Challenges that teachers face in Kenya

  

Date Posted: 11/17/2012 11:39:36 AM

Posted By: jullieflavia  Membership Level: Gold  Total Points: 2188

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1. Gross mis-distribution of qualified teachers which denies a portion of our public school students' access to a high and quality education. Sometimes a teacher may have a great work load that denies him or her chance to even prepare well for teaching a lesson.

2. Teachers continue to have little voice in creating the policies and programmes needed to ensure that every student has a good teacher. Most of this work is decided upon by other bodies and teachers are only to follow these guidelines when teaching.

3. There is a large number of entrants of teachers in the profession. There is so little consensus about how to recruit and in some areas especially in rural set up, recruitment of untrained teachers has been high. The ignorant belief that anybody can teach has left the profession to be thought of as low. In reality, you can only know what to teach and how to teach after being trained.

4. Lack of commitment to the teaching profession, for example a number of teachers is likely to leave teaching due to poor pay, too little respect and time factor. However, with the current salary talks and agreements set to level teachers’ salaries with other civil servants, the problem is set to be solved soon. Poor remuneration, compared to other professionals has always been a challenging factor for teachers.

5. Maintaining energy and enthusiasm is a challenge for even the most experienced teachers. It is said that many teachers do not voluntarily choose teaching as a profession. Most of the teachers at the lowest levels choose teaching profession as a last resort and therefore give in just bare enthusiasm in teaching.

6. Students with bad behavior have always been hard to cope with. Teachers have therefore been discouraged to help such students and even teach them with interest.

7. There is gender imbalance both

in education and in the teaching profession.

8. Social-economic background of the entrants is sometimes hard to explain. Teachers are faced with this challenge of teaching students from different backgrounds which to some extent is hard to level in class.

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