needed to enhance teaching and learning. There were no laboratories, libraries, whiteboards, or interactive boards in the classrooms and in some schools, the number of classrooms was limited. In some schools, technology was not readily available, while improvements to school facilities were needed in other schools.

Other means of communication should be developed to save time going to the principal's office. Parents were not supportive due to long distances to schools and illiteracy. R. Ahmeda and Y. Sayed (2009) indicate that these structural problems can be linked to leadership problems when decisions are made behind closed doors and communicated to others during staff meetings, which evoke teachers' frustration. The respondents were further of the opinion that complaints from teachers were not taken seriously or investigated. Some teachers could not use the Internet due to a lack of technological knowledge. Some parents did not even collect their children's progress report cards. While two schools complained about the non-existence of any good school building, many agreed that there should be professional development more than once a year.

While some teachers noted shared personal practice, although with limited or no feedback, others complained that too much work for teachers had left them with no time to share their practices.

Other problems listed by teachers and principals included a need to improve content teaching and the problem that teachers in rural areas transferred every year. As a result, learners have no teachers for up to three months at the beginning of the year. Two teachers also said that classrooms were overcrowded and that it “kills teachers' moral(e)”. Four teachers said they had not been given the required support but were only pressurised. The improved relationship with the area managers was appreciated.

As can be seen in Tables 4 and 5, statements B59 and B61 above, participants' positive responses were relatively lower than in other components. On the other hand, the negative responses were high (31.9% disagreed with statement B59). Although the opportunity to make recommendations to the SGB is not a physical structural problem, as finance for professional development, it was indicated that there are problems with interaction and people. If teachers cannot develop and do not have the opportunity or ability to influence the structures, it will certainly continue to cause problems for the teachers in their learning communities. Understandably, there is not sufficient technology available for teachers, since many of the schools do not have sufficient electricity or infrastructure for electronic equipment (for example, no safe place to store electronic equipment), and most of the time, these schools have no extra funding to purchase more or better technological equipment.

Although the data could be somewhat deprecated, no study of this nature has been conducted in the study region in South Africa yet. Equally important is the fact that the findings of the study are still very relevant to other research conducted in other parts of the world. M. Antinluoma et al. (2018) reached similar study conclusions. According to their study, most participating principals agreed that they use PLCs to influence both teacher-leadership and PLC members. Principals facilitated and provided the necessary PLC working conditions in their schools. In another study by M. Antinluoma et al. (2021) on the Practices of Professional Learning Communities, they used the same components, such as shared values and vision, shared supportive leadership, enabling structures and collaborative practices. These were the same structures used to evaluate principals' and teachers' practices of PLCs in their schools.

The findings of this study that teachers and principals highly rate their schools as PLCs, are also similar to those of J. Zhang et al. (2023). They concluded that shared and supportive leadership, collective learning and application and supportive conditions-structures significantly and positively affected the teachers' collective learning especially when it came to students' discipline. Another area worth mentioning is the high rating of collective learning and application component. A. Schmidtke (2023) determined that all participants noted that when they learn together, their learning increases as they share with both experience and young colleagues. They explained that Shared professional development experiences provided them with opportunities to talk about their learning with one another to promote higher levels of understanding and increased perspective. Participants in a study by A. Schmidtke (2023) reported an increase in collaboration that was meaningful and reinforced their feeling of trust in each other.

Conclusions

The study reemphasised that the core components for schools to establish PLCs are shared supportive leadership, collective creativity, shared values and vision, supportive conditions, and shared personal practice. It is the principal's role to monitor, guide, and facilitate this evolutionary process. The principal must support teams by continuously providing opportunities for growth by providing ongoing professional development related to the area of need. While the principals, SGB, HoDs, teachers, parents and other stakeholders continue to work on the problems that schools are facing in the case district in the Northwest Province of South Africa, it is time the Ministry of Education and the Department of Education re-examine its long-term strategy for school improvement in the district using the lenses of PLCs. In addition, to address problems like supportive conditions, other problems like learner drop-out, trust-building, accountability, continuous inquiry, genuine relationships, and collaboration among all the stakeholders should also be improved. Principals in this district should continue to develop the following capacities: personal mastery; mental models; shared vision; collaborative/shared learning; and systems thinking which is the cornerstone of change. Teachers' and principals' assessment of their schools is one major way by which can be re-examined the school's performance. Notably, principals rated their schools' performance as PLCs in all the core components higher than the teachers. Secondly, the findings revealed the level of the majority of these schools as PLCs and the disparity between female and male teachers in this district. This study has not only presented the findings of teachers' and principals' assessment of their schools but has also presented areas of schools' underperformance, as revealed especially by the supportive conditions (the structures component) and the comments of respondents. It is worthwhile to repeat this study in other provinces to see the similarities and differences and to come up with various ways the teachers can be supported to improve their performance.

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