Teacher readiness towards nurturing Advanced Performance among all students: A pilot study

Equipping students with well-developed thinking skills and dispositions to become Advanced Performers appears to remain a daunting task for teachers. To this end, the research foregrounded two feasibility objectives for a pilot study that, firstly, obtained information based on teachers’ perceptions about the strengths and weaknesses in relation to the factors that influence the nurturing of Advanced Performance, and, secondly, established the suitability of the questionnaire items to ascertain teachers’ perceptions about their readiness towards nurturing Advanced Performance. Quantitative, non-experimental, descriptive survey research with a heterogeneous group of Grade R and Foundation Phase teachers from two public primary schools and one pre-school (n = 26) in South Africa was employed. Findings revealed that a main study would be feasible and should continue with modification to the questionnaire to streamline data collection. Perceptions about teaching practice as well as competence in teaching thinking skills and dispositions seem to strongly influence teaching for Advanced Performance. Questionnaire items could be selected and grouped more meaningfully to focus attention to these two constructs. Moreover, exploring additional contextual factors, such as curriculum overload and a content-driven approach to teaching, could extend the present identification of factors that hamper the nurturing of Advanced Performance.