Abstract
The study explored the classroom practices of Life Sciences teachers with a specific focus on teacher knowledge. Through observation and interviews, the researcher aimed to identify teacher content knowledge, context knowledge and understanding of learners. The analysis of the diagnostic reports of the Life Sciences exams revealed a downward trend in learner performance and commonalities in difficulties across the years 2017 to 2020. The findings revealed that teacher difficulties were informed by poor content knowledge, context knowledge and learner understanding, and that good knowledge in these areas was attributed to limited teaching difficulties in the Life Sciences topics. The study was underpinned by the classroom practice diagnostic framework developed by Mudau, 2016.