Educational Technology 4

Multi-faceted roles of today’s teacher

 Rich quantities of innovations are being practiced in the current scenario of education. While discussing on the role of today‟s teacher, Trilling and Hood (1999) compared the characteristics of learning of the knowledge based society and industrial society. In Industrial age, teacher was a director, and knowledge source while, in Knowledge age teacher is a facilitator, guide, co-learner and consultant. In Industrial age the process of learning was curriculum-directed, time-slotted, rigidly scheduled and fact-based. In Knowledge age, learning changed to a mode of open, flexible, on-demand, student directed, real-world and concrete. Action & reflection, discovery & invention, collaborative, community–focused, open-ended, creative diversity, computer mediated, dynamic multimedia interaction, worldwide unbounded communication, multi-dimensional performance assessment by experts, Introduction 4 mentors, peers and self became the main traits of today‟s learning and instructional environments. Role of teachers change over time in response to new patterns of educational governance and managements, new kinds of students, new theories of teaching and learning, and the arising new technologies (Chapman & Adams, 2004). Educationists are claiming that, we are on the way with „child centered education‟, „learner-oriented instruction‟, „participatory–approach‟, „competency-based instruction‟, „brain compatible learning‟ etc. Still teacher is the prime medium of classroom activities. As innovations and reforms in education occur, the meaning of teacher effectiveness also changes. But, certain basic ingredients of effective teaching still tend to persist, which includes knowledge of substantive curriculum area, pedagogic skills, familiarity with multiple instructional strategies, ability to be reflective, self-critical and motivate students to learn (Chapman and Adams, 2004). While the term „learner-centered‟ is invoked in many curriculum documents, there is little agreement on its meaning. Learner-centeredness is a concept that cannot be captured in finite, static, and unquestioned definitions (Paris & Combs, 2006). In midst of learner-centered reforms, teacher is still a high-status participant in the classroom interaction process. When the process of instruction get more transformed to learner-centered, teachers are currently faced with a variety of challenges like class size, diversity in student populations, variety of instructional strategies, classroom management problems, social accountability pressures, curriculum changes, and new technologies and the like. The process of instruction is complex and this takes place in two contexts–curricular context and programmatic context-and to be perceived in terms of three phases – pre-engagement phase, engagement phase and post-engagement phase (Martinez-Pons, 2001). The contexts are so important since they determine the ways in which instruction is planned and carried out. The curricular context of instruction involves the regular school or educational settings and their instructional efforts are part of an on-going curriculum whose activities are repeated cyclically. The programmatic context of instruction involves teaching –learning activities designed Introduction 5 to meet some specific organizational goal such as bringing teachers up to date on aspects of their work or to meet some social needs. Whether the context is curricular or programmatic, the instructional endeavor is to be discussed as a three-phase process. Efforts like learner needs assessment, diagnosis, fixing instructional objectives, task analysis, test development, pre-testing, grouping, instructional module development and it‟s debugging are included in the pre-engagement phase of instruction. The engagement phase of instruction covers instructional implementation, module implementation, situational assessment, final adjustments, formative evaluation and corrective activities. Summative evaluation and remediation are the major actions in the post-engagement phase of instruction