Meeting the learning needs of your students and the welfare of teachers
Welcome to our weekly blog for Teacher Tapp Ghana!
Every Monday we summarize our most surprising and interesting survey findings from the week before. This weekly blog provides an easy way for you to learn about the experiences and opinions of teachers across Ghana.
Please encourage your colleagues to use the Teacher Tapp app to keep engaged with education even when they’re not teaching. Your responses are also a vital data source that will guide decision-making around best policies and approaches for enhancing the welfare of educators/teachers and ensuring robust educational sector management.
Many more teachers will like to be heard and this can be done through Teacher Tapp. Do share this blog with your colleagues and encourage them to use the download links at the bottom of the page. In the meantime, here are this week’s intriguing findings…
- The welfare of teachers should be a top priority for all governments
Teachers often complain about their poor conditions of service and their overall welfare situation. They have been several calls on governments, both past and present to attend to the welfare needs of students. Even though commendable policies such as the Single Spine Salary Structure are currently being implemented to make the lives of teachers better, there are still a lot of gaps to be filled and work to be done in ensuring that the standards of living of most teachers are bettered. Our interactions with Teacher Tappers this week re-echoed teachers’ grievances on the issue of welfare and the need for all governments, past, present, and future to hold bettering the lives of teachers in the nation in high esteem. This we believe will go a long way to improve the affairs of the nation as teachers play a pivotal role in nation-building.
- Meeting the individual learning needs of students is a herculean task
Students generally have different needs. It is not so much of an anomaly because human beings have different capabilities in diverse fields. This truth, however, presents a challenge to educators all over the world as they do not only have to identify, but also meet the different learning needs of their students. This week, our survey with our users amplified how challenging it can be for teachers to meet the learning needs of their students with 91% responding in the affirmative to the aforementioned topic. It is imperative that teachers are equipped and given the necessary help and support to be able to attend to the different learning needs of students.
- Most schools do not have special support programs for students with special learning needs
Special learning needs refer to the learning difficulties that make it harder for children to learn than most children of the same age. Children with special learning needs are likely to need extra or different help from that given to other children their age. This week, we sought to find out if schools in Ghana have special support programs for students with special needs. 63% of our respondents indicated that their schools didn’t have such programs while 31% indicated otherwise. It should be noted that students with special learning needs can be greatly helped if the necessary and proper structures are put in place to help them improve on their learning abilities. In light of this, we would like to urge school heads, parents, teachers, and other stakeholders to collaborate efforts into developing programs and whatnots that will be geared towards getting the best out of students with special needs.
- Finally, we know you’re finding our daily readings useful, so here are some of the tips we gathered from last week…
How to recognize signs of potential learning disabilities in preschool.
4 tips for a successful self-contained classroom.
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This blog post has really highlighted the top three (in my opinion) resolvable challenges in Ghanaian Schools today.
However, I am more interested in 1. , that the welfare of teachers to government should be a priority. I totally agree.
However, I also wish to highlight the often untold sad story of the Quality of Teachers in our Ghanaian Classrooms today. It is sad to state that:
1. Many teachers though trained have not attained enough Professionalism and the ‘Quality’ to deliver some aspects of instruction in our classrooms today.
The basic inference can be drawn from why a teacher today does not agree that s/he is to a great extent responsible for the academic performance of his students. No matter how lazy, uninterested and unconcerned a student seems, his/her success, participation in classroom activities is primarily the work of a teacher who knows his job.
2. Adapting to Change is like swallowing a bitter pill for teachers. Becoming a teacher or any other career person is not a one-time achievement. One must continuously learn skills in order to stay productive, employer and relevant. Sadly, this is a no go for teachers. An example is the Professional Development Allowance instituted for teachers help them participate in other teacher skill and knowledge training programmes to improve their skillset and knowledge base on Teacher Education Policies in Ghana seem to receive a backlash from majority of teachers as they would rather enjoy that money as bonuses and not a token to become better instructors, and facilitators in the fast changing world.
John Dewey once said, “If we teach like we taught yesterday, then rob our children of the future.”
How long will these teachers with such thoughts continue to rob our children?
Are teachers with these thoughts thinking of their professional well-being?
You know the answers.