Involve Teachers in Making Decisions
- Category: Education
- Date 23-07-2006
- 263 views
Hon. Margaret Sitta, the Education and Vocational Training Minister, has announced the government’s decision to construct houses for teachers in rural areas, on the account of the hardships in such areas. Accordingly, government is holding talks with donors, including the World Bank and the Irish government to raise funds for the said purpose.
It is encouraging for government to appreciate that poor working environments discourage teachers from moving to certain areas. When they cannot go there, it is the country’s children that lose most, therefore the nations future is equally blighted. One hopes that Hon. Sitta’s revelation is not mere political rhetoric, because the importance of education in a country’s development cannot be overemphasised; educational success rotates around the teachers’ welfare.
Teachers are often under-paid, under-resourced and neglected, leading to high turnover rates, lack of confidence and varying levels of professional commitment. In order to achieve education development targets, the role and needs of teachers must indeed be better considered by policy makers.
In this era of materialism and display of wealth in the face of widespread poverty, teachers need to be adequately motivated: their salaries must be paid, teaching facilities made available and the school environment made generally attractive. It's a "dirty little secret" in the education community that the lowest performing schools in the nation are in hard-to-reach, rural villages, inadequately staffed by the least experienced personnel.
Teachers must be motivated to work in such places, and those who accept to go should, in addition to getting good living conditions, be paid what is called “hardship benefits”. Poor working conditions influence dissatisfaction toward the teaching career and affect teachers’ performance and effectiveness. When the teachers’ morale and self-confidence is low, motivation follows suit and so does educational quality.
It has been suggested that monetary and non-monetary factors are important in determining teachers’ morale, motivation and job satisfaction. It might not actually be a matter of attracting teachers to rural schools, but rather to make the entire teaching profession attractive while taking care of the disadvantaged places as noted. Thus, the minister’s plan for the improvement of the teaching conditions must be long-term, not adhoc.
Well, Hon. Sitta is a weathered educationist and perhaps immensely conversant with the teachers’ circumstances, but still her programme cannot fully thrive without the input the stakeholders – the teachers. Quick-fix ideas sometimes do not address the real issues. It might be necessary that the process takes quite a while, but becomes exhaustive, therefore participatory.
The issue of teachers’ motivation could be addressed by establishing consultative fora, in which teachers can discuss, address their unique concerns and put forward proposals. This may not necessarily halt the government programme already in motion, but could just enrich it as it progresses. Participation of teachers in education planning should be the norm, and donors should require it as a prerequisite of education funding – education planning should be so democratic.
Special benefits, such tax exemptions and hardship allowances for rural teachers, for example, might induce many to work in such areas, more than a house which the teacher would not own as personal property. As pointed out above already, this era of materialism demands that individuals are able to acquire personal property from which they can draw to support their families, children and to fall back when they retire. Someone must not look at housing as though it is the roof of the teachers’ desires.
We need to be better and smarter about getting our most gifted and talented professionals teaching in our most challenging environments. To get the best results of our plans, it is very important to work with teachers because even though what they love most may not be provided, their engagement offers sufficient credence to the educational choices we make.
A conversation is essential on all that is needed to gain and retain highly qualified teachers in all fields for a totally rounded education system, not pieces here and there. This would be better as a part of a total approach to attracting and keeping teachers, and deploying them appropriately.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen