Teaching in the Classroom and Beyond

I believe that professional development begins in the classroom and moves outwards. Being a new middle manager, I will attempt to describe such professional development based on my experience.

I see teachers developing professionally throughout life and from many sources – but real development begin in the classroom. As teachers bring into the teaching profession, starting with values and purposes (now adding personal purpose to my own list so that there is clarity in understanding what and who teachers are as individuals and how we came to be in teaching), I begin to consider the ways teachers lead and evolve in professional development from the classroom outwards. Placing teaching and learning at the center of the teacher, I intend to follow some of my teachers through their journey as they develop through their blogs. Description of their personal mission and then why they chose the work of teaching are followed by narrations of classroom-based work. These narrations can include the teachers’ description of their relationship with students, parents and fellow teachers and how to work effectively with different roles and tasks with groups of teachers. They can also describe challenges and benefits of working across the different roles and tasks, the relationships build, the trust gained and the effect change with students, parents or even fellow teachers in their classrooms, schools and beyond.

I advocate for Teaching and Learning for students and improved instructions, on top of the usual drill and practice. I hope to get the “buy-in” of my teachers as well as I believe that such advocacy would lead predictably to school wide improvement. At the department level, teachers share expertise and at the school level, they may seek professional support from others, say NIE lecturers. I believe in such endeavors even for expert teachers as such specialized knowledge would only strengthened by affiliation with fellow teachers and research fellows. Finally, teachers should reach out to support the teaching profession in the quest to bring teaching and learning to students of other schools.

I know that there are huge amount of knowledge pertaining to education. To know and get better understanding of such knowledge may help the teacher to improve teaching and learning. As teachers, I believed that it is the constant examining through new eyes of the different instructional strategies and pedagogies that would result in students actually learning, within and beyond the school that is of most help. Teachers who think about their role of teaching in all its dimensions, and about what kinds of actions are needed for learning serve the students best. Education is ever changing, even though some of our practices are not evolving as quickly as our students are. As such, only teachers who are building the future of education can bring the wisdom of practice to education.