Responsibility is Mutual

I like this mantra a lot. It's one of the core beliefs of the organization I currently work for, and it basically suggests that the success or failure of everything we do will be from collective effort. Since we operate in the education sector, it is especially important that we uphold this belief ourselves and drill it into our students. This way, we understand that education is a system, and systems as we know, are complex and rely on all of its components to run smoothly.

So in this system called education, who is to blame if we’re not seeing the outcomes we want?

Teachers, students, parents, the learning environment and stakeholders are the components of this system. So if society is not seeing the stellar performance they're hoping/expecting of students, what we need to do is a root analysis to get to the bottom of whatever the problem is, not point fingers. But too often, this is usually rather the case. We’re looking for someone to blame, and who better than teachers, right?

Some teachers are in the profession not because they love what they do, but because it is how they get paid. To them, teaching is doing the bare minimum to get paid. They’re not invested in the success of students in the tiniest bit. You would think that I’m simply talking about those teachers who don’t come to class, but this extends beyond them. For others, they show up alright, but as long as they’re in class teaching, they’ve done their job, regardless of whether students understand or not. Perhaps we can blame these types of teachers for mediocre performance of students.

Committed teachers don’t just teach, they make conscious efforts to understand their learners, reflect over their own lessons and practice, and innovate alternative ways to approach subject content to improve learning outcomes for their students. These types of teachers, you can’t blame.

However, in this blame game, we lump both types of teachers together because “it’s their job” to teach students. Whiles that is true, there’s only so much a teacher can do in ensuring the success of students. We have a local saying in Ghana that goes, “You can take a donkey to a river, but you can’t force it to drink”. Forgive the analogy, but I’m sure you get my point.

Then there’s parents, their denial, and the results of that denial.

Parents struggle with accepting that maybe, just maybe, their kids’ poor performance is a result of their own actions of inactions. Through out my education, I’ve seen this happen a lot, particularly from my primary to junior high school years. Parents would storm school grounds to harass teachers over matters concerning disciplining their kids when kids go wayward: they forgot that academics is something affected by other things such as class attendance and punctuality. And if this is how you would address matters indirectly impacting your child’s academic success, are you the parent not being a weapon fashioned against your child? Do we still blame the teacher?

In the school I currently teach at, a lot of students absent themselves from school when it rains because their parents take them to farm. Every time this happens, they’re drawn back an entire day of learning in different subjects. Now do the math for every time this happens through out an entire semester, and the gross impact that will have on their results by the time they graduate.

Now, say teachers, students, and parents all act right. Questions like whether the school is a conducive environment for teaching and learning is another thing. If there is no toilet facility in the school, you can expect that both teachers and students will frequently leave school unauthorized during class. Performance takes a hit there. Whose fault?

We can keep going on and on and on, and there’d still be no one person or thing to blame. Student success is a mutual responsiblity of all agencies in the education system, so the cause of mediocre performance is not solely the responsibility of the teacher. It’s something that should be investigated, because as demonstrated, it can be due to an array of things.

All images are mine

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