Hi everyone💞,
Today I will write about teacher roles. We, teachers, have lots of duties not only just teaching to our students but also
taking care of them, understand them, and helping them. Teachers are
facilitators to students’ life and progress.
We can categorize the roles of a teacher:
When students think of teachers as a
controller, they feel comfortable. As a controller, we should
take the roll and
tell students things, organize drills, read aloud, and in various other ways
exemplify the qualities of a teacher-fronted classroom.
Being a controller in the classroom is an efficient way but sometimes it may not work because students can wait
everything from their teachers also, they can cut down on speaking talents.
That is mean, over-reliance on students can affect their learning ability badly.
2.
ORGANIZER:
Organizer means that; teachers help students
what to do when they are not sure about the activity. Teachers should explain clearly
to avoid chaos such as now we are going to do this because...etc. Observing
students is especially important. Teachers should spend time engaging the
students’ interests because activities may not be successful, or group works
may not be suitable for them. During activities teachers should explain how
they are going to do activities and telling the time is important. According to
activities, some of them can be pair work or group work. In activities, maybe
just giving instructions may not be enough for students, demonstration is
better than instructions.
When
teachers organize something, new things can be good or interesting for
students. Also, activities should be appropriate for their levels and talents. At the end of the class, summarizing is particularly important, teachers should
repeat what did they today. Using some forms and feedback are necessary you can
ask your students; did you like this activity, did you enjoy it… etc. To sum
up; organizer means: engage
👉 instruct 👉 initiate 👉 organize
feedback
3.
ASSESSOR:
Students often want to feedback from their teachers to be sure or to see if they understand the subject. Also, feedback is important for both teachers and students. Teachers should show what is the right answers or their mistakes. So, they can understand or measure themselves.
Fairness is important. We should not
separate good grades and bad grades. Students can be mistakes or they can take
bad grades, but we should balance with sensitivity and support. Students do not
want to be unfairly judged.
4.
PROMPTER:
Teachers should give permission to students’ doing something. Teachers should not give all directions. It can cause less motivation and lack of encouragement. Also, their creativity can be decreased we can offer which words or phrases they can use, and prompting is a kind of sensitively and encouraging thing.
5.
PARTICIPANT:
Doing some activities with students can be different
and efficient for students. Being a participant has two effects. The first one is
the good side of being a participant. Students can enjoy having the teacher with
them and teachers can enjoy it, too. The second one is the bad side of being a participant. Teachers can easily dominate one proceeding, also teachers
usually have more English at our disposal than our students do.
6.
RESOURCE:
Sometimes, students need their teacher as a
resource. For example, they want to learn what should they do in the activities
or they can want more information about activities. Actually, teachers are one
of the most important sources for pupils but sometimes we allow them to be
their resources. It is important to their creativity and they can be more
independent. And they can trust themselves. For example, we should not answer
every question or mean of words, we can direct to a good dictionary to their
learning abilities. But it is not mean we should not answer every question, at
the same time we must resist the urge to spoon-feed our students in that way
they can trust us.
7.
TUTOR:
When students do not understand something with prompter and resource, we can act as a tutor working with a small group or individual. Working in a large group can be difficult in that situation because caring to everybody may not be enough for students who have problems with understanding. Some students can feel disappointed. When we are a tutor, we must make sure that we do not disturb either too much or too little.
8. OBSERVER:
Being an observer is important to giving feedback
or organizing students but when we observe students, we should not interrupt every
word or writing things all the time. Also, when er take some notes about our
students, we should not write all the time their bad sides, we should write students’
good sides, too. Being an observer provides us with how students are doing something.
We should observe simultaneously when they are listening, watching, etc. Please do
not observe your students just for feedback.
As a teacher, as you can see, we have lots
of roles but how can we understand which one is suitable for both our students and
us? We need to be able to switch between the variable roles. Sometimes we use
just one but sometimes we need to combine them according to our students’ needs.
We should know the requirements of every role and we should understand that which
one is suitable.
Have a nice weekend teachers🌼
source:
Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language teaching. London/New York
Chapter 4: Describing teachers, p.56-67
