Literacy coaching in gauteng province: needs and possibilities

Current scholarship advocating the role of pre-service and in-service teacher development for counteracting the multiple levels of South African 'school dysfunction' (Bergman & Bergman 2011) has said relatively little about the substantial role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the multiple layers of reform at play in literacy education - and even less has been said about the role of NGOs in developing teacher-leaders, or in our case, 'literacy coaches', for engaging grass-roots in-service teacher change. In this article, we theorise findings from a participatory, qualitative needs analysis examining a South African NGO's development of literacy coaches as part of a broader Gauteng Province Literacy and Maths Strategy (GPLMS). Embedded in sociocultural conceptions of 'thoughtfully adaptive teaching' (Fairbanks et al. 2010), our findings suggest that although coaches were confident in their ability to interact as coaches for the curriculum generated by the GPLMS reforms, they were less confident in their abilities to engage their teacher colleagues in the horizontal relationship horizontal collaboration within a community of collaborative professionals. We provide specific recommendations for the GPLMS initiative with broader implications for similar participatory teacher learning efforts for enacting education as change.