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.
The number of teachers using us everyday is still quite small. This means that the number of teachers answering our questions isn’t enough for our findings to apply to all teachers in Ghana. However, once we have a few hundred teachers answering our questions then our findings will be more accurate and reliable.
To help us get to that level, we need your help! Please send our website to all the teachers you know and encourage them to download the app and start using it. The more teachers we get on there, the better our service will be.
For now, here are the most fascinating findings from the past week….
1 . You want textbooks more than technology
Imagine your headteacher is feeling generous one day, and decides to offer you some new resources for your classroom. You can either have a new set of textbooks, an editable set of worksheets or an AI-driven chatbot. What would you choose?
When we asked you this question the most popular option was the textbooks, with 52% of you wanting a new set. Textbooks are a very flexible teaching tools – they can be used for individual study, group work and can be read aloud to students. Perhaps this flexibility explains their popularity in this question?
The second most popular option among respondents was the AI-driven chatbot for pupils. Such a piece of technology, which could answer students’ questions for you, could actually save teachers a lot of time and effort. It would be effectively the same as having a second teacher in the room! So why wasn’t it the most popular option?
We think the benefits of the chatbot may not have been obvious enough in the question. But it could also be that teachers in Ghana have had negative experiences of technology in the classroom and would rather not rely on it unless absolutely necessary. To investigate further we’ll be asking you about your experiences using educational technology in future surveys.
2 . Here’s what your perfect lesson would look like…
When we asked you to select the features of your ideal lesson, there were four especially popular elements. 62% of you said you’d want students working in pairs/groups, 52% wanted students working to complete lots of practice questions, 45% wanted the lesson topic to relate to students’ lives and 41% wanted students speaking more than the teacher.
The least popular feature, with only 3% of teachers selecting it, is “The classroom is silent for much of the time”. These selections combine to suggest that our current teacher users in Ghana prefer more more student-centred teaching methods to traditional, teacher-led approaches.
We’ll be using this information to try and make sure we select articles for you to read that match and help with your personal teaching style.
3 . Teachers in Ghana have to argue for higher wages
Many teachers across the world feel that their pay is unfair. It looks like this might be a concern for many teachers in Ghana too. When asked, 76% of you told us you’d had to argue for a higher wage at some point in your career.
It would be really interesting to find out from teachers whether you were successful in arguing for a higher wage. This feedback could help us come up with some tips for teachers to use when approaching senior staff for a salary increase. Please let us know by using our contact information on our new webpage to get in touch.
4. Finally, we know you’re finding our daily readings useful, so here are all of the ones from last week…
- How can you get students to ask good questions?
- How to build routines into your classroom management
- Planning learning sequences instead of lessons
- The best way to start students on a new activity
- Persuading students to change their behaviour
- The most effective way to design multiple choice tests
- The Ten Principles that will change your teaching
