Before teachers involved in one of our pilots conducted in KwaZulu-Natal watched one of our modules, we asked them how they set spelling tests. Of the 39 who answered, 56.4% used a standard ten-word list with dictation and 41% used a list with sentence writing. Not one reported a creative, game-based or differentiated format.
The temptation with a finding like that is to read it as a gap in the teachers. I want to argue the opposite, because the data does not support the first reading and my own experience of these classrooms contradicts it.
Think about what the finding describes. A group of teachers received a method for setting a spelling test, early in their training, and then applied it for years, across classes that grew larger and cohorts that arrived with more varied needs. Nobody handed them a second method. The uniformity in that room isn't evidence that the teachers stopped thinking; it's evidence that the system stopped supplying.
When we did supply something, the response was immediate. Of the 39 teachers who completed the feedback form in August 2025, 82.1% rated the ideas in the module as extremely useful and said they would use several of them. A separate sample of 43 teachers, surveyed in July 2025, gave us 97.7% saying kolab. Smart Support would assist their teaching.
I will state the limits on both figures, because they matter. Both are self-reported, both were captured close to the intervention, and stated intent is not the same thing as changed behaviour. A teacher saying she will use an idea is honest evidence of interest and weak evidence of practice; we publish the intent as intent, and we are working on the harder measurement.
There is one more piece of the pilot I find harder to argue with. Thirty-two teachers earned certificates for completing modules in their own time by October 2025: fourteen at Bronze for ten modules, fifteen at Silver for twenty, and three at Gold for fifty or more. Nobody required that. Fifty modules is a considerable amount of unpaid professional development for a teacher who already has a full week.
This is the assumption kolab. is built on, and the reason I keep publishing our sample sizes rather than our best numbers alone. South African teachers are willing and capable, and they work with what is placed in their hands. When no teacher in a room has been shown a second way to set a spelling test, I don't see a failure of the teachers in it; I see a system that hasn't put anything new in front of them for years, and that is a solvable problem with a known cost.
