The poor quality of many teachers in the Nigerian educational system is leaving the country’s students unprepared for 21 st Century challenges. The faulty foundation of teachers’ training and certification processes, poor teaching methods and limited opportunity for continuous teacher development are some of the critical challenges facing the Nigerian educational system say experts.
Data obtained from the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) show that there are about 1.5 million teachers registered in the country but about 50 percent of these do not have the competence to deliver 21st Century curriculum, since it requires mastery of a broad spectrum of skills.
In a report published at the end of its 22nd Economic Summit in October 2016, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, stated that some of the most urgent challenges in teachers’ training include lack of robustness of the curriculum used in training teachers at Colleges of Education, stressing that the curriculum has not evolved over generations and is out of tune with the present age.
At the flag-off of 2015 Teacher Development Training organised by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education, stated that Africa’s most populous nation has a teacher deficit of about 1.3 million and would need six years to fill this gap. This partly informed the N-Power project meant to recruit 500,000 teachers in 2016.
“It is really sad what goes into teacher training and formation in Nigeria. I visited a teachers’ training college recently, I will not name the school for obvious reasons. I needed someone to guide me to my destination. On approaching one of the students to ask for direction, she could not talk to me but rather asked a companion of hers in the local language, which I understood, to talk to me because she could not do so, given her poor use of the English Language,” said Folashade Adefisayo, who is the principal consultant and CEO at Leading Learning Ltd.
South Korea, which leads the list of best educational systems in the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD), according to a 2016 ranking, has a robust teacher training and development environment. The South Korean government develops and manages professional development programmes for teachers. These include training for qualifications, as well as in-service training and special training in areas such as information digitalisation or curriculum formation.
“Approximately 60 percent of teachers in Nigeria today are far from kitted to prepare students for the knowledge economy. Beyond this general statement, there are islands of exemplary teachers, mostly in private schools and in public schools in states with well-resourced classrooms and welfare for teachers.
These teachers produce students that make academic waves and are star employees of big corporations all over the world, especially in Europe and North America” said Peter Okebukola, former executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) and chairman Crawford University Governing Board.
This contrasts poorly with what obtains in Japan, where continuing professional development is required in the teaching profession. Professional development programmes are available at the national level through the school level, and each local board of education determines the minimum hours a teacher must spend on professional development each year.
Another issue standing in the way of teacher training in Nigeria is the recurrent incident of students who find themselves in the departments of education without having chosen to be there in the first place.
“Disinclination for teacher education programmes is a well-known phenomenon in Nigerian Universities. Of 179 students surveyed in the education department of the University of Ibadan, the following results played out: 37 percent did not choose education at all, 32 percent chose it as third choice, 23 percent as second choice and 8 percent as first choice” said Pai Obaya, who is an emeritus professor at the Institute of Education, University of Ibadan, and sits on the Committee of Experts of Education International (EI).
To remedy this situation, a number of solutions have been proffered by experts in the education field, “First is to rethink our teacher education programme to make it 21st Century compliant in terms of teacher knowledge, skills and attitudes to effectively deliver the curriculum for producing nationally-relevant and globally-competitive graduates” Okebukola said.
He added, “second is to undertake massive resourcing of our schools from primary schools to our universities in terms of facilities and general ambience of the environment. The third is to significantly improve the welfare of our teachers.”
The 21st Century learning style is shifting from being teacher-centred to becoming student centred because students no longer need to be “spoon fed”. “In order to remain effective, teachers would need to continually update themselves since technology keeps developing, learning a tool once and for all is no longer an option for teachers” said Odumosu Omolara, CEO Class Climax Consulting.
Omolara added, “Teachers need to be taught to take blogging seriously. As today’s students have access to authentic resources on the web, experts everywhere in the world, and peers learning the same subject somewhere else, teaching with textbooks is very “20-century.” Teachers should be re-trained to expand their teaching toolbox and try new ways such as teaching with social media, or replacing textbooks with web resources.”
