Beyond the Award: What My World Teachers Day Nomination Journey Taught Me

As the verification process for shortlisted candidates in Kenya's World Teachers Day Awards 2026 by Teachers Service Commission (TSC) gets underway at the preliminary level, I find myself reflecting on something bigger than the award itself, on teachers, recognition, impact, and the stories we so often fail to document.

The nomination call drew many registered teachers who felt moved to step forward and display their abilities, achievements, and impact in the education sector. I was one of them, applying under the Teacher Mentor Award category.

And as the verification process unfolds, I keep asking myself: why did teachers decide to put themselves forward?

Some saw it as a golden chance to have their work seen and acknowledged. Others may simply have been drawn to the award itself. Some applied just to experience the process, learn from it, and prepare for future opportunities at the national or international level. Others may have seen it as a chance to cement their own brand even further, positioning themselves to pitch for bigger opportunities down the line.

Whatever the motivation, there is something powerful about a teacher stepping forward and saying: this is my work, this is what I have done, this is the difference I have made. For that alone, every teacher who submitted an application deserves to be congratulated.

Congratulations to Every Teacher Who Took the Step

I want to begin by celebrating every educator who submitted an application, because putting together an award application is far harder than it looks. Documenting your achievements and gathering verifiable evidence can send you deep into your own professional archive.

In my case, the Teacher Mentor Award asked for evidence covering the previous five years, proof of consistent, sustained mentorship, not a single delightful story. That meant digging up records of the learners and colleagues I had mentored, tracking the progress they made, retrieving testimonials, follow up notes, certificates, photographs, and reports that showed mentorship as an ongoing relationship rather than a single, isolated gesture. Other categories, like the Lifetime Educator award for teachers with over twenty years of service, demanded an even longer excavation of one's own professional history.

And that was one of the hidden gifts of this process. It forced us to stop and look back, to ask ourselves:

• What have I done?

• Who have I impacted?

• What evidence do I have?

• What difference have I made beyond my classroom?

Those are powerful questions for any educator to sit with.

The Invisible Work Teachers Do

One of my biggest reflections from this experience is that so much of what teachers do is never documented at all.

Teachers teach, mentor, counsel, and encourage. They innovate, nurture talent, and support vulnerable learners. They organize activities, visit families, and mobilize communities. They stay behind after everyone else has left and sometimes spend their own resources to make something happen, often without ever expecting recognition.

For many teachers, the greatest reward is simply watching a learner grow in confidence, discover a talent, or overcome a challenge. Some are driven purely by a desire to transform lives, with nothing expected in return. Those teachers have my deepest respect.

But this experience has taught me something important: doing magnificent work matters, and documenting that work matters just as much, not so that every good deed becomes a bid for an award, but because our professional journeys deserve to be preserved.

To the Teachers Who Have Never Been Nominated

There is another group of educators I want to honour: those who have done extraordinary things for learners and communities but have never submitted an award application. Some have never been nominated. Some have never received a certificate. Some have never been celebrated by their schools and may not even realize how exceptional their work truly is.

Yet they keep showing up.

To those teachers, I want to say: please feel seen, please feel valued, please feel loved. Your name does not have to appear on an awards list for your work to matter. A nomination is not the beginning of your greatness, and missing an award is not the end of it.

Countless teachers will make contributions that never appear on a stage, in a newspaper, or on a screen, and those contributions are no less real for it.

Building a Digital Footprint: The 21st Century Educator's Toolkit.

If there is one practical lesson, I would urge every teacher to take from this experience. It is this: start keeping a record now, before an award or opportunity forces you to reconstruct five years of your own history from memory.

Keep a digital archive. Save the photos, the testimonials, the certificates, the thank you notes, the small write ups of what you did and why. Do not wait until a call for nominations sends you scrambling through old emails and forgotten folders. Future you, will be grateful.

But beyond archiving, I want to challenge teachers to go further, to actively show up in spaces where ideas are exchanged and expertise is shared. Attend conferences, not just as a participant but as a contributor. Author articles about the things you have learned in your classroom. If you have a book about your teaching philosophy, your mentorship approach, or the innovations you have piloted, write it. If speaking comes more naturally to you than writing, start a podcast in your area of expertise. None of this requires permission from an award committee. It only requires the decision to begin.

The 21st century educator is built differently. We are no longer confined to the four walls of a classroom or the boundaries of a school compound. There is an entire world out there hungry for what teachers know, and increasingly, the tools to reach that world are already in our hands: a phone, a laptop, a free blog, a recording app.

This is not about chasing visibility for its own sake. It is about recognizing that your expertise, earned through demanding work in the classroom, has value beyond it, and that documenting and sharing it is itself a form of teaching.

A Word to the Young Educators Coming Up

To the young teachers just starting out in this profession, I want to say one more thing: guard your fire. You will encounter naysayers, colleagues who mock ambition as showing off, who dismiss extra effort as "seeking attention," who have grown comfortable with mediocrity and expect you to shrink to fit it. Do not let that noise define what is possible for you. Every profession has its cynics, and education is no exception, but cynicism has never built anything worth building. Keep showing up for your learners, keep documenting your journey, keep reaching for the next room you have not yet been invited into. The people discouraging you today are rarely the ones who will remember your name tomorrow, but the learners you shape will carry you with them for the rest of their lives. Let that be enough reason to keep going.

One point I feel is worth emphasizing: although the results have not yet been announced, I have chosen to embrace the outcome, whatever it may be. Receiving or missing this recognition does not diminish my achievements, nor does it lessen the pride I hold in my identity as a global teacher mentor. This is the mindset I would encourage every applicant to adopt, to resist discouragement, and to continue putting themselves forward for future opportunities regardless of outcome.

 “My advice to every applicant: keep showing up and showing out, regardless of the outcome.”

I would love to hear from you: 

What is one piece of your own teaching journey that you have never documented or shared, and what is stopping you from doing it now? Drop your thoughts in the comments below, let us start archiving our stories together.

Written by: Eddah Kamau

Educator, Educational Support Specialist, Author, and Mental Health Advocate.