Understanding the landscape of mathematics teachers’ professional development in south africa

Profession development is essential in standardising the quality of teaching across subject areas and impacting learning in more meaningful ways. In South Africa, students’ achievement in mathematics remains abysmal for decades, evident from the National Senior Certificate examinations and allied global reports. Extensive literature adduced several reasons for the anomaly experienced. Evolving mathematics teachers’ practices owing to low achievement justifies among other reasons for professional development. Extensive studies and trainings on professional development of mathematics teachers are available to date with implication on teachers’ practices to alleviate the existing milieu. This study seeks to aggregate literature on mathematics teachers’ professional development with a view to understand the landscape for impending effort by Education Training and Development Practices Sector Education and Training Authority [ETDP SETA]. This literature review exposes comparatively areas of need and improvement in professional development effort. An understanding of this landscape is a pilot study expected to guide on preparation and instrumentation on areas of professional development for mathematics teachers in South Africa. From the review, we observed absence of empirical data in our context comparing the two models of initial teacher education programme. There is an agreement in the literature to direct professional development to content and pedagogy. Hence, the need for further studies which critically analysed these two areas through the framework of mathematics knowledge for teaching as against the general PCK.