I am a Teacher

 

Oh Really?

by Alex Hutchins

The definition of a teacher is pretty straight-forward:  one who teaches or instructs, especially in a school; but, what does a teacher do actually?

According to Teacher and Teacher Education, The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas.  Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students' existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students' thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves.  Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher's role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher. Copyright 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 

WOW . . .  this must be teacher speak because one has to read it several times to achieve enlightenment or have the preverbal light bulb turn on; but basically, as I understand it, teachers develop an approach that transfers knowledge to the student by getting to become involved or engaged in their own learning processes.

It has been my experience, that while you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make them drink; however, you can create the environment that enables them to motivate themselves.  And, this seems to work for all types and ages of learners.   The problem that this approach creates is that it puts more burden on the teacher or the instructor to be properly and sometimes overly prepared for each class; unfortunately, the average teacher or instructor mentality in American is to put forth the least amount of effort for the most amount of pay.

Karen Lewis

We can see more evidence of inspired teachers by looking at what is happening in Chicago as the city’s public school teachers plan to go on strike for higher wages.  There was only bad news from nearly eight hours of contract talks Friday, with Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis looking grim while saying at a news conference, "We are very disappointed. We thought it would be infinitely better than it was."

 

The main stumbling block is money as the City is offering a 2% annual raise while the Teacher’s Union demands at least 19% for the first year of the contract.  Of course there are other issues but they are all tangent to the main issue of money.

So this beautiful idea that teachers have regarding helping students achieve their potential and delivering well prepared, inspired classes is really predicated upon how much money they will receive. 

I am a Teacher, the title of this posting comes from a potential Chicago Public Schools Teacher striker that caught my attention when listening to the news.  What I find really interesting is that teachers want more money and yet our high school educational system is ranked 16^th or 17^th in the world in math, science and English as I recall.

What message does this send to our very impressionable students, I wonder?