There are extensive efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning of teachers in South African schools. The new South African democracy has experienced numerous challenges to address the educational neglect of the last 350 years. Since the onset of our democracy in 1994, there have been curriculum changes coupled with various training initiatives, to enhance the capacity of teachers in South Africa. The focus of these training initiatives has been on improving the efficacy of teachers. However, many of these training initiatives have been decontextualized and without support; i.e. these training sessions took place outside of the context in which the teachers practice their profession and without the required support to make the paradigm shift from learning as a finite activity, to learning as a lifelong activity.

In the quest for finding ways of improving Continuous Teacher Professional Learning Activities, Practice-based Continuous Professional Learning has increasingly been offered as an approach to Continuous Professional Learning through which the impediments (overly theory-laden, not relevant to the context in which teacher work, no clear link between theory and practice) of ‘conventional mostly transmission-mode training could be addressed. After an in-depth survey of the literature as well as critical reflection on own practice the Stellenbosch University Centre for Pedagogy (SUNCEP) decided on a Practice-based approach to Professional Learning as the primary/preferred approach for all Continuous Professional Learning Activities initiated by the Centre.

These practice-based training initiatives, consisting of two core components namely, face-to-face contact sessions and mentoring, are designed to increase the pedagogical content knowledge of the teachers by bridging the gap between theory (training) and practice (teaching) thus assisting teachers to develop their confidence and competence in delivering the curriculum. These practice based initiatives also affords the learners the best teaching and learning opportunities to excel in mathematics and science and to access higher education.

As a way of plotting the change in efficacy of the teacher, and by way of extensive research, two instruments were developed to report back on the professional learning that took place by the  teachers. The first was an instrument which used a Likert type scale to indicate the progress of the teacher and the second was a template which was to be completed by the mentor to provide a narrative of their experiences in the cluster sessions and the on-site individual visit. The two instruments were developed with the view to collect evidence that would assist in making informed decisions related to the professional learning of the teachers in our various mathematics and science projects. As this process was about improving the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of the teacher, it was obvious that PCK would form our theoretical framework of our mentoring process and inform the development of our first instrument with its variables/constructs and dimensions thereof within our instrument.

The essence of this paper is to report on the initial findings from the data, extracted from these mentoring instruments, utilised in our practice based training initiatives. The data gathered from these instruments, completed by teachers and mentors, and analysed using appropriate quantitative and qualitative data analysis tools, indicate that some teachers, despite their contextual challenges, showed a willingness to improve their teaching. Some had a much higher level of their abilities as a teacher while some underestimated their ability to become good teachers.

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