ESTABLISHMENT OF TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE IN DELTA: A Turning Point For Teachers
By Richardson Ogwezzy
It is a hackneyed saying that education is the bedrock of national development and that no nation can develop beyond the level and limit of its education. There cannot be any over-emphasis of the centrality of the teacher as the hub of the success of education. Good and quality education, which is a desideratum of every nation, fundamentally hinges on the quality of teaching that goes on in the classroom.
Unarguably, the pragmatic and beneficial legacy a responsible government can bequeath to her citizens is quality education.
All workers in every sector of the economy need on-the-job professional development to reposition them for effective service and result delivery. Due to the importance of teachers and the nature of their job, professional development such as seminars, workshops, conferences, symposia, training and retraining, etc are all beneficial, purposeful and consequentially effective to them. Such goal-oriented activities are inevitable in view of the incontestable fact that they are useful platforms for teachers to learn new techniques, methodologies and strategies based on contemporary ideas emerging from researches on education. Professional development of teachers gives room for teachers’ high job performance. This subsequently ensures good quality education with attendant positives on students’ good academic achievements.
Therefore, the establishment of the Teachers’ Professional Development Centre (TPDC) by the administration of His Excellency, Sen. (Dr) Ifeanyi Okowa, is novel in Nigeria’s education history and a highly appreciated development. The Centre, among other things, seeks to achieve teachers’ capacity building, which ultimately brings about new frontiers of development in Delta State and Nigeria at large. This is a sharp departure from the hit-and-run approach to teachers’ on-the-job capacity building typical of preceding administrations. Obviously, this development is a proactive strategy, more result-oriented approach and provides comprehensible and unambiguous answers to the hitherto complex solutions to the whole questions on teachers’ professional development.
As a teacher in the State, I observed Sen. (Dr.) Okowa’s administration is the first to give noticeable (first of its kind) induction to newly recruited teachers sometime last year. And to make the gains of the training of those newly recruited teachers not to be sunk into the drains as well as vivify the skills of the existing teachers, he recently established the Teachers’ Professional Development Centre. This development facility is very useful to teachers in both primary and secondary schools in the State who now appreciate better the value of training and self-development going on at the Centre. Just few months of the commissioning of the Centre, teachers are now regularly attending capacity building workshops in hundreds almost on weekly basis.
This gives credence to our expectations that teachers in the State from now will no doubt be updated, reinvigorated, rejuvenated and reawakened in their career matrix. On the aspect of teachers’ professional development, I am fully convinced that the present administration needs unreserved and deserved commendations, not just from teachers alone but from people of all walks of life, because such giant strides are to the benefit of everyone in the long run. While other governors in some States are sacking teachers as a result of fault-finding and deliberately orchestrated inefficiency occasioned by the inadequacy/non-provision of facilities, our own ‘Ekwueme’ is on the humane track of providing professional development to make teachers perform optimally in their career.
The concern that the present administration has shown on teachers’ training and development would have taken the State to a height where teachers would be playing the role of nationally redefining education, if such training programme(s) had begun with past administrations. On its own, the Delta State government by now would have been concentrating on other primary areas of concern and development of the teachers. For instance, teachers in the State are long overdue for allowances (for inconveniences) which their counterparts in other sectors enjoy in the event of transfer. Effective implementation of this will go a long way in encouraging them (teachers) and also giving them a sense of belonging.
Similarly, the teachers in remote and rural communities who do not enjoy accessibility to social amenities like their colleagues in the urban and more developed areas of the State can be given rural allowances to encourage them in their place of work and also for the revivification of their work commitments in line with the ethics of the profession.
His Excellency Sir, once again the teachers of Delta State wholeheartedly appreciate you on the establishment of the Centre. Members of the Academic Staff Union of Secondary School (ASUSS) and Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) see you as a teachers-friendly Governor. This is attributable to the fact that teachers now enjoy the benefits attendant to workshops and other related career development programmes which never existed in the past. Delta teachers are, without doubt, presently experiencing a turning point in their career in your administration. This explicates why they hold you in high esteem as you have created the hitherto elusive enabling conditions for the improvement of their sense of self-worth in their chosen career. Their love for you consequently is clearly boundless!
Richardson Ogwezzy is a teacher at Girls’ Secondary School, Kwale
