Peter Mokaya Tabichi has made the country and Africa proud. He is a lesson on many things: humility, courage and compassion. Above all, he is a good lesson to the teaching fraternity in Africa.
The soft-spoken teacher cites passion as his main motivation in executing his teaching duties and the happiness that comes with it makes him to keep doing more. And this is just one teacher out of the more than 300,000 that we have in Kenya; never mind that locally, he has never been recognised for anything, leave alone by his employer; Teachers Service Commission.
Yet ironically, as a society, we spend an inordinate amount of time, resources and money looking at how to improve the quality of education. The questions we ask ourselves are always the same. How do we improve the quality of teaching and learning? How do we make our children more motivated and competitive? And how do we get children to value and ‘own’ their education?
And yet, after all the talk of new methodologies and curricula; after new and different methods of teaching and models of assessment; after all the time and money spent on technology; after the personalisation of education and differentiated teaching; after learning styles and habits of mind; after mindfulness and every child matters; after the debates about continuous and formative assessment; and after all the constant tinkering, bureaucratic and legislative, with their greater focus on data and compliance, we don't seem closer to establishing what are the most important factors that make children and our nation succeed.
Teach them
The only consistent factor we can identify is the role of the teacher, whose abilities and skill set, knowledge and enthusiasm are crucial in determining the success or otherwise, of learners.
Teaching is about engagement, about getting children to listen. The best investment any government can make is to get the most effective, the most talented and the best teachers in front of the children.
We should struggle to ensure we have teachers who know how to enthuse and connect with children. These are teachers who can properly engage with children and teach them by inspiring and challenging them. Sometimes situations dictate that the process comes down to hard work rather than inspiration, but teaching is all about the relationship between teacher and pupil more than anything else.
Children will work harder for a teacher they respect, even if they demand more and insist on discipline and high standards. One can only speculate what would have been the impact if all the money spent on technology had instead gone into lowering the teacher-pupil ratio (it is very bad now in schools with the nearly 95 per cent transition) and improving the identification, selection and training of the most effective and passionate teachers. Where would we be now?
Their passion
Good teachers may use resources to embellish their lessons; they will not allow the resources to become the lesson. The best teachers always want to do and find out more about their own craft; pushing out the boundaries of their learning and teaching, which is why many exceptional teaches re-work or even discard their teaching notes on a regular basis and look for new topics and ways to teach the same thing.
What Peter Mokaya has done is to show that teaching is not a profession for the cynical or indifferent; enthusiasm, interest in pedagogy and a thirst for passing on the benefits of education is what makes them stand tall. They are typified by their passion, breadth of interests, high expectations, understanding of how children learn, empathy, an insistence on greater self-discipline and by their relationship with their pupils.
Today’s and tomorrow’s education is getting more complicated. The world that the next generation will grow up in will be radically different from the past. A world filled with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, virtual reality, personalised medicine, self-driving cars, people on Mars and other puzzling things.
It may be a world where people might not even have jobs and where society itself may be organised differently. How are parents supposed to know how to prepare them to succeed in a world that we cannot predict?
For me, it starts by rethinking what a school is and with it, how the teacher would be involved in it. Schools used to be the storehouses of human knowledge and going to school was the best way to learn anything.
Now that is no longer the case, knowledge is no longer confined to dusty classrooms or old books. Thanks to ICT, it is now accessible to anybody who wants it anywhere. All that schools have to do is get them to want it. This means that it must be delivered differently and places the teacher at the centre of it all.
As a teacher, Peter Mokaya Tabichi has shown how to do it; he chose to became a teacher to make a difference. And he has done it.
Prof. Mogambi, Communication and Social Change Expert, teaches at the University of Nairobi.hmogambi @ yahoo.co.uk
