Regardless of what must have been said about teachers, especially in developing countries like Nigeria, I believe many teachers really want to provide education that truly works for their students.

Sometimes the problem is not desire, the problem is they don’t know how to go about the issues they face in teaching. For example, how should a teacher help a class of students with diverse learning speed without abandoning the slow learners because she is too fast or causing the fast learners to lose interest because she is too slow?

The interesting thing is that there are several education researches that have been done to proffer pedagogical techniques about this but many times, the teachers have no awareness about them or they can’t access them (Talk of buying 1 journal article for $30 when your takehome salary is not even taking you home). These are some of the issues when we are talking about having equipped teachers especially in places like Africa. There is so much disconnect between education researches being done everyday and the very teachers that need the knowledge of the research outcomes to improve how education is being done.

One way we can address this is to equip teachers to be researchers themselves. It doesn’t have to be about them publishing education papers (although that would be amazing), rather it can be about them knowing how to design their entire teaching in such a way that helps them inquire facts about the teaching and learning process, to test new methods and see how much they work and in what context, to find the weakness in existing pedagogies and generally continue to search for better ways to make education truly open minds.

This was the core of one of my facilitation sessions at the teachers’ training session last week where I taught on “Teaching as Research”. I was truly excited to be able to share practical ways I have been doing this in my own work as a college faculty.