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Skills, Stationery and the simple facts of life for teachers in Ghana!

24 February 2020

Welcome to our weekly blog for Teacher Tapp Ghana!

Every Monday we summarise our most surprising and interesting survey findings from the week before. This weekly blog provides an easy way for you to learn about the experiences and opinions of teachers across Ghana.

Before we dive into our exciting findings, we just wanted to remind you all about…

🥳 CPD Day! 🥳

CPD Day is on Thursday 27th February this week!

In a survey last week, nearly 70% of you told us that you’d be very likely to recommend Teacher Tapp to your colleagues.

Well now is your chance!

We have excellent resources on our page here that you can use for introducing Teacher Tapp to your colleagues. We have resources for running a presentation as well as for using our articles to run a CPD discussion for CPD Day. You can also use all of these resources in your next PLC meeting.

Remember, running a session on Teacher Tapp or using Teacher Tapp discussion materials can be evidenced as running an activity for your GES promotional portfolio!

Good luck! In the mean time, here are three of our fascinating findings from last week…

1. Wanted: more tools to teach digital skills

You’ve told us several times in the last few weeks that you strongly believe in the use of technology in the classroom. You’ve also told us you believe students need to learn digital skills to succeed in the 21st century.

But how well equipped are you to teach these skills?

We asked a series of questions on this topic last week and found out that 91% of you feel under-prepared to teach digital skills to your students and want more training.

Aside from lack of appropriate training, 55% of you also told us that your school does not have the resources to teach digital skills effectively.

Without the proper training and resources to teach digital skills, we might expect your students to be severely lacking in the knowledge necessary to succeed in the 21st century.

However, more than half of you told us that you believe your students have enough of these skills to succeed in the workplaces of the future!

What’s going on here? It’s possible that your students are learning about technology outside of school – for example through using phones and computers available at home or in the community. It could also be that you’re expecting many of your students to hold jobs that require only a basic level of competency with technology, which would make their current levels already suitable.

Let us know your thoughts on this puzzling problem by emailing baz@teachertapp.co.uk

2 . The stationery situation

It’s hard to imagine being in a classroom without paper, pens or other stationery for students to work with.

Given their necessity, you might expect schools to provide them for students. However, we were stunned to find out that nearly 40% of you work in schools where no stationery is provided for students.

The most commonly provided stationery are exercise books and paper, although less than 1-in-5 schools provide pens. Perhaps this is because it’s very difficult to stop students leaving your classroom with them? This means you run out of then very quickly and need to buy more!

With limited resource provision in your schools, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that nearly 90% of you bought stationery for students at least once. Nearly half of you told us that this is something that you’ve done frequently.

Do you believe it is fair for teachers to have to provide resources for their own classrooms and students? What are the reasons, aside from money, that make schools reluctant to provide resources? As ever, please send your thoughts to baz@teachertapp.co.uk!

3 . The simple facts of your life…

How much do you walk in a day? How much time do you spend talking to your colleagues?

These are the simple facts of your life that we wanted to help you find out more about. What did we find?

While you’re most likely to walk somewhere around 1-3km, nearly 40% of you walk over 4km. What’s even more remarkable is that 11% of you walk over 11km! That’s the equivalent of walking across 120 football pitches!

Teachers naturally tend to walk quite a bit as they spend most of their day stood up, pacing around their classroom. Does this explain the lengthy distances you walk?

Another possibility is that people, in general, are very bad at estimating distances without measuring them. Perhaps you’re accidentally overstating how active you are!

Aside from being on your feet all day, another unique aspect of teaching is how little time teachers spend talking to their colleagues. In other jobs, people sit with their colleagues all day. In education, teachers spend nearly all of their time with children with only brief opportunities to talk to any adults.

We found out that 1-in-3 of you spend less than 30 minutes speaking to your colleagues, which is less than one tenth of the whole school day! Another 1-in-3 of you spend between 30 minutes and an hour.

With two thirds of you spending less than an hour speaking to your colleagues, there’s a real worry. How are you going to find time to discuss teaching and lesson planning, exchange information on students or even just relax in the middle of a tiring day?

Is the solution to have more organised meetings with the rest of your colleagues? Let us know what you think by contacting baz@teachertapp.co.uk

4. Finally, we know you’re finding our daily readings useful, so here are all of the ones from last week…

PLUS, Don’t forget that there are discussion questions for every single article that can be found here. Why not try them out with your PLC or on CPD Day?

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