Teachers urged to reimagine education for better outcomes

Abimbola Ogundere, founder & CEO, Learning As I Teach (LAIT) Foundation Africa, has urged Nigerian teachers to recommit themselves and reimagine education towards producing better learning outcomes within the classrooms.

Speaking during the annual Right Teacher Conference 2025, themed, ‘The Power of You – Reflect, Reimagine, Recommit,’ Ogundere said teachers must envision education for the future of work in seeking a better outcome for the teaching-learning process.

“Now, let us reimagine what education can and must look like in the 21st century. The world our students face is unlike anything we experienced growing up,” she said in a keynote address titled, ‘Harnessing your inner power to create transformative change in classrooms and beyond’.

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She said that to reimagine education, teachers must move beyond their comfort zones by being intentional with the understanding that education must shift, and must be dynamic.

“What if we saw our classrooms as incubators of innovation, not just spaces for instruction? In Africa, a teacher is not just an instructor—a teacher is a lifeline. You are the difference between hope and despair, between a child daring to dream and one giving up too soon.”

Speaking on the critical role teachers play in producing better learning outcomes, Ogundere said that the power of education is not in policies or systems, but in the teachers. “So, harness your power—and let’s change the world.”

Rhoda Odigboh, head of Africa programs at Kizazi, said teachers are a critical component of classroom transformation, which will eventually lead the current generation of learners to the world of work.

“What are we teaching, and how are we teaching it? We have to determine that it fits all those models of work. We still have a lot of teachers who are not well-trained. A lot of teachers who don’t have the resources that they need; we still need to work on that,” she said.

Odigboh said Nigeria currently has very low digital literacy skills, and that the school curriculum is not well-fitting to the world. “So, we’re not there yet. In the private sector, there’s a lot that is being done. In the public sector, there’s so much more that needs to be done.”

According to her, Africa also has to deal with the challenges of low foundational skills, where learners between ages 10 cannot read a single passage of 60 words and also find it difficult to comprehend.

“Currently, we have the sort of academic set of skills, but we’re still somewhere around 50 percent; and that’s because, whether we like it or not, we still need to have some knowledge base to work with,” Odigboh said.