In my last reflection, I spoke on the passion in teaching – that require teachers to find their passion in their teaching every year – to treat the cohort of students as if it is the first time that the teacher has taught a class – as it is for the first batch of students with this teacher. This week I will like to elaborate more on my understanding of what passion entails in teaching.
Often I hear of others when considering passion constrained such passion to joy or involvement to matters unrelated to teaching. They spoke of emotion, akin to reading, music, and hobbies. To me, one of the key component of passion as a teacher is the sheer thrill of being a teacher as well as a learner. Passion is about the absorption that accompanies the process of teaching and learning, the sensations in being involved in the activity of teaching and learning, and most importantly, the willingness to be involved in deliberate practice to attain understanding for the students. I find that such passions reflect the thrills as well as the frustrations of learning, and I believed that it can be infectious, that it can taught, it can be modeled and it can be learnt. Learning is not always pleasurable and easy; more often than not, we forget. Learning requires over-learning at certain points, spiral approach in our knowledge construction. I see this as among the most important outcomes of education and it is such passion of a teacher that will make a real difference to the students’ learning outcomes.
To make a real difference, I think that it would require a teacher to have more than content knowledge, acts of skillful teaching or engagement of students – although these will help too. But I believe that it requires a love of the content, a moral caring stance to wish to influence and affect our students with a similar liking or even love of the content being taught, and a demonstration that the teacher is not only teaching but learning – about the students’ processes and outcomes of learning.
Yes, we teachers must model learning.
ReplyDeleteOnly when we display our love for learning can our pupils love learning.
Hence, the heavy demands on any teacher and how easily our energies are drained.
As leaders, we need to be clear that we do not demoralize, and if we can find ways to engage them as whole persons (not merely in work), we will have a good chance of spreading the passion to be an influence to our pupils.