Collaboration; The New Face Of Professional Competition – The Teacher’s Perspective.

How do we define the new competition? Winner takes all or one wins for all?
10 teachers went on a professional retreat. Each teacher was told to write their
subjects and names of students on cups, fill each with oil, and arrange them on the
floor. The labelled cups of oil were now rearranged by the head trainer, who mixed
up the labeled cups of oil with so many other randomly labeled cups on the floor.
Now the main exercise was for each teacher to locate their own labeled cup of oil
without spilling the oil in two minutes. It was difficult to do so without spilling the
oil. They spilled the oil and made a mess of themselves.
The second part of the exercise was a reverse. The teachers were now required to
identify one another’s labelled cups and bring them out without spilling the oil. It
was quite easy for them with one teacher carefully picking up a fellow teacher’s
labelled cup as they moved around the arranged cups with no spillage or mess.
Now, the oil represents the creativity and specialization of each teacher and the
labeled cups represents the medium through which it is delivered. The new face of
professional competition requires that we compete together to preserve time, prevent
the mess of oil spillage, and leverage on the principle of ripple effect for ourselves,
our students, and the society. The language of collaboration speaks about competing
together. The winner does not take all, it becomes one for all and all for one.
From the teacher’s perspective, the profession is a landmark in the society and
collaboration is seen as a system of specialized creativity working together on the
society’s raw material to produce outputs that can man any sector of the society. This
implies that when you train one teacher, 10 other teachers have been trained.
Fundamentally, this has redefined professional success too. When a child gets an A1
in English but gets a D7 in Biology or Economics, we cannot applaud the English
teacher in isolation because if English is the language of instruction, and passing
English implies doing well in the four language skills. These four language skills, if aught in application to learning other subjects, will reflect in the child’s
performance in other subjects delivered using English language.
We can therefore say that the new face of professional competition from the
teachers’ perspective should no longer be teaching in subject isolation but teaching
in inter and intra subject collaboration. This is where versatility, a core value of the
teaching profession, applies because collaboration makes versatility easy.
Finally, collaboration is the renovation that will attract bright minds in the society to
the profession, and flush out the “cheats” or “idiots” in the profession as Reverend
Father George Ehusani once said;
“In a society where all bright minds
don’t want to be teachers,
their children will be taught by idiots.”

Eagleteacher

Eagleteacher (Bisayo Iseyemi) is a Languages teacher. She teaches mostlyK-12

students. She is from Nigeria.