The teaching cycle

During each term, you can use Siyavula to teach, to revise, and to consolidate and assess your learners’ knowledge within and across topics.

Different ways you can use Siyavula to support your teaching cycle

As a teacher, you can use Siyavula to support your teaching in any aspect of your teaching. From our experience, and the feedback from teachers who use Siyavula, these are our suggested ways to get the most out of our platform:

1. Set revision on a topic area

Each of the chapters in Grade 8 - 12 Mathematics practice begins with a revision section, which is designed to prepare learners for new content you are about to teach. Before you teach a new section, tell your learners to practise the revision section at the beginning of the chapter. This will remind them of concepts they had learnt before, and can help plug gaps and as remediation.

How to use our revision sections

2. Present your lessons on the topic

You can use Siyavula as part of your lesson in the following ways:

During class

Use the questions as part of your teaching to explain a concept
Put a question up on a smartboard and get learners to work on the question, either alone or as a group
Give them Siyavula questions you'd like them to work on in class

After class

Set a homework assignment for learners on Siyavula: this allows you to choose the questions you want them to work on. You can check that they have completed their assignment by looking at your automatically-generated assignment performance report.
Tell your learners to practise from the chapter and section you are teaching: if you tell learners to practise until they have a certain number of mastery stars, this allows learners to work at their own pace to achieve a set level of mastery. You can check your learners' progress by checking your learner performance report.

3. Set consolidation practice

Once you have taught a new section or chapter, tell learners to practise that on their own. This gives them the opportunity to work through the content at their own pace, and retrying questions they are struggling with. You can check your learners' progress by checking your learner performance report.

It's a good idea to give learners a mastery goal to attain (e.g. practise until you have three stars in a section). This will allow learners to achieve the same level of mastery.

4. Check learners' understanding and knowledge

Once you have taught a new concept or section, you can assess your learners' understanding and knowledge by setting a formative or summative assessment. For this, you can either:
Set an assignment covering work from the chapter/s you want to test; or
Use one of Siyavula's pre-created summary assessments: Mathematics only

Updated on: 16/05/2023