Stephen Fry Announces Olasunkanmi Opeifa As A Top 10 Finalist | Global Teacher Prize 2020

Watch Stephen Fry announce Nigerian teacher Olasunkanmi Opeifa as a top ten finalist for The Global Teacher Prize 2020. Ten teachers in ten weeks. They each deserve their moment in the spotlight. Who’s next?

Now, more than ever, we must shine a light on the world’s teachers.
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English teacher Olasunkanmi Opeifa from Government Day Secondary School, Karu, Abuja, Nigeria, was shortlisted for the Global Teacher Prize 2020, after being selected from over 12,000 nominations and applications from over 140 countries around the world.

Olasunkanmi Opeifa decided that he would become a teacher at the very young age of just eight years old, and has never wavered in his choice

After graduation, he served for a year in a very remote part of the country, Koma, Adamawa, as the only English teacher in a village school of over 200 students, where he helped build the school’s first ever library. In 2012, he moved to Government Day Secondary School in Karu, a semi-rural area of Abuja serving children of low-income earners in the civil service, market traders and artisans. Students often cannot afford textbooks or the heavily subsidized school fees. With more than fifty students per class, he grappled with teaching English to children with poor writing and reading skills and relative poverty, but despite so many challenges, his is a success story.

Olasunkanmi Opeifa has a reputation for innovation and going out of his way to ensure his students receive the best possible tuition, often consulted by other staff on the latest 21st century learning skills, as he uses the flipped classroom model for teaching essay writing, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms for assessment, online videos and e-past questions. To stimulate his students he has been known to use edutainment/fun-based learning for teaching English language concepts, for example linking essay writing with popular dance steps and, to demonstrate phonology and grammar, he has even taken to rapping and hip-hop songs.

Having published a book on oral English pedagogy in 2014, he has been invited to speak at seminars organised for teachers. He boosted his school’s recognition and good name winning the 2018 Maltina Teacher of the Year Award as the best teacher in Nigeria and as part of the dividend from this prize a block of six classrooms was built at the school with a library well stocked with books, enabling the school to take up to 300 new students a year.

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