Exploring Approaches to the Teaching of Life Sciences

This book is about the qualitative research study on the teaching approaches employed by grade 12 Life Sciences teachers to improve learner performance. The research methodology adopted is a case study, the instruments of data collection are classroom observations which were video-recorded and semi-structured interviews which were tape-recorded and transcribed into text. The focus of the study is to find out which teaching approaches are used by Life Sciences teachers to teach a section of environmental studies to grade 12 learners, without making it difficult for learners to understand. The following are the different teaching approaches which can be intergrated by teachers during lesson presentation which I identified from the literature that I reviewed: context-based teaching (relational teaching, cooperative teaching, transmission teaching), experiential teaching, facilitative teaching, executive teaching and environmental teaching, in light of the New Curriculum Statement (NCS), which aims to instill critical thinking in learners and learner-centred teaching approaches.