The article below comes from the following site: https://schoolsweek.co.uk/what-qualities-will-future-teachers-need/
What qualities will future teachers need? Andy Hargreaves | 12:30, Nov 13, 2017 As facts become more easily accessible, the role of the teacher is changing. Teachers of the future will need both more authority… and less authority, argues Andy Hargreaves Many of us think a lot about the future, what it will be like to live in a world of robots, a world where there’s more technology, a world where many of the existing jobs have disappeared. Some people think that technology, apps, or algorithms, will replace teachers. But they’re wrong. Others people think that teaching will continue exactly as it’s done for the last one hundred and fifty years – teaching from the front, question and answer, seat work, and tests. But they’re wrong too. So what will technology do for the role of the teacher, when humanity is going through profound transformations? The teacher will need both less authority and more authority. Less authority because any knowledge or fact can be looked up in an instant on Google or any other search engine. The teacher can no longer bluff. The teacher really has to know, or better still has to help the student come to know how to evaluate the information that is in front of them, to tell right from wrong, good from bad, true from fake, boring from interesting, shallow from deep. This is the job of a well-prepared, not merely enthusiastic, teacher: to help the learner learn in relation to the principles of learning and in relation to the ethics of what it means to be human and in relationship with each other. This is why the teacher will need to have less authority – to be a facilitator, supporter, stimulus and guide; not a blowhard who just bluffs. The teacher will also need more authority. One of the other things that makes us human is our love of stories, the way we pass on history from our elders and ancestors through narrative – through tales of what our great, great grandparents did; through stories of how we came as a people from another place to settle in a particular land and what we came to believe because of it. We need to hear the great plots of life, of drama, struggle and obstacles, love and loss, and tension and relief. Teachers should still be able to set their classes on fire This is why people watch TED talks – not an algorithm, but some somebody standing there for eighteen minutes utterly captivating the people they have in front of them. And we want real people in front of us to do this, not just someone on YouTube. To do this, and to do it well as a teacher, you need the power of great stories: oral command; mystique and presence. Part of the joy of learning and teaching is not just in mastery but in mystery – in that moment of divine ignorance that the teacher holds like a little piece of magic just before an insight or an answer is revealed. People will always want teachers who know some things extraordinarily well, almost more than anybody else. As a teacher, facilitate a lot, but also don’t be afraid to be a tour de force in your own area of expertise either. Expertise, wisdom and knowledge have become devalued too easily. Teachers can’t know everything or bluff, but when they really know what they are talking about, they should still be able to set their classes on fire. So when we think of the teacher of the future and the skills, knowledge, and sheer professional capital that they will need, the question is: How do we deliberately develop these? Teachers learn best and improve most when they work with other teachers, when they have access to their practice, experience, students, knowledge, and insight. This does not mean that all teacher development will be school-based. It needn’t be all face-to-face, either. For instance, Michael O’Connor and I have been working with a network of 29 schools in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, where teachers may be the only teacher in their school, hours from some of the other teachers with whom they collaborate. But if they can meet, even twice a year, it is enough to sustain stimulating and supportive online interactions where they can plan curriculum together, review each other’s practice, give feedback, and have their students communicate with each other. Alone, none of us knows everything, but together we can know almost everything we need right now, and become more aware of what we still need to know in the future. Andy Hargreaves is Thomas More Brennan Chair of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and author of Collaborative Professionalism, part of the WISE 2017 research report series
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When I first started out in teaching (1990), I remember being very clear that I didn’t just want to be a teacher, I wanted to be a really good teacher. I wanted to be the sort of teacher that students remembered. The sort that students said made a difference for them. I’d like to think that I succeeded in this for some students but it would be fair to say that there were others who I failed to reach. There seemed to be a certain level of acceptance among some teachers at that time that as long they had presented the learning to the students, it was up to the student themselves to choose whether or not to access that learning. I vividly remember one of my (less successful) colleagues telling one of her classes that she didn’t care if they did the work she had set them or not, she still got paid anyway. As far as she was concerned, she had discharged her teaching responsibilities and the idea of what had been learned did not feature. She saw herself as a teacher of English not a teacher of the students in her classes. She directed what the learning was to be and students had little or no say in this. As a result many students had little or no engagement in this learning. ![]() Skip forward nearly 30 years in time to a classroom not too far away... What I saw going on there completely turns this approach on its head. This learning was student centered. In this class, the teacher had identified the skills and knowledge the students needed to develop and learn - just like my earlier colleague had done - but it was how she made the learning happen that was different. She provided a context of learning students could relate to (in this case a Buzzfeed quiz), gave them choice in deciding what to do their quiz on, taught them the tools they needed to write the code for their quizes, encouraged them to collaborate to identify bugs and iron them out and enabled them to produce a product and supporting evidence that provided them with all they needed for an NCEA assessment. Because of the nature of the task, students repeated the coding they had learned with each new question, thereby reinforcing their learning through numerous applications. When I spoke to them they said they had found coding really challenging at first but now they were really enjoying it. Every single student in that class was engaged with the work at hand, and every single student was achieving. Students felt they had a say in what they were learning and how they were learning. They had a sense of agency. https://www.slideshare.net/dwenmoth/shifting-the-ownership-of-learning Approaches to teaching reflect the educative purpose of the prevailing curriculum and the understandings about education that exist at any particular point in time. Dr Julia Atkin provides some insight into the evolution of curriculum and the educative purpose that has sat behind each iteration. http://ile.education.govt.nz/the-national-curriculum/ The world we are preparing students for is vastly more complex than it used to be and as secondary school educators we now have the responsibility and, according to Joan Dalton, the challenge of “providing individual pathways that allow each young person to find their future through the development of their whole selves and the role they are going to play in society.” We cannot do this by continuing to do what we have always done. We must engage all of our students in their learning journey. To do so requires us as teachers to be “connosieurs” of teaching - a term used by one of my favourite educators, Ken Robinson, and illustrated in the following clip. There are many resources and much advice about the most effective strategies we can use as teachers to optimise the learning that happens for our students. What these resources and pieces of advice cannot do for us however, is to tell us what will work best for the specific students who sit in front of us each day. This is where Spirals of Inquiry come in. Helen Timperley, Linda Kaser and Judy Halbert in the Centre for Strategic Education publication A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry, outline the main difference between the spirals approach and the teaching as inquiry approach that we have used in the past: ![]() One of the important differences in this new framework is the involvement of learners, their families and communities, underpinning and permeating each of the phases shown, from the beginning and throughout the whole process. This requires a shift from student voice to developing learner agency, as the students help to identify and address issues in their learning environments. In the past it has often been adults who have decided what is right or wrong with learners, and what is good for them, without involving them in either identifying issues or developing solutions. Deciding what is going on for learners without their input lacks respect and is unlikely to be productive. The key to making the spiral of inquiry work is for everyone to approach the framework with a mindset of curiosity and genuine inquiry into what is going on for learners, and then to move forward from there.
There are many times I wish I could be back in the classroom, making a difference for the students I teach. I know that I would be challenged by a new approach to inquiry in this context and in making it work for my learners. But this is exciting work. It is meaningful work. It is transformative work. Spirals can also be applied in a leadership context and this is our next task, to develop and operate an inquiry. In researching the Spirals approach, I have found that, as well as making sense to me, it has great congruence with the restorative approach we are using in the school. The process sits squarely in the “With” sector - problem solving, respectful, collaborative, responsibility. Together, we can make this work.
~Linda Miller |
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