Issues in education - Commentary

The school principal is employed and given a mandate which is explicit, either being outlined in a job description, or implicit as evidenced by the utterances of the political head of the education system, to raise the performance of his/her school. This usually means that the principal must ensure that the students in his school perform to meet or exceed the national average of performance that students have set. To ensure that he/she achieves this goal, the principal has to work with a team - senior teachers, teachers, students, administrative and ancillary workers,  parents and other stakeholders achieve his/her goal. How does the principal do this? He/she has to be a human resource manager. That is, the principal has to devise policies and strategies to motivate the human beings whom he/she manages to work towards contributing to the goal that the education directorate has set for schools generally and his/her school in particular. This is part of the thrust of human res...

Display mounted by teachers in training I watched about five minutes of the recent Oscars presentation on television, not because it wasn't a good show but because I had things to do that I considered to be more important than watching the spectacle. In the five minutes or so that I watched, I learnt much, not from what was going on on-stage, but from my viewing companions. From them, I learnt the names of some of the guests in the audience, I learnt about the actors who were nominated in the category of "Best Supporting Actor" and I learnt about my companions' opinions of the movies and actors nominated in this category, as well as their views on who should win and why they should win. This was information that was new to me since I cursorily follow the goings-on of pop culture. In five minutes, I got a lesson on an element of pop culture. From this lesson, I came to a realisation about the process of learning in schools, colleges and universities and all o...

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...

Education officials question the quality of the output from the schools, colleges and universities. They also take issue with the quality of the teachers in some of these places of learning and their ability to effect learning in students. The business community questions the quality of the output from the schools, colleges and universities. Members of this community also take issue with the quality of the teachers and their ability to effect the kind of learning that they would like to see students exhibit. Teachers question the ability of some of their students to learn as well as their motivation to learn. In addition, they question the role of parents in their children's learning. They also take issue with government's provision to the education sector. Parents see their children as the smartest and most capable students who have ever graced the walls, virtual or otherwise, of classrooms. Therefore, they believe that their children can learn much and if they do not, i...

The word honesty denotes truthfulness, integrity – positive, admirable values. Should honesty always be a guiding principle in our lives? A student, several years ago, in responding to the essay topic: Honesty is the best policy  opined that honesty is not always the best policy. She illustrated her answer with the example of examinations. According to her, a person will find herself/himself in situations when she/he has to cheat. If passing an examination well meant that a person would get into the best schools, and getting into the best schools would determine that person's successful future, (a belief in her culture) then it would be all right to cheat. She did not examine the consequences that a person could likely face if caught. The potential benefit of cheating, to her, it would seem, far exceeded the costs. The nature of the environments in which we work We are working in environments in which governments and businesses have been trying to cement what is often ...

I am hearing the resounding "yes" of most of you who are reading this article. "Of course we are professionals!" But, what exactly makes you a professional? I can still hear you. Your responses are many and varied. Some of your responses are coherent. You know exactly why you are a professional. Some of your responses are incoherent. You believe that you are a professional but you are finding it difficult to articulate your reasons for your belief. A number of scholars in many fields - Education, Business,  Government, among others - for example, Donald Schon and M. Noordegraaf who have engaged with the study of professionalism, have suggested, among other things, that there are some key components of professionalism. These components are as follows: There is a knowledge component. That is, the area in which one claims to be a professional has some specific knowledge associated with it. Having gained the knowledge associated with our areas of interest, kno...

Performance of the administrative staff One of the challenges that the education system faces is that of getting the administrative staff to raise its levels of performance. The administrative staff in schools has very important roles to play in the education system. They, like the principals and teachers, have important roles to play in helping schools achieve their objectives. They do the following: Provide Administrative Support - First, they provide administrative support to the principals of schools, but they also provide 'policy support' in disseminating the articulated visions of principals for their schools. They do this dissemination of the visions of principals for their schools literally or figuratively through their interactions with all categories of staff, students, parents and the wider community. Manage Perception - Second, since they, more often than not, are the first link between the school and the wider community - parents, businesses,  civic...