The Role of a Teacher (C&M Core: Seminar 2)

The Seminar 2 task was to:

1. Read Chapters 1 and 2 of Churchill et al. (2013)¹ and Chapter 1 of Brady and Kennedy (2012)².
2. Reflect upon what you consider to be your role as a teacher? What are the expectations of students, parents, school leaders, school community?
3. Respond to the following question

From your experience of Seminar 2, and readings, what do you consider to be the crucial characteristics of the changing role of a teacher particularly in relation to assessment. (Note you may wish to consider some of the features influencing the current SACE curriculum and also consider what you have learned from Seminar 9).

In Chapter 2 of Churchill et al. (2013)¹ Millisa Vick gave a overview of how the role of a teacher has changed over time. In Chapter 1 Julianne Moss gives an introduction to teaching, with a focus on the thing that motivates most new teachers: making a difference (hence the name of the book). The (often contradicting) pressures on teachers from different stakeholders is discussed in both these chapters, and these different pressures are explained explicitly from the perspective of assessment in Chapter 1 of Brady and Kennedy (2012)².

Personally, I see two fundamentally crucial role of a teacher. The first is to be looking out for the best interests of their students. However, what is in the best interests of the students will often contradict with external pressures and expectations — particularly in relation to assessment. That is to say, often it might be in the best interests of the students for the teacher to use a certain approach — “deep learning”, to teach them to think for themselves, to consider failure to be a positive thing: an opportunity to learn. However many stakeholders, including the students themselves, their parents, the school community, and school leaders, will often be very focused on the outcomes of external assessments such as exams. And although the approaches to teaching that might be in the best interests of the students would likely impact on their assessment outcomes in a positive way, they are almost certainly not the most efficient way to improve their exam results. A teacher could simply train students to answer questions, to always answer questions correctly by following an algorithm blindly, and they would likely improve the students exam outcomes dramatically. This brings me to what I think the second fundamentally crucial role of a teacher is: to be pragmatic about how they go about implementing what they think is in the best interests of the students. The pressures upon a teacher from the various stakeholders are likely to be very real and intensely felt — it is important not to ignore them. Not only because ignoring them would likely be harmful to a teachers mental health, but it could even be considered self-sabotaging in that it would ultimately stop them from achieving their original goal of doing what was in the best interests of their students. So it is important for a teacher to understand the various pressures on them by the different stakeholders, as laid out nicely in the readings above, and to take these interests into account when deciding on a course of action. Every situation is different, the role of a teacher will be different in any given moment: a mentor, an educator, a councilor, a disciplinarian, and so on. So I thought it was appropriate to write a general answer from the perspective of motivations and approaches.

And so I had a conversation with Glen Arthur (the chemistry curriculum and methodology tutor) about exactly this yesterday night:

EDIT: Did I forget to write about that conversation? We talked about the balance a teacher needs to find between doing what is in the best interests of the student, and preparing them to answer questions in an exam, because that will be an important skill for them to have.

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