How to train teachers: three skills every teacher training must emphasise

Training teachers will always remain a crucial aspect of strengthening the Nigerian education system. Teacher training, especially at the primary and secondary education level, happens all around the year. However, it is not unusual to find a lot of emphasis on teacher training at the beginning of the year in both public and private schools. 

Depending on the unique goals of each school, teacher training might emphasize different forms of capacity building. Regardless of these differences, there are three things every 21st-century teacher training must emphasise:

Listening Skills

The kind of education that would really strengthen learners’ capacity for self-actualization and problem-solving must emphasize thinking. Getting learners to think requires a teacher who will walk with them through the muddy journey of knowledge creation. Such a teacher is willing to listen to the students, and not make teaching a one-way conversation where students are only told what they need to hear.

Listening in this context goes beyond the social context of simply hearing someone out. Like my co-authors and I said in our recent research work, listening in teaching context involves paying deliberate attention to “students’ thinking in constructive and respectful ways — to tune into and appreciate students’ intellectual and affective experiences in knowledge construction.” This is a critical skill for teachers who would lead students towards an ability, not only to memorize, but to also generate original knowledge. 

Digital Skills

The 21st-century work is a natively digital world. The 21st century teacher must know how to maximize technology as a helpful tool of education, and not a hindrance to it. Nigeria’s educational sector indeed has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to digital education.

The heat of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that one of the greatest hindrances to digital education in Nigeria is teacher’s knowledge of digital education tools.  We don’t need to wait for another pandemic to throw our education system into a hullabaloo like COVID did before we take digital education seriously at every tier of education. Every teacher training program should incorporate helping teachers get better with the usage of technology tools, including AI. For individual teachers, I made a checklist of how to use some common tech tools in your classroom, you can find it here.

Design Thinking Skills

I would have called this “entrepreneurial skill” but I realized it could be seen in the “know how to start a business” way when I rather meant it in the “know how to solve problems in your classroom” way. 

The 21st-century teacher is dealing with an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Foresight Practitioners call it the VUCA world. Challenges will continue to exist. Complex, unpredictable challenges. COVID-19 was an example that was clear to all. No one can fully foresee the challenges that the world will face.

In the context of Nigeria, with a fraught educational system, the complexity increases. Aside from global issues, teachers have to deal with multiple local issues all at the same time, from lack of infrastructure to progressive reduction in students’ motivation for education. All of which hinders their ability to deliver quality education.  

We can focus on the challenges and how complex they are, or we can begin to take our baby steps towards solving it in the small ways we can. From one classroom to another. That is where teachers come in. They are the real first responders in the education sector, and they are the ones who have the most direct access to the classroom.

It is high time we stopped approaching solving the problems in the education sector as an “out-of-the-classroom” issue. Education leaders and policymakers need to strengthen teachers’ ability to deal with the challenges they face in their classrooms in their little ways.

Design thinking skills help teachers shift their thinking from solely waiting on leaders in the upper echelon of power to do something about problems they encounter in their work, to taking the bull by the horns in their own classrooms.

Imagine a teacher who knows how to empathize, who knows how to define a problem appropriately, who knows how to brainstorm, and knows how to create and test solutions of how to make their own teaching better by themselves? That would not only be a powerful teacher who is able to maximize whatever they have but would be a vivid example of how to be a solution provider to their students.

If we wait until the government, multilateral organizations, and other education leaders are able to solve all problems in education in every classroom, we will wait for long. We need to get teachers on board with daily problem-solving within the manageable context of their classrooms by equipping them with the skills to do it. Or, as Lela Mohammed Mussa, Zanzibar’s minister of education, put it at the United Nations Transforming Education Summit I attended in New York in 2022: “Empower teachers as education entrepreneurs”.

Oluwatoyin is a Doctoral Researcher in STEM Education, Social Entrepreneur and Policy Consultant. She writes from Boston, United States and Lagos, Nigeria. She can be reached at [email protected] or on LinkedIn here.