Teachers in the school of tomorrow

Today's Good Teacher

When I read Marie Robert's April 11, 2021 article "The 7 Roles of the Teacher in the Classroom" on Education Passion and Transmission, I realized that the changing role of the teacher is already here and soon we will be calling it "the new educational norm."

I have a habit of pointing out what is wrong and shaking up minds with my findings. This time, I'm going to tell you about the beautiful vision of tomorrow that all educational managers will soon dream of achieving.

Yesterday, the role of the teacher was to teach and he had a lot of power in his more or less controversial function, especially over physical punishment. He was a god to parents and students alike.

In the last 50 years, there has been a shift and the teacher is unfortunately more limited in his creativity, sacrificed on the hotel of standardization. Parents make him responsible for the failures of their children and the roles are sometimes reversed when it is he who receives the slap of a student or his parents. The result for the most fragile teachers is often burnout, loss of motivation and other undesired drifts.

And, in all of this, are blooming new flowers, new ways of doing things, new social norms, new behaviors of the new parents...

The role of the teacher

"The role of the teacher is vast. From imparting knowledge to protecting the well-being of children to inspiring critical thinking and moral values, teachers have a central position in the community. They are often passionate and dedicated individuals with a strong desire for lifelong learning.

Teachers serve as role models, mentors, caregivers, and counselors. They can have a profound impact on the lives of their students"

Gone are the days when a teacher was simply considered a classroom teacher; someone who just teaches a basic subject to a classroom full of children, then goes home for the evening, his or her job done. Teachers can work on a wide variety of topics, which they can bring to life with the help of modern, interactive technologies.

Today, the role of a teacher is to "shape young people's life chances by imparting knowledge - bringing the curriculum to life."

I really like this introduction because it's from someone who focuses on the wonderful when all around is not so perfect. Focusing on the good models as this lady inductively proposes is probably the way to go.

Being consensual on the model to follow, even if it is imperfect, will get us out of our immediate worries. When managers face major problems, they have their heads in the water or their noses in the air and it becomes complicated to project themselves into these complex situations. So, the best thing to do is to focus on the vision of a model that we like, that is adapted, that should be... and little by little, day after day, the idea is to make the strategy of small steps. One day you look back and see behind you a phenomenal change.

The initial mission of the teacher is to teach... but it is evolving

"1. Develop knowledge and skills

Students need to feel supported - while remaining active. In this respect, the school has evolved a great deal: today it not only emphasizes the mastery of knowledge but also values skills, i.e. the application of acquired knowledge. It passes through the mastery of a common base of knowledge, skills and culture that the teacher will be in charge of evaluating."

A great change has occurred in our world: the structuring of jobs and the way they are managed by human resources in the face of the great innovations of this last decade. The key word is "skills", in the plural. People no longer learn trades, but acquire skills in certain trades that they can recycle in new careers. Learning is no longer continuous, it is modular.

"2. Create a learning environment

It is important to create an environment that contributes to the process of self-reliance, a supportive environment that encourages motivation, self-confidence, curiosity, and a desire to learn... Teachers are responsible for the social behavior in their classrooms. This behavior is primarily a reflection of the teacher's actions and the environment he or she defines."

While the school or learning environment was an almost unknown word 50 years ago as well, it has become a critical factor in the successful completion of work, tasks, and learning. Associating empowerment with the work environment is an interesting assemblage because the ecosystem of the worker has changed due to the paradigm shift.

In the past, long ago, workers worked their entire lives in a company and in a trade. School would train them and eventually reinforce their knowledge. Today, the model is different. Knowledge is no longer categorized into occupations solely by academic knowledge; knowledge acquired on the job is now an equal part of the equation. It is up to the worker to choose his or her destiny and no longer up to the school to define what he or she will do. This is why the work on empowerment is fundamental.

Yesterday, workers were trained for the most part to follow the leader. Tomorrow, we will need people who are part of a big puzzle still called a company but which is increasingly moving away from the classic pyramid system. Teachers will no longer be able to be the sole source of knowledge but will also have to teach their students to swim and steer their boats as a team.

"3. Help students express their ideas and make their understandings explicit

When students arrive at school, they already have ideas, notions, and ways of reasoning, what are called representations or understandings. The role of a teacher is also to bring these conceptions to the surface in order to build on them in order to evolve them into scientific knowledge."

To steer this famous ship, they will have to take their place as workers and as autonomous beings who will have to deal with new synthetic, artificial intelligences and who will have to become exceptional beings in order to tame the machines or repair them. The future needs scientists, not factory workers. Robots will be unbeatable in this field. Our creativity will be our redemption and if we are not careful we will be classified as useless. Personally, I would not like my children or grandchildren to be classified in this category. So I will push while I can to move in that direction.

"4. Encourage individual and group work

Working together allows for the confrontation of ideas, but also sometimes makes classroom management more challenging for the teacher. The aim is to encourage investigations, verbal and procedural exchanges between students, to help students formulate hypotheses, to test them, to observe, to explain by arguing, to do documentary research. Individual work helps develop autonomy and independence."

I'm not sure that autonomy has anything to do with independence. For me, it has more to do with how to get by in your ecosystem. Who can be a fish in a group like in his river and at the same time an independent individual outside the group, will have all the qualities to face all situations. We are not all equal, we have to realize this and over the top academic equality brings this out.

It seems to me that there is a piece missing in the school system that is the tools used by human resource departments. Let's take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In it defined 16 profiles of personalities and behaviors. If the school thought to refer to this kind of profiles, it would help to know what to reinforce, what to develop... and instead of setting up an egalitarian school, it would become an equitable school.

"5. Guiding Action

...The teacher guides and mentors, throughout the project, to help his or her students build curriculum-related knowledge and learning. He/she indicates the way to acquire new knowledge. He guides his students, proposing situations of exploration to promote the construction of learning."

Again here, the notion of empowerment reappears. To train oneself, to choose how to train oneself, to thereby choose one's destiny, to have a strategic vision of one's life... and to keep in mind the good model of that teacher who will have marked you and given you the desire to try, to start again, to go further.

"6. Organize and encourage communication

The teacher is the organizer of communication among students. He or she repeats, rephrases, repeats but also distributes roles. The teacher provides information, favors a scientific approach, and insists on the role of experience. The student must be aware of what he is doing and why he is doing it. So there is to observe a way of conducting the class, an attitude of conducting the class, an attitude of the teacher in his approach, the way he guides the students."

After, the know-how, the personality, the vision. Here we are on the means of action, that is, communication and organization. Because if the communication is not good and the projects are unstructured then there will be no future neither social nor entrepreneurial.

Organizing is among the primary foundations of school, but communicating, when teachers have been used to being the center of attention for so long, gets stuck in the weeds sometimes. The intersection of teaching discipline and free expression has not always gone well. A lot of work needs to be done on the subject and especially on the teacher himself who is the model. It may take a generation to achieve a good success rate. Just long enough for the old-timers to retire.

"7- Accompany his students to make them educated and enlightened citizens

The teacher's role must be that of a facilitator full of patience. He or she must demonstrate how to learn independently, encourage them, provide feedback and suggestions, and support them in their efforts. This role is crucial and provides an environment that fosters independent learning and motivates students."

This last topic is the most controversial. Is citizenship, living together according to social rules and those of respective nations, the domain of the school or the family? This subject has been debated in France for three centuries without ever reaching an agreement. The only agreement close to a consensus is that it is the business of the animators. But, is this reasonable?

Can we put the worker on one side and citizen on the other like an Epinal image when you see that some of the best students can be role models on one side and the most virulent harassers on the other? The fact that the phenomenon has been growing in recent years is sobering. Shouldn't both sides be brought together in a single ecosystem to make it clear that personal ethics and social behavior in fact are (should be) one and the same value.

School creates the individuals of tomorrow and teachers are its representatives. It cannot remain unchanging, unchanging because it is the vector of the future, towards the best tomorrow possible.

Illustration: Pixabay: 3330852

Article source: - The 7 Roles of the Teacher in the Classroom - Marie Robert
https://www.educationpassiontransmission.com/post/les-7-r%C3%B4les-de-l-enseignant-en-classe