Friday, September 27, 2013

Teacher Student Relationship_Part 1

Teaching is a universal pursuit – everyone does it. Parents teach their children, senior colleagues teach their juniors, spouses teach one another and of course, teachers teach their students. As students spend a large part of their waking hours in school, teachers also spend an amazing amount of time teaching their students in class. Teachers find that time richly rewarding because it helps students to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge. Such times are joyous learning for both students and teachers – it motivates the teachers to continue contributing to the development of their students.
But as practitioners, we teachers also know that teaching students can also be terribly frustrating and draining mental and emotionally with disappointment. These are times when the teacher discover to his/her dismay that his/her enthusiastic desire to teach something worthwhile to students somehow fails to cause an enthusiastic desire in his/her students to learn.
When students seemingly without reason, refuse to learn what teacher so unselfishly and nobly willing to teach them, teaching is anything but nerve-racking to the teacher. In fact, it will be a miserable experience which may lead to feelings of fear, hopelessness, inadequacy and too often, hate and deep resentment towards the unwilling and ungrateful learner!! Have you observed others or had conversations with others about such situations in your personal and professional teaching experiences? Are teachers equipped to deal with his/her own or the students' emotions?
So, what makes the difference between teaching that works and teaching that fails and teaching that brings joyful and rewarding learning and teaching that causes frustration and anguish? Certainly there are many different factors such as teaching practices, engagement in learning, teacher student relationship, peer relation, recognition and discipline that influence the outcome of the teacher's efforts to teach student. But I feel that one of the factors contributing the most – namely the degree of effectiveness of the teacher is establishing a particular kind relationship with students. In this, I mean that it is the quality of the teacher student relationship that is crucial – more crucial, in fact, than what the teacher is teaching, how the teacher does it, or whom the teacher is trying to teach! Why is this so? Well, I believe that without quality teacher student relationship, very little learning will take place.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Setting my boundaries



As acting Head of Department (HOD), I felt as though I am on the job six days a week, twelve – fourteen hours a day. And in many ways I am. But I came to realize for those middel manager who don’t establish a sense of boundary between their own lives and the contribution they make to their school run a risk of low job satisfaction and a high rate of burnout. Hence, I did a quick relook of my new role and responsibilities three weeks ago, and decided to set clear boundaries between my work and my personal life as I did when I was Subject Head (SH).

Not every lunch has to be a working lunch at my desk. I can take some time off by myself at the staff lounge or to chat with colleagues I really want to be with in the canteen, not just working colleagues who I need to work with. There are times I must say to myself – No bringing work back home today! But at times it is impossible not to bring work back – then I need to say to myself not to bring certain kinds of work home with me!

As I worked on my roles and responsibilities this year 2013, I hope to learn from the experience, and next year be able to establish a plan where I will take work back home only on certain days of the week. Hence, I will need to delegate more freely, particularly when there are other SHs and teachers who are more experienced and better trained or more capable of managing certain events or doing Raa─Raa than I am. I also refused to be led by some colleagues who try to draw me into other teacher’s personal concerns. By refusing all these do not mean that I am not a caring people developer or caring HOD. Instead, I find that it would be beneficial to everyone to detach myself from problems which I believe the teachers themselves really have to solve by themselves.

I also have to keep reminding myself that I cannot give other what I don’t have myself – this been my first year in my new role. I really need to establish boundaries so that I will not deprive myself of all my energy and more importantly the sense of calm, without which, I would not be in any position to help my SHs or teachers even if I try to.