Issues in education - Commentary

pixabay.com The teacher is sometimes maligned, a few times for good reasons, but most of the times the teacher is unjustly targeted because those persons who cast aspersions at the teacher and the job of teaching are not fully aware of the complexities of the job and the challenges that the teacher faces in navigating these complexities. Having been a teacher for more than twenty five years and having taught in a number of countries, I have garnered some insights into the nature of the teacher and the job of teaching. I have shared these insights in a new book, The Teacher's Gift . One facet of the teacher that I have explored in a number of chapters in this book is her mental health and how she can maintain her mental health, in spite of all the challenges that she has to navigate on the job. Here is one chapter of this book. Maintaining her mental health 3 – tempering her expectations of her students One way that the teacher maintains her mental health is by temperi...

Chapter 1 The Calling The teacher’s “calling” is that driving need that she has to embark on a course of action as her life's work and that deep-seated belief or acceptance that she has about the “rightness” of that course of action on which she has embarked. And, having embarked on this course of action, the teacher feels a sense of satisfaction in tackling the demands of this course of action, in spite of the challenges. The course of action that she feels compelled to take, to teach, is her calling. It is from this calling that she hopes to achieve her livelihood. The teacher believes that teaching is her calling, whether by choice or by circumstance. She knows that in spite of her motivation for entering the teaching profession, she has a responsibility to her students to, among other things, help in guiding them in becoming the kinds of citizens that society, through the policies of government or through its norms and mores, expects them to be. The teacher reali...

Photo credit: pixabay.com You are in a noble profession, or so you've been told. Your job is very important. You are charged with moulding young and not so very young minds to accept and nurture what is "good" and so be a credit to society. Because, society needs "good" people if it is to surge upward in its development.  You're supposed to achieve this noble goal, in spite of whatever resistance/challenge that you meet in the classroom - students who are aggressive, disrespectful, resistant to learning what you are teaching them in the classroom... Some days the challenge of finding the right balance between allowing your students to be students, thus keeping them always happy, and getting them to perform up to the standard that you know they can perform weighs heavily on you. I have been a teacher for more than 25 years and I have survived many of these days. On one such day, I thought up this "tongue in cheek" list, intended to stir...

Photo credit: pixabay.com We are working in an environment in which we often hear the buzz words: team , team building , collaboration and their synonyms. The experts have urged managers in organisations to work collaboratively with their  teams to achieve the objectives of the organisation. However, in many organisations - educational, non-educational, governmental or non-governmental - there is at least one worker who scoffs at the idea of team work. This colleague exhibits the following behaviours: 1. She is not interested in briefing sessions or any other form of staff meeting. This person attends these meetings but when she does, she stares blankly at nothing, seeming to be in another place at another time, or is obviously annoyed by the goings on, from time to time muttering to herself or rolling her eyes as the team leader outlines the tasks to be completed that day. This person usually separates herself from other colleagues, and if she is prodded to come cl...

The change in the educational landscape with the most far reaching effects is the adoption and use of Information and Communication Technologies in classrooms. Of course, these effects may be more visible in the developed world than in the developing world, which for the obvious reason, are lagging behind the developed world in the wide scale adoption and use of technology in the classroom. Michael Godsey in an article in The Atlantic asks the question: When kids can get their lessons from the Internet, what's left for classroom instructors to do? In this article, he presents his vision of the future of education and the role of the teacher in his envisioned future educational landscape. Read God set's article here . For many teachers today, their role in the classroom is unambiguous. They see their role in the following light: to physically attend school each day to prepare lessons before hand to deliver these lessons face to face to their students, to asses...

To what extent should teachers be held accountable for students’ performance at school? It has been the pastime of a number of social commentators in newspaper columns over the years to vilify teachers whom they blame for the poor performance of students in the education system. And, there are those “experts” in the education Ministry who have drawn heavily on data supplied by researchers elsewhere to categorically state that if the “right” methodology is adopted, if the “right” people are allowed into teacher training institutes, all children will learn. Teachers, on the other hand, have not been silent. A number of them have voiced the opinion that the expectations that the education Ministry and society at large have of them, where performance of students is concerned, are unrealistic. For example they say, teachers who teach the lower streams – on a numerical scale, say streams four or five on a five point scale, or streams seven and eight on an eight point scale – ar...

It is a great honour to be considered an “expert” at anything. We often see in the media where persons who have been invited to panels to talk about or (analyse?) issues are introduced as experts in their fields. Any field may have many experts as we would have discovered. In education, for example, there are experts in curriculum, experts in assessments, experts in teaching, experts in inspection and experts in education itself, all types of experts. A number of these experts are convinced (as a result of their presumed expertise on the matter) that teachers are the major impediments to students’ optimal performance in the classroom. They seem to derive this conclusion by cursorily examining high performing schools which share similar characteristics with low performing schools. Some of these high performing schools have large classes, for example. Yet their students learn, they argue, as opposed to students in the same situation in low performing schools. Class size, therefore, is no...

There is a saying that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. To what extent is this saying app licable to teachers who have been in the education system for many, many years? The educational landscape is continually changing as a result of changes in the wider environment. Let us briefly examine three changes in the educational landscape here. First, the educational landscape is changing in terms of modes of disciplining students. This is a major change in some educational systems. There was a time when teachers, mostly in the primary schools, would punish misbehaving, inattentive students by issuing corporal punishment. Some teachers swear by the efficacy of this punishment in getting students to display the desired behaviour in the classroom. Corporal punishment, today, is deemed by the experts to be cruel and inhumane punishment. Instead, these experts suggest that teachers use positive reinforcement to get the desired behaviour from students. However, it seems that for many students...

  A teacher of Mathematics once told me that if I could add, subtract, divide and multiply, I could master Mathematics because these skills were the foundation of Mathematics. Well, I can add, subtract, divide and multiply, quite well, as a matter of fact. But I wouldn’t say I mastered Mathematics. My memories of Math classes are not great, but they do not leave me depressed. One of my Math classes in third form stands out in my memory to this day. It is the only one that holds a position of prominence in my mind. The teacher was quite pleasant. I remember her sitting at her desk for most of the class, waiting for us to bring our work to her for correction after she had “taught” us the fundamentals of whatever topic was introduced. (Sitting is not a bad thing to do. I like the idea of having a chair at the ready in my classroom so I can rest my weary legs, if I choose to). So, back to my third form Math class. I can still see a “stick man”, standing at the top of an incline. Our jo...

Performance as it relates to tasks in an organizational setting may be defined as effort exerted by workers in the organisation to achieve particular goals set by the organisation. Performance is something that the government of Jamaica wants to maximize. If you visit the website of the Cabinet Office, for example, you will see strategies outlined in documents such as Public Sector Transformation , Public Sector Modernisation as well as Performance Management and Evaluation programmes . The strategies outlined in these documents signal the government’s aim to raise the level of performance in the public sector.   Among organisations targeted are schools and the government is urging them to improve their performance citing low returns on its investment in education as the reason for its concern with school improvement. And, with the government creating the National Education Inspectorate (NEI), it is indicative of its expectations of the education system. The NEI...