The Never Ending Process of Learning and Growing as a Teacher – From Dinosaur to Avatar

Learning is no longer something that you do in order to get a job and then proceed to do what you learned for years on end

. Similarly, in the teaching profession, the role of a teacher can no longer stagnate or remain as it was in the past. A teacher has the potential to shape every student's career for better or worse. This fact is not as apparently obvious to most because the impact is not completely determined until that child has reached adulthood and is trying to enter the workforce. However, it is not just the role of the teacher that needs to evolve, but also the role of the school systems that support education.

In a world in which information grows exponentially, today's students are active participants in an ever-expanding network of learning environments. They must learn to be knowledge navigators, seeking and finding information from multiple sources, evaluating it, making sense of it, and understanding how to collaborate with their peers to turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into action. We need to produce thinkers and innovators. Students that are able to adapt to any changes or developments that the future may hold.

What does this mean for teachers and school systems responsible for delivering today's education? This means they need to be constantly learning, adapting, creating, and communicating with accomplished colleagues and experts in the field, modeling for their students the collaborative learning and knowledge construction that is at the core of 21st-century competencies. Teaching must be treated and supported as a critical profession, which all others are dependent on. Think about your own past. Surely more than one teacher helped you get to where you are today. It is the teacher, who will make the difference in whether a society succeeds or fails.

Yet in most cases, today's teachers work alonethey spend an average of 93 percent of their time in school working in isolation, and they continue to work alone during outside of the school setting as they prepare and grade their students' assignments. Their day-to-day work is disconnected from the efforts of their colleagues, and their respective professional development is often fragmented or disconnected from the practical approach that will help their students.

This fragmentation prevents any substantial education reform from gaining traction, because teachers are not given the support or the time they need to collectively build a coherent body of knowledge and practice to help their students improve and achieve better results.

Today's new teachers are eager to work and make a difference, but find it difficult to adapt to this traditionally isolated environment that follows the teaching practices of the past. Faced with a choice between working in the last century or the 21st century, they "vote with their feet": The young people we are counting on to teach the future generations are leaving our obsolete schools at an alarming rate.

It is time to change this picture. Today's teachers want to team up to teach. In survey after survey, teachers who have expressed the most satisfaction with their careers and the contributions they are making to their students' lives are likely to work in schools with higher levels of professional collaboration. They want more time to plan and discuss the issues they are having in the classroom and they want to leverage the knowledge and support of their peers. Additionally, they would also like to be able to have access to technology that will extent learning for their students beyond the walls of the classroom.

There are two simple changes that schools make today to begin to break down the degree of isolation that exists in today's schools. The key issue these two changes is the fundamental need to provide teachers the time and structure necessary to make them work.

One of these changes is to institute Lesson Study groups within the schools. Lesson study is the practice of having teachers observe their peers conducting a lesson, followed by a debriefing in which they review how the lesson could be improved when it is delivered again.

Another important change is to establish Professional Learning Communities between teachers that share the same subject or grade level responsibilities. Professional learning communities are usually facilitated in formal meetings in which the group discusses and makes decisions on instructional practices, share curriculum decisions, discuss the outcome of assessments of students and openly, determine potential professional development needs themselves. And most importantly, listen to each other's needs as professionals.

In addition to these two key changes in how things are done at the school level, we as a society must deal with even more critical issues in education that will have an even bigger impact on the overall quality of our schools.

Pay: We need to consider what an acceptable pay range should be to attract the best possible candidates to the teaching profession; not only attract them but retain the best teachers. We must create a huge supply of qualified individuals that are eager and able to enter this important profession.

Accountability: Teaching the standards that are needed in the 21st Century is not an easy feat. It is not something everyone can do. Therefore, we need to have a method to release teachers that are just not able to do the job of instructing children well. We need to clearly delineate the expectations of high quality teaching and hold ourselves and others, in the school system, accountable as professionals do in every other profession.

Professional Development: As stated earlier, our whole world is changing and becoming innovative at an exponential rate. We need our teachers to grow and expand their knowledge as well. This will require that all teachers have development plans for their professional growth as teachers. Consider the career of a doctor: Would you want your doctor to only know and prescribe the medication and procedures that were available 10-15 years ago? Or do you expect your doctor to stay abreast of new medications entering the market and groundbreaking procedures that can help you and your family stay healthy? Teachers have patients too; they are called students. Just like doctors, teachers need to stay current and knowledgeable about the content, methods and resources they are using to improve student learning.

Education Funding: We need to determine a better way to fund and maintain our educational systems. We need to determine how much it actually costs to educate a child for one year of schooling, including programs that children need in order to learn to their full potential.

We need to create a system of funding education that is not compromised by the ebbs and flows of the economy or political whims.

We need a system of oversight to ensure that revenues for education are received and properly allocated for that which they are intended. We need to flatten the overall administration structure so that the focus of funding is on the instruction in the classroom, not office space.

If we implement these changes, hold each other accountable as professionals and establish a funding system that aggressively recruits the best teachers in terms of content knowledge and teaching style, our students will definitely catch up to the 21st Century. When they enter the workforce, they will be qualified professionals with the right skills, critical thinking abilities and knowledge of technology that are essential in the workplace. A good education will not be the privilege of a few, but the norm for all. Teachers will no longer be regarded as dinosaurs, a dying prehistoric breed, but as avatars, the most skilled, sought-after, advanced, and knowledgeable specialists in any field.

Follow this link to learn more about how Teach N' Kids Learn Inc is working on breaking down the barriers and isolation of our 21st Century teachers

The Never Ending Process of Learning and Growing as a Teacher From Dinosaur to Avatar

By: Rudy Azcuy

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