Teach learners how to reason powerfully

Curriculum content has been the yardstick for performance. With little room for innovation, limited acquisition of new skills, reproduction of facts; such has been the problem of many African education systems. Learning, like the Japanese and Koreans have embraced, should be directed towards acquiring skills that best benefit the learner while operating in the ever changing society. Many times teachers focus on students reproducing what has already been given to them rather than students finding their way around scenarios through effective reasoning capabilities. Reasoning as a skill should be fully emphasised and upheld by all teachers who look to nurture creative minds. Like one great writer suggested, “a society based on production is only productive not creative” As we set our targets under Vision 2020, our educational objectives will not only be on numbers in the classrooms but also on the quality of our school products. So how do we bring up creative and yet productive individuals in schools? We need to start imparting techniques that will provoke students into thinking critically and reason better in challenging situations. A variety in classroom questioning is the first step to achieving this. Although questions serve various functions in the teaching-learning environment, teachers should be mindful that classroom questioning is not intended to determine whether students have learnt what has been provided but to guide students on how to find solutions to the challenges placed before them. In this case, a teacher should be reducing on what, which, when questions and placing emphasis on the high end questions of how and why that require thoughtful responses provoking learners to explain the means by which they arrived at the solution rather than the end product. It is from consistent practice like this that learners begin to adopt these skills at a later time in their productive life. The writer is a school-based mentor.