“Teachers are required to have a passion for teaching and leadership, engage with members not only in the school community but also in the wider community, and act as potential agents of change.”-National Teachers’ Standards (NTS) for Ghana Guidelines by MoE/NTC (2017) p.34.
Educational policies, programmes and strategies are reviewed, revised or reformed whenever the need arises. No society or nation is static or would want to be static. Progress is a thing that every individual and nation pursue to achieve. There is, often, a shift in people’s thoughts, actions and lives.
How possible is it then for a nation’s education system to be static or deemed to be static when cultures, philosophies, socio-economic backgrounds, politics and governance keep changing? To review is to assess to change a thing; to revise is to examine to update; and to reform is to change a thing to improve it. In all of these definitions, the catch word is “change”.
Ghana has had a series of Acts, policies, programmes and strategic plans on how education should be run for the benefit of the nation and citizens. There have been 1951 Education Act as a component of the 1951 Accelerated Development Plan aimed at making education available to every child, the 1961 Education Act (Act 87) to provide free access to primary education, and the 1974 Dzobo Education Reform reducing the duration of pre-tertiary education from 17 years to 13 years.
There has also been the 1987 Education Reform, which replaced the four-year-middle-school system with three years of junior secondary education and three years of senior secondary education instead of the earlier seven years. Other ones have been the 1995 Education Act (Act 506), the 2008 Education Act (Act 778) and the 2020 Education Acts (Act 1023 and Act 1049).
In 2019/2020, the proposal to shift from the nation’s objective-based curriculum to a standards-based one, where senior high school education would be part of basic school education, was implemented. Major changes have been made to the kinds of subjects being studied at the primary school level, as senior high schools, starting from this academic year with students who have just been enrolled in first year, are to start or have started running what is called the “Common Core Programme”.
The teacher is expected to facilitate learning and to treat students as “fellows” or “co-learners”. To promote learning, the teacher must consistently urge the learner to appreciate that both of them (i.e., teacher/facilitator on one hand and the learner on another hand) have met to share their experiences in a learning situation so to learn together. This article, therefore, seeks to highlight the critical skills and strategies required of the teacher to do it right.
Teaching (in this context, facilitation) is an art, a craft and a profession. It is not a task to perform without the requisite preparations by the teacher and support from the learner and stakeholders. Good command over a content knowledge with appropriate use of skills, values, attitudes and pedagogy is key to an effective service delivery as a teacher/facilitator. Even if the “there” is not there, the teacher ought to cause that “there” to be there for the slated learning to happen still. Improvisation of instructional resources and modification of the existing resources so to suit what is deemed to be taught are an ideal function of a teacher.
The fact that, for instance, a school does not have an arable land is not enough an excuse for the teacher to deny students of agriculture the opportunity to engage in field works and practical demonstrations to promote learning. Improvisation would, therefore, enable the teacher to use containers such as nursery polybags, old buckets and wooden boxes with “weeping holes” created on them to facilitate water drainage and the containers filled with fertile garden soils to serve as micro-farm lands.
For learners to acquire appropriate knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and competencies, there is a need for learning experiences to be integrated with the elements of national values and with attention paid to cross-cutting issues of Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI), Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and Special Educational Needs (SEN) of learners, and with the 21st century skills of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, collaboration and communication skills, social and leadership skills, and digital literacy and ICT skills (GES/NaCCA/NTC PLC Handbook for Teachers, n.d.a, p.4, and National Teachers’ Standards 1a, 2b, 2c, 2e, 2f and 3a).
On GESI, the teacher employs instructional strategies to critically examine and to attend to the needs of learners equally irrespective of gender and social status. SEL ensures that the teacher creates a safe, encouraging learning environment, and manages the behaviour of learners. Differentiated, blended and intervention learning sessions are employed to ensure that every learner is supported to learn.
The teacher uses instructional strategies which are appropriate for mixed ability, multi-lingual and multi-age classes and ensures that tasks that encourage learner participation, collaboration and critical thinking are assigned (NTS 3c, 3d, 3e, 3g, 3h and 3o).
On the issue of SEN, learners, with their physical and intellectual abilities and of geographical locations, notwithstanding, are supported to participate in learning. The teacher pays attention to all learners, including girls and learners with special educational needs. The teacher, for instance, leads the class to discuss concepts using examples that all learners can appreciate well (NTS 3i).
The teacher, often, chooses from a repertoire of pedagogical approaches (also referred to as exemplars) to build varied skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and communication as well as digital literacy, and social and leadership skills in the learner. Appropriate use of exemplars increases the learner’s understanding of specific skills, content, or knowledge and to internalise, with ease, a criterion or a standard, which has been set for a particular learning experience (Sadler, 2010).
Pedagogical exemplars enable learners to better appreciate learning outcomes from learning tasks (Scoles, Husman and McArthur, 2013). If used accurately, exemplars enable learners to determine their own levels of understanding of learning tasks and to clarify what constitutes a high quality of learning (Hendry, White and Herbert, 2016).
The teacher can adopt the talk for learning, activity-based learning, Think-Pair-Share, digital learning, inquiry-based learning, experiential learning, and problem-based approaches to facilitate learning. Approaches like constructivism, collaboration, reflection, integration and inquiry-based approach exist for use to facilitate learning (Sadler, 2010). Learners are not just put into groups to talk, but to do it by sharing individual learning experiences.
An activity can be given to learners singly or in groups to perform and to learn from it. Learners can be tasked to think through a scenario individually and be supported to compare their findings or results with the findings of fellow learners through discussions. Learners can be given scientific cases to study and to present their findings in well-composed reports using digital devices and channels.
By Anthony Kwaku Amoah (MPhil)
(E-mail: amoatec80@gmail.com)
NB: The author is an educationist and a trained counsellor in the Ghana Education Service and a visiting lecturer at the College for Distance and e-Learning of University of Education, Winneba.
Editor’s note: Views expressed in this article do not represent that of The Chronicle
