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The ideal teacher?

Overview
What is your image of a teacher? Most likely you can look back across years of schooling and studying and from that experiential base you have a fairly solid view about what is a teacher. Some of your teachers may have impacted on you significantly, for good or bad, while some teachers can barely be remembered. As you were a developing as a person your whole approach to learning, to schooling and to finding your place in this world, would have been influenced greatly by your teachers. Consequently your image of a teacher will be shaped by that experiential base.


Indeed we need you to think more deeply about, what is a teacher? How certain are you that your image of a teacher is fully adequate? How sure are you that your image of a teacher embraces all that is known about what a teacher should be like, or should do in the role of helping students learn and develop? This Module Four will challenge and hopefully extend your thinking about what it means to be a teacher - particularly a teacher in this year and beyond.


There are many perspectives from which we can approach a Module on The ideal teacher but we have chosen the following questions to focus our approach.

  • " What is a teacher?
  • " What does a teacher need to know?
  • " How can a teacher become more effective?
  • " How should a teacher start to think about teaching?

 

Approaches to Teaching

There are many ways of looking at approaches to teaching.
One way of thinking about this is the difference between teacher centred and student centred teaching.

Teacher-centred approach
What is this approach like for the teacher?

  • Teacher decides what is to be learned.
  • Teacher decides when is to be learned.
  • Teacher decides how the learning occurs.
  • Teacher sets the classroom timetable.
  • Teacher sets the grouping of students.
  • Teacher sets the room arrangement.
  • Teacher sets the room displays.
  • Teacher decides the learning resources.
  • Teacher sets the classroom rules.
  • Teacher determines the consequences.
  • Teacher decides the classroom discipline.
  • Teacher decides the evaluation of learning.
  • Teacher works to motivate students.

Student-centred approach
What is this approach like for the teacher?

  • Teacher decides only some of what is learned.
  • Teacher provides the conditions for learning

 

  • Teacher enables students to choose:
    • what they want to learn
    • when they learn (timetable-wise)
    • who they learn with
    • how they learn.

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  • Teacher is a facilitator of learning, a guide.

 

  • " Teacher encourages the development of self:
        • self-reliance
        • self-evaluation
        • self-responsibility
        • self-motivation
        • self-organisation
        • self-discipline
        • self-understanding
  • Teacher works to enable students to become wise and good decision-makers.
  • Teacher gives equal weighting to cognitive and affective domains.
What are the advantages of each approach?

Teacher-centred approach

  • Easier to manage for the teacher.
  • Teacher has a greater sense of control over what is happening in the class.
  • Some students prefer a teacher-centred style.
  • Set curriculum can be monitored more effectively.

Student-centred approach

  • Teachers find more students enjoy learning.
  • Curriculum is more meaningful, relevant and integrated for students.
  • Learning is more motivated.
  • Classroom discipline is more positive.

 

Problem-solving approach
Another approach to learning, and one along a quite different direction to teacher-centred and student-centred approaches, has become known as the problem-solving approach. In a problem solving approach students are presented with specific authentic, practical or hypothetical problems or sets of problems to solve.

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