Biography
Dr. Jacob Filgona is a lecturer II at the Federal College of Education, Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria. His research interests include instructional strategies, student motivation, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher education, curriculum implementation, and educational technology. He has published widely in these areas and has participated in national and international research collaborations. His current research focuses on curriculum transformation, decoloniality, Education 4.0, teacher education, and technology-enhanced learning in African higher education.
Conference contributions 2
RESTORING FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY AND SEQUENTIAL COHERENCE IN LESSON PLANNING:
A critical examination of contemporary template distortions
Lesson planning is a central practice in teacher education and instructional design, yet contemporary lesson plan templates have undergone extensive modification without corresponding theoretical justification. Many templates now exhibit conceptual inconsistencies that distort the pedagogical purposes of their constituent components. This article introduces the concept of functional integrity—the principle that each lesson plan component should perform a distinct instructional function without duplication, substitution, or conceptual overlap with other components. It further proposes sequential coherence – the principle that lesson plan components should be ordered according to the temporal and logical dependencies of instruction. Drawing on instructional design traditions including behavioural objectives, instructional events, alignment theory, and teacher planning research, the article identifies three recurring threats to functional integrity: functional distortion (inappropriate information placed within a component), functional duplication (identical information repeated across components), and functional displacement (one component performing another's role). Through systematic analysis of common lesson plan components, the article develops a principle-based framework for evaluating template quality. The framework provides school administrators, teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers with diagnostic tools. In order to enable learner-centred pedagogy, formative assessment, and self-regulated learning, the study suggests that lesson planning quality should be evaluated based on the preservation of functional integrity and sequential coherence rather than template complexity or administrative completeness.
TEACHER AGENCY AND CURRICULUM CHANGE:
Constrained, collective, and improvised forms from the Global South
Dominant theories of teacher agency have been developed primarily within Global North contexts characterized by relative resource adequacy, policy stability, and individual professional autonomy. Yet, the majority of the world's teachers, coming from the global south, work under conditions of chronic resource scarcity, policy incoherence, and systemic constraint—conditions these theories were never designed to explain. This paper addresses a central question: what forms does teacher agency take when these conditions do not hold? Drawing on literature from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Zambia, and Kenya, this conceptual study develops a tripartite framework of agency in conditions of constraint. It conceptualizes improvised agency as real-time creative response when formal systems are inadequate, collective agency as forms of action distributed across professional networks rather than located in individuals alone, and constrained agency as professional action exercised within severe structural limitations rather than the absence of agency. The paper further proposes a dynamic relational model in which structural constraints generate conditions for improvisation, improvisational practices are sustained and refined through collective professional networks, and collective forms of action may, over time, contribute to the partial renegotiation of structural constraints. This framework builds on ecological accounts of teacher agency by shifting attention to how agency is negotiated in contexts marked by persistent scarcity and unstable institutional conditions. In doing so, it offers a lens for interpreting curriculum reform beyond stable policy environments. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this perspective for curriculum policy design, teacher professional development, and comparative studies of educational change.