Nigerian Olasunkanmi Opeifa has been nominated as on the top 10 finalists for the 2020 edition of the Global Teacher Prize.
Olasunkanmi is an english teacher at Government Day Secondary School, Karu, Abuja, Nigeria. He was selected from over 12,000 nominations and applications from over 140 countries around the world
The Global Teacher Prize is a US $1 million award presented annually to an exceptional teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to their profession. It serves to underline the importance of educators and the fact that, throughout the world, their efforts deserve to be recognised and celebrated. It seeks to acknowledge the impacts of the very best teachers – not only on their students but on the communities around them.
Olasunkanmi Opeifa decided that he would become a teacher at the very young age of just eight years old, and has never wavered in his choice After graduation, he served for a year in a very remote part of the country, Koma, Adamawa, as the only English teacher in a village school of over 200 students, where he helped build the school’s first ever library.
In 2012, he moved to Government Day Secondary School in Karu, a semi-rural area of Abuja serving children of low-income earners in the civil service, market traders and artisans. Students often cannot afford textbooks or the heavily subsidized school fees.
With more than fifty students per class, he grappled with teaching English to children with poor writing and reading skills and relative poverty, but despite so many challenges, his is a success story.
Olasunkanmi Opeifa has a reputation for innovation and going out of his way to ensure his students receive the best possible tuition, often consulted by other staff on the latest 21st century learning skills, as he uses the flipped classroom model for teaching essay writing, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms for assessment, online videos and e-past questions.
To stimulate his students he has been known to use edutainment/fun-based learning for teaching English language concepts, for example linking essay writing with popular dance steps and, to demonstrate phonology and grammar, he has even taken to rapping and hip-hop songs.
Having published a book on oral English pedagogy in 2014, he has been invited to speak at seminars organised for teachers. He boosted his school’s recognition and good name winning the 2018 Maltina Teacher of the Year Award as the best teacher in Nigeria and as part of the dividend from this prize a block of six classrooms was built at the school with a library well stocked with books, enabling the school to take up to 300 new students a year.
Applicants will be judged on a rigorous set of criteria to identify an extraordinary teacher who has made an outstanding contribution to the profession.
The Academy will look for evidence of a combination of:
- Employing effective instructional practices that are replicable and scalable to influence the quality of education globally.
- Employing innovative instructional practices that address the particular challenges of the school, community or country and which have shown sufficient evidence to suggest they could be effective in addressing such challenges in a new way.
- Achieving demonstrable student learning outcomes in the classroom.
- Impact in the community beyond the classroom that provide unique and distinguished models of excellence for the teaching profession and others.
- Helping children become global citizens through providing them with a values-based education that equips them for a world where they will potentially live, work and socialise with people from many different nationalities, cultures and religions.
- Improving the teaching profession through helping to raise the bar of teaching, sharing best practice, and helping colleagues overcome any challenges they face in their school.
- Teacher recognition from governments, national teaching organisations, head-teachers, colleagues, members of the wider community or pupils.
Olasunkanmi says if he wins, he would use the funds for a number of projects: a scholarship scheme for the underprivileged, the building of libraries in some of the surrounding rural communities, and the creation of a fully digitised K-12 not-for-profit school in his own community.
Kenyan Peter Tabichi won the 2019 edition of the competition.
