South Africa’s education system has long been plagued by poor outcomes and teachers are often blamed for issues such as declining matric results, low rankings in comparative international tests, below-average reading and comprehension scores and high dropout rates. A new initiative, however, builds on the success of programmes offering extended student teacher internships and aims to make a positive impact on the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) field.
The Teacher Internship Collaboration South Africa (TICZA) is a multi-stakeholder partnership with support from government departments, trade unions, non-profits, universities, and implementers that was formally launched in 2021. Its stakeholders invest in extended student teacher internships for distance ITE students, as an attractive auxiliary option for student teacher training.
This was the focus of a webinar held on 29 September 2022 and facilitated by Trialogue, a responsible business consultancy. The webinar featured discussions on the importance of teacher internships, the origins of TICZA, and the deliberate process of adopting and implementing a collective impact approach. Trialogue’s Managing Director Nick Rockey chaired the session and inputs were provided by four panellists: Zahraa McDonald, Researcher at JET Education Services (JET); Professor Sarah Gravett, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg (UJ); John Gilmour, Chairperson, Global Teachers Institute (GTI); and Makano Morojele, Corporate Reform: Education, Absa.
Understanding the importance of student teacher internships
TICZA was initiated by Trialogue, JET, GTI and the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Bridge Innovation has since joined as a convening partner. TICZA was co-founded on the premise that student teachers who are placed and mentored within a school environment whilst completing their distance education studies, will become high quality teachers and are likely to remain in the teaching profession for longer.
By enabling the exploration of different internship models and gathering data on the impact of these, TICZA hopes to support the many NPOs and universities providing student teacher internships. TICZA aims to demonstrate the value of this approach and to support efforts to achieve scale and systemic adoption.
Student teacher internships form a core component of education curricula internationally and enable trainees to gain first-hand experience in areas from instructional techniques to lesson planning, effective communication, subject command, and resource management. As John Gilmour of GTI explained, “The opportunity of an internship gives those teachers the deep experience of understanding the rhythms, rituals, routines and just the regular day-to-day running of the school. The learning in your first year at a school is deep.”
Referring to new teachers who are not well-equipped for the transition into employment and the challenges of working in often under-resourced settings, Gilmour added, “The dropout rate of people coming straight out of university, into a school, then quickly looking for alternative ways to earn a living, is too high.”
TICZA’s main aim is to achieve systemic change in ITE through demonstrating the value and impact of student teacher internships. Stakeholders believe that if widely implemented, this change can lead to a new generation of high-quality, effective teachers for South African public schools. At present, aspiring teachers spend an average less than six months in classrooms during a four-year degree course, and existing student teacher internships vary considerably in length and intensity.
Taking a collective action approach
Trialogue MD Nick Rockey explained that there are numerous organisations already working to bring about change in the education sector. Many of these however, “are operating in isolation but have very similar agendas”. Major systemic change remains elusive and government departments simply do not have the capacity to engage with the numerous initiatives with solutions that are “difficult to scale or systematise”.
TICZA’s convenors therefore decided early on to adopt a collective impact approach, based on a methodology developed by John Kania and Mark Kramer and originally published in a 2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The collective impact model is defined by five key organisational features, all of which have been embedded in TICZA’s work:
- A common agenda, debated and defined by a wide range of stakeholders involved in ITE.
- Tools for shared measurement, developed from a co-created theory of change (TOC) and accompanying monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework.
- Implementing mutually reinforcing activities, including members repositioning their own organisations and programmes to support the common agenda.
- Continuous communication and engagement, which is not a small task given the diversity and numbers of members, and with up to fifty participants at Steering Committee meetings.
- A structure providing backbone support, as represented by the convenors as well as a staff appointment specifically to support the TICZA process.
Researcher Zahraa McDonald of JET also described how TICZA has set up four distinct work streams to focus its activities and outputs: the establishment of platforms for collaboration, including communities of practice and a working group; knowledge production; sector capacity development, focusing on supporting emerging researchers; and tools and resource development. What TICZA does not do, McDonald explained, is prescribe the adoption of any specific student teacher internship model.
Achievements and challenges to date
Webinar participants highlighted a number of TICZA’s successes thus far as it nears the end of its second year of operations. These include conducting a sector scoping study, a literature review and the publication of Training Better Teachers: An Implementation Brief for Improving Practice-Based Initial Teacher Education. The development of the TOC and M&E framework have enabled data collection, results tracking and reporting across organisations. Reflecting on her own department’s participation, Professor Sarah Gravett confirmed, “We are experiencing that TICZA is bringing together different parties involved in internships and that enables learning from each other [and] thinking together.” She added that she looked forward to TICZA taking on an even stronger role in the future, particularly in the area of thought leadership.
The TICZA process and its collective impact approach have not been without challenges. As described by Rockey, these have included the need for stakeholders to source additional indirect funding, as well as the substantial amounts of time and effort required to build and maintain relationships and communication, throughout what has been an unfamiliar process for many. At times the organisations involved are pushed to revise their own strategies and even compromise their direct interests, on behalf of the common agenda. With long-term systemic change as TICZA’s end goal, its immediate results have at times felt diluted and less apparent than short-term wins.
Panelist Makano Morojele of Absa – a TICZA funder – agreed that while it can be “tempting and easy to say, [Lets’] create a common agenda or work towards a common goal’, in practice, those who have been in the trenches of really connecting, coordinating, and pulling the reins will tell you that it’s not as easy as it looks.”
Despite these challenges, TICZA remains on track to deliver on its five-year workplan, with an ambitious range of activities and outputs planned leading up to 2025 – underpinned by the strong foundation created thus far. And as Morojele reminded webinar participants, “No single entity can solve complex social issues” and therefore the importance of aiming for collective impact as TICZA has done “cannot be over-emphasised.”
Watch a recording of the webinar here:
More resources
- Learn more about teacher internships in South Africa from the TICZA Implementation Brief here: https://www.jet.org.za/clearinghouse/projects/teacher-internship-collaboration-south-africa-ticza/resources
- Hear about TICZA’s first year of operations through its 2021 Annual Report here: https://www.jet.org.za/resources/ticza-annual-report-final-2022.pdf/download
- Read John Kania and Mark Kramer’s original article on collective impact here: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact.
- Hear about TICZA’s first year of operations through its 2021 Annual Report here: https://www.jet.org.za/resources/ticza-annual-report-final-2022.pdf/download
- Read John Kania and Mark Kramer’s original article on collective impact here: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact.
