Being Intentional About Things!

Over the course of my live, I have the opportunity to become different people, a child, student, adult, …. teacher and parent and so on... In a similar way, over the course of my profession, I assumed a number of different roles as my tasks change and my responsibilities grow, a contract teacher, trainee teacher, beginning teacher, form teacher, CCA teacher, middle manager... But even in the midst of all these changing roles, I see chances to reinvent myself in other ways.

I observed many of these changes in the various aspects of teaching. Even within our classroom, faced with one situation a teacher may be advocate of change, while at other times the same teacher may defend the current order because he believes that certain changes are unwarranted or unwise. In one stage of teaching career, some teachers may derive a great deal of satisfaction from a particular element of our work (say in positional leadership work) that a few years later teachers come to regard as boring and be more focused to their “real calling” of classroom teaching.

For me, my dedicated time for reflections has helped me to be conscious of how I can change as a middle manager. Through such reflections, I am more aware of the evolving roles I will be doing from teacher through the middle manager role, and imagine how I need to reinvent myself so as to best serve the needs of my students and the school. For instance, I reviewed what programs needed next to improve ICT implementation and wanted to raise the level of expert support so as to provide another level of support to improve our teachers’ capacity to plan and deliver ICT enriched activities for students. However, I found that these “so called experts” are themselves unclear how to go about using technology for self-directed and collaborative learning. Moreover, they are insistent on being “technology-expert” and so can only providing training for teachers on the use of technology. I decided to live up to my commitment to role model by initiating deliberate practices with my teachers. I seek for volunteers to participate in designing ICT activities using blogging and was pleased to find that our teachers are indeed willing to work with me on ICT-based lessons. I also concluded that what I really need is to rethink the pedagogical practices to incorporate ICT in teaching.

These are some of the paths I have chosen to undertake to affect the ICT implementation process in school. I know that the outcomes of these implementations will definitely take some time to attain and that a certain degree of development and change along the way is evitable. What I now only trying to do is to be completely intentional about it!