دستیابی به آموزش با کیفیت با درک رضایت شغلی معلمان Achieving Quality Education by Understanding Teacher Job Satisfaction Determinants

1. Introduction A common adage among teachers in Nigeria is “our rewards are in heaven”. This is viewed by many as an indication that teachers are only appreciated by God. A further interpretation is that they desire appreciation for the work they do. This “cry” for recognition signifies a desire for acknowledgement, which may be considered as an unmet need. An unsatisfied need may have the capacity to unleash either physical or psychological discomfort that leads the individual to find ways of satisfying the need and possibly lessen the discomfort. A teacher’s unmet need may lead to the resolve to leave the profession or attend to his job with reckless abandon. Teachers are instrumental to the nurturing of the future leaders of society. The work that they do is arguably fundamental to the development of any society. Therefore, appreciating the work that they do by every member of society can strengthen their upkeep. We add that the needs of teachers can only be attended to if the responsible stakeholders—government, school governing councils, and communities—are made aware of them. For some time now, within basic and secondary education, there have been reports of poor pass rates, low throughput rate, and insufficient infrastructure. These often manifest in a dissatisfied band of teachers. Reports of this nature are common in sub-Saharan Africa (Richardson 2014). The worst hit based on most accounts is Nigeria (Adesulu et al. 2015). The case of Nigeria is mostly fuelled by a number of factors namely a continuously downward economy (Edet 2014), bad governance (Ogunnubi and Okeke-Uzodike 2016), a pervasively high scale of dilapidated infrastructure (Iwu and Iwu 2013), a massive disregard of the teaching profession by successive governments who refuse to pay teachers’ salaries (see Abayomi et al. 2015; Teacher Solidarity 2016; Ololube 2006) and several other factors. These factors often drive Nigerian teachers to seek alternative means of livelihood (Akyeampong and Bennell 2007) which we argue will lead to high rate of teacher absenteeism, inability to adequately prepare lesson materials and consequently ill-prepared classes. To shine a light in this supposedly gloomy picture of the Nigerian teacher’s current state requires a number of elements.