Your role

Hello. This week, we’ll be looking at the role of the teacher in managing lessons. This covers lots of things like setting up activities, including activities with different interaction patterns, and ensuring learners are involved and engaged in your lessons. Teachers are certainly capable of having a huge influence on student learning. I’m sure you remember your favourite teacher from school. In this video, you’ll hear teachers reflecting on their professional role. As you watch, think about how you see your role as a teacher. Does it change during a lesson or with different learners? Has it changed since you started teaching? Let’s see what the teachers thought.

It’s very difficult to define teacher’s role because if you’re in primary school, if you’re teaching primary kids, you’re always teaching English, facilitator, and all that roles in the book. Other than that, you have to play the role of a parent also. And that role, parental role is remain even though you are teaching in universities. So you have to play different roles. And then you are quite capable of such acting, honestly speaking, as Aristotle and [INAUDIBLE] said that we are actors in society. Teachers can be the best actors because they have to. Sometimes we have to forget our personal problems and work in the classes. So I think the different roles we have to play.

I think being– having that kind of empathy and understanding about the students is very important. I mean, you don’t learn by just assimilating or absorbing what the teacher is saying and hope when you walk out of the class you’ll be OK. You need to be actively involved. So this is what, then, I would say to teachers. We are central. But I see our role more as that of catalysts. That we get into that class, we create excitement, and then we stand back. And we monitor from the side as learners learn. We create a situation for them to learn, and then we walk along with them as they learn, guiding their ways around learning.