Nigerian teacher, Olasunkanmi Opeifa is a step closer to being crowned the World’s best teacher after making the 2020 World Best Teacher top 10 shortlists. Olaifa whose dream from age eight was to be a teacher, teaches at the Government Day Secondary School Karu in the country’s capital city, Abuja.
The Nigerian will slug it out with South Africa’s Mokhudu Cynthia Machaba alongside other teachers from Brazil, USA, India, Malaysia, UK, South Korea, Vietnam and Italy.
Opeifa made it through an initial list of 50 teachers to enter the final top 10 over the course of ten weeks.
The teacher who wins yearly award goes home with US $1m (£747,000) and Olaifa could bring this back to Abuja where he works if he’s crowns winner at the Global Teacher Prize 2020 ceremony taking place on the 3rd December 2020.
Opeifa introduced music to learning which he called “edutainment” to teach students who are unwilling to learn the way any teacher teachers.
“I will teach in such a way that I can link whatever they are learning with a popular dance step, with music around there. Once you do that they are waiting for you to come back to the class, they want to learn more and it has really been helping and giving us results,” he told globalteacherprize.org.
