April 25, 2016 / by Megan Beckett /
We are excited to have kicked off a new partnership with the Soweto Science Centre to integrate the use of Siyavula Practice into their after school support and tutoring programme for learners from Soweto and the surrounding regions.
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January 23, 2015 / by Megan Beckett /
At Siyavula, we believe in constantly asking for feedback from a group both during and after a workshop. What often comes to my mind when reflecting on feedback are examples from biology where one can get positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. Both are necessary for a healthy individual or ecosystem. The same is true for any process where you want to constantly be tweaking, making adjustments, finding a balance between different needs and expectations and using the feedback to respond and evolve. Closing these feedback loops is crucial in developing a successful, sustainable, long-term process.
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January 22, 2015 / by Megan Beckett /
As part of conducting the Natural Sciences training, we were asked to conduct a performance analysis, both before and after the workshops, to assess the subject advisors’ content knowledge. I think one of the main reasons for wanting this was to have some way of assessing the “impact of the intervention”, and a data-based performance analysis is often what is looked to as the easiest measure of impact. However, we were at first opposed to doing this right at the start as I felt that it would not be the most welcoming approach to administer a test as everyone first walks in the door. I also felt it would not set the right tone for the rest of the training.
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January 21, 2015 / by Megan Beckett /
In this post I want to outline some of the details of how we structured the workshops, the different sessions we ran and the content we decided to focus on. We also created and used a number of openly licensed resources, which have all been made available online for anyone else to build upon and adapt for their own use.
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January 20, 2015 / by Megan Beckett /
At the end of 2014, Siyavula was involved in planning, designing and conducting training workshops for the Gr 4-9 Natural Sciences subject advisors in all 9 provinces in South Africa. I coordinated the training project from our side and learned an enormous amount, from designing training workshops, to working with different stakeholders in the education system, to delivering training and teaching concepts, to working with a diverse team, and importantly, interacting with the subject advisors and building relationships across the country.
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