I’m Nefertiti Puplampu, I’m a learning science, curriculum and human performance specialist with a master’s and PhD in the areas of teaching and learning as well as 20 years’ experience teaching students on the tertiary level and training and coaching educators in secondary and tertiary level institutions in the United States. I also have significant experience writing, evaluating and redesigning curriculum for higher education institutions, mostly in Information technology and new media, but also in communications and education foundations, among others. I am founder of The Nefertiti Project, a global teaching and learning institute focused on bringing 21st century learning science to everyday practice.
In this blog I will share biweekly posts on Teaching and learning, mostly on the subtopic of 21st century teaching practices. 21st century teaching practices are teaching practices that are aligned to the skills that our current day students, graduates and workers will need in order to be competitive in the global world of work. In short, they involve a move away from traditional stand-and-deliver or lecture teaching formats, away from memorization and regurgitation of course content, away from rote learning, and “chew-and-pour” or “chalk-and-talk” practices as we have dubbed them in many societies. As we move away from these teacher-centered approaches, we move towards greater awareness and adoption of learner-centered teaching strategies. This means that we use techniques that make the learners or students engage the material actively, promoting critical thinking, problem solving and future learning.
These active learning, learner-centered teaching strategies are usually foreign to those of us who came up in teacher centered learning environments and so they are not always easy to learn. We can hear about them and sometimes even see them done but we might feel a bit uneasy about doing them ourselves. This is especially the case for highly experienced teachers who are particularly procedural about their teaching. Or for those of us who have a hard time letting go of the notion that knowledge should come from the person in front of the class.
In these blog pages, every two weeks, we will discuss the mechanics of learner-centered teaching. We will discuss the challenges to adoption of learner centered teaching practices. We will discuss the challenges and benefits of this need for a 21st century teaching orientation. We will explain and simplify some of the learning science behind the shifts, making it easier for educators to adopt them correctly. We will also talk about training and standards in the adoption of 21st century teaching practices across Sub-Saharan Africa where these shifts are only recently being made. This dissemination of information on our move to 21st century teaching practices is the main goal of The Nefertiti Project among a few other smaller training and consulting objectives (technology, ethics and curriculum consults).
The mission of the organization however is to assist in the establishment and maintenance of a standard in this shift.
The goal is to see the quality of our 21st century skills training sustained or improved over the period of its proliferation. This proliferation is already in progress. The mechanisms for measurement and evaluation of these efforts are therefore of primary concern. How will we maintain the quality of teachers and coaches in 21st century teaching and Learning? And how will we maintain that quality across our curriculum and course designs?
Besides sharing ideas and perspectives on 21st century teaching and learning I will comment on our local education movements and events as well as invite guests to contribute their written pieces to our teaching and learning blog.
If you are a teacher, trainer or lecturer looking to learn more about improving your teaching or training skills in this area, you can subscribe to our various social media channels and to this blog to get quick tips, terms, jokes and quotes on 21st century teaching and learning. Or you can follow us just to join the movement and be a part of the solution by staying informed. Sometimes important transformations come in small, seemingly insignificant, packages. And some of the most effective and most revolutionary interventions are the simplest. Simple because all they take is a single, but strategic shift in perspective. Our social Media content is designed to give you short but useful snippets of information you can use to improve your teaching effectiveness and to help guide you into a fuller understanding of learner-centered teaching paradigms. So stay in touch, follow, like and subscribe. You never know what you’ll learn and how it may help you, your institution or your students. If you are an education administrator, you will benefit from the perspective we discuss in the shift away from teacher-centered education on this continent, and you can be an important part of the shift as we do our best to champion and promote this cause. You will also be privy to giveaways and promotions from The Nefertiti Project for you or your organization if you stay subscribed to our social media channels (blog subscription alone does not include those announcements).
My personal educational journey is inextricably tied to the work I currently do. The first educational institution I attended was a Montessori kindergarten in San Jose California. After which I attended a nursery school in Accra Ghana. And went on to primary and secondary schools in Accra. I don’t recall much of the first or second nursery schools, and I cannot say how they may have shaped my expectations or mind frame in terms of teaching. But by the time I got to class one (I entered young/early because I was a bit ahead), I was in serious conflict with the way school was taught and the fact that it was being stripped of any fun or natural excitement. By class two the situation had worsened, in my mind at least, and I recall lots of ‘repeat after me’ and being sent home with pages and pages of little mathematics problems to solve.
By the time I got to secondary school I was at full blown war with these boring learning environments. I excelled in courses where the teachers attempted to make the material come alive to make it applicable. The rest I did ok in. During my high school years I saw a glimpse of what I imagined teaching could be. I took the IB program, and the IB curriculum was designed to create intellectual engagement on the part of the learners. I became even more firmly fixed in the idea that learning could be something so much fuller than what we were experiencing in most of our teaching and learning environments. Many years later I finally got a chance to test my theory teaching at a design college in the United States. I created the environments I believed were more effective and they worked! My classes were not only fun, engaging, and mentally stimulating/challenging, but they were highly effective from a student learning standpoint. I completed my Master’s degree in instructional technology and the principles I chose to study all informed my teaching and confirmed what I suspected all along. That there are paths to greater learning, more effective and efficient means of imparting knowledge, ways that use the active power of an engaged human mind over mindless repetition and rote memorization and regurgitation. Our minds are so much more powerful than the passive processes that we as educators have been taught to employ when we teach. But the more I studied this topic the more I realized that embracing this was a shift in mind frame, not just a change in the use of strategies. I maintained an interest in this shift and continued to hone my teaching skills over the years.
My classes were not only fun, engaging, and mentally stimulating/challenging, but they were highly effective from a student learning standpoint.
Nefertiti Puplampu
I studied further and further into this field and obtained my PhD in instructional systems and Learning Technologies, my dissertation study explored requirements for faculty preparation in using a new scientific model for learner motivation and teaching effectiveness in a very large STEM undergraduate course. The learning science I studied in my PhD was leading edge, and it built upon the teaching principles I was exposed to in my Master’s. Adopting and streamlining these principles and strategies has offered me such clarity and expertise in this area that it would be almost a waste for me not to systematise the dissemination of this knowledge, specifically in Sub Saharan Africa, where I first sparked my objection to the rote learning practices it exposes and resolves. I remain a lifelong learner in these things, continue to improve my own skills and my consistency in their application. But more than anything I am energized and motivated by the wonderful pleasant, enjoyable, challenging and stimulating, experiences I create amongst my students and the knowledge that I am able to impart to them, knowing that they will likely be able to hold on to these concepts for life because they have been effectively anchored in their brains. And this, this is the experience and the outcome I would like to share with as many educators as I reasonably can.
This blog serves as one part of a multi-pronged approach to that dissemination . Workshops, talks/ seminars, skill-sharing labs, one-on-one coaching, skills evaluation, and professional development programs are all among the many approaches the Nefertiti Project has engaged and will be building upon to bring about the slow but steady shift away from the practices that have robbed us of efficiency and effectiveness in our teaching hours.
Do join us here and elsewhere and be sure to subscribe across the various social media channels as they each will offer slightly different content towards this end.
On the blog specifically, I welcome your comments, stories, disagreements and other perspectives, or concerns. The discussion we all have around these issues are some of the most critical events in our move towards this important goal. Opposing perspectives are particularly welcome as they allow us the opportunity to explore the nuances of the science and to engage the particular obstacles and concerns that we will meet on our journey. Eventually I hope to create, in these blog pages, not just an up-to-date resource for educator considerations in 21st century teaching and learning, but also a location for healthy discourse on the issues and an archive or repository of these important ideas and discussions. Please direct all questions and any ideas you have to me at nefertiti@thenefertitiproject.com, or reach out to the Nefertiti Project in Ghana by phone or worldwide on WhatsApp at +233 50 984 5010.
Thanks for joining us in the early stages of our journey and we’ll see you in the articles ahead.