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Why teachers in Ghana need to relax more!

17 February 2020

Welcome to our weekly blog for Teacher Tapp Ghana!

Every Monday we summarise our most surprising and interesting survey findings from the week before. This weekly blog provides an easy way for you to learn about the experiences and opinions of teachers across Ghana.

Before we dive into our exciting findings, we just wanted to remind you all about…

🥳 CPD Day! 🥳

CPD Day is on Thursday 27th February and entitles all teachers in Ghana to a day in school focused on their own professional development. As Teacher Tapp is one of the simplest and most effective ways of accessing free CPD, we’ll be using this time to encourage you to help us get more teachers using the app.

1-in-3 of our current users have told us they’ll be using CPD Day to introduce Teacher Tapp to their colleagues. If you’d like to join them, use these helpful resources –

  1. If you want to give a presentation to your colleagues, you can use resources found here to explain the app and its usefulness, as well as help your colleagues download the app. More information can be found here.
  2. If you’d like to run a discussion around one of our articles, we’ll be including discussion questions alongside all of our new articles for the next 10 days. You’ll be able to see these in the app.

Remember, running Teacher Tapp activity on CPD Day can be used as evidence of leadership for your NTC promotional portfolio. Plus, if you need any further support before the day, just get in touch with baz@teachertapp.co.uk

In the mean time, here are three of our most intriguing findings from the past week…

1. You’re optimistic and feel useful…but you can’t relax!

We asked you three questions to assess your mood over the prior couple of weeks – in particular how optimistic, useful and relaxed you’ve been feeling.

The questions we used were all taken from the ‘Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale’ which is a series of questions used by researchers to assess and monitor mental wellbeing. The questions aim to find out how happy and positive you are generally feeling in life. How did you do on the questions?

60% of you told us you’ve been feeling optimistic at least most of the time, with 10% of you telling us that you’d only felt this way quite rarely or not at all. A staggering 86% of you told us that you’d felt useful for most of the last couple of weeks. These are all positive signs that you’re in a place of good mental wellbeing.

However, we found one was one area where your mental wellbeing seemed to be under-performing. When we asked you how relaxed you’ve been feeling recently, nearly 1-in-2 of you told us that you had barely felt relaxed at all over the previous two weeks.

These low levels of relaxation could be temporary, caused by recently having a lot to do that keeps you busy. For example, you might be revising for your GES Aptitude Tests on February 20th and 21st.

However, it could also be that you have a hard time relaxing in general. This is true of lots of teachers in general, including in the UK. Because teachers constantly feel like they have more work to do, they can find it difficult to relax. What’s worse, many teachers see their job as being so important that they don’t deserve the right to relax.

Relaxation is very important for mental wellbeing. It helps you rest and recuperate. But periods of relaxation also increase your cognitive abilities. This means that you can complete work more quickly and to a higher standard. If you’re not getting enough relaxation, then you’ll complete work to a lower standard which can make you feel stressed and anxious, leading to worse levels of mental wellbeing.

So make sure you find some time this week to relax. Your brain, and your boss, will thank you for it!

2 . Skills for life and self-discipline…

Teachers have an enormous influence on their students, often in ways that we don’t realise. But if you had to pick three ways you influence your students’ lives for the better, what would they be?

When we asked you this question, there were some especially popular selections. The most popular things you wanted to leave your students with are “The skills they need for life”, while 1-in-2 of you told us you’d live to leave your students with self discipline.

These two outcomes came above your desire to leave students with knowledge of your subject and a passion for it. This pairs up with some of our previous findings which have highlighted your interest in equipping students with the skills they need to survive in the 21st century – including ICT skills, digital literacy and an ability to work as part of a group.

In technical terms, this might be taken to mean our users in Ghana are currently more ‘Progressive’ than ‘Traditional’. This means you believe the purpose of education is to give students skills rather than knowledge, and to prepare students for life in general rather than for academic excellence. This is also the focus of the new Basic Curriculum in Ghana.

Do you agree with this characterisation? As ever, please send your thoughts to baz@teachertapp.co.uk!

3 . You spoke, we listened…

Last Wednesday we asked you a couple of questions about your experience of using Teacher Tapp so far. We asked these questions so we could understand how we can make sure you get the best experience out of Teacher Tapp.

You told us that three simple things would motivate you to keep using the app every day:

  1. Sharing articles that are specifically written for teachers working in Ghana
  2. Making sure these articles don’t take up too much time to read as you’re often busy with other commitments
  3. Setting up a system that allows using the Teacher Tapp app as evidence for your promotion portfolios

We’re really grateful for this feedback and are taking the following actions to respond to it:

  1. Working with T-Tel and other local teachers in Ghana to produce content that is specifically for Ghanaian teachers. We will begin sharing this content this forthcoming week (17/02/2020).
  2. Updating our process for selecting articles to make sure they are short, taking less than 5 minutes to read.
  3. We are continuing to work with GES and the NTC to set up a more formal process for using app usage as evidence of engagement with CPD.

Teacher Tapp takes your feedback seriously and will always act to improve our app in response to it. If you have any further suggestions or feedback on how we can improve the app, please complete this short form or email baz@teachertapp.co.uk.

4. Finally, we know you’re finding our daily readings useful, so here are all of the ones from last week…

Download the Teacher Tapp App today!

If you liked our great findings and want to to get them sent to you weekly, then download our app below! You’ll also get access to free, high quality CPD articles and get to answer questions that will be used to change the education system in Ghana for the better.

Just use these download links to download our free app and get started today.