The new role of the teacher is not about teaching.

Waking up early every day, no video games, no phones, no TVs and no beds to just do nothing. You have to listen to someone talking about different topics that are not interesting to you and you even have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. How would you feel?

From my experience as a teacher, I can say that the most difficult thing for students of all ages is to know what they really want. They are sent to school without a clear goal to accomplish and for that reason, schools offer multidisciplinary subjects so that the students can explore what they like and later decide on what they want, but the objectives or reasons are always blurry for the students and the problem here is that their interests are in a constant flux while the system remains static. The access to information and the input of different topics not only make the students change their interest quickly but also make them feel confused.I believe that our job as teachers is no longer transmitting or sharing information. That is something that the Internet and a robot can do, and indeed are doing for us right now. We have to think about the things that the students can't do on their own easily and there's where we come in. It is no longer about knowledge because they get it without teachers. Information is in the air and modern families provide their kids with the tools to breath it in from an early age.

Many people would claim that the new information and communication technologies are only a tool but unfortunatelty the reality is that in the digital era, the material that the students are given become the real teachers and the instructors become just motivating agents.

Paradigm shift

I believe that in this era our real job starts when the students struggle with their own interests. We have to prepare, support, motivate and help them face the constant changes of their minds, organize the knowledge that they manage, guide them to set realistic objectives and convince them that they can achieve them. That's what I call Encoaching.

It is about time that teachers start shifting from teaching to encoaching, which in short means to manage the goals of the students and help them achieve them. More than teaching, we have to make the students believe in themselves. The subjects that we teach are just excuses to provide a space of discovery and engaging experience but the students will be in charge of their own learning with our help.

Of course, a lot from NLP will be needed to prepare the Teachers for the new reality of our job and we ourselves will have to be knowledgeable of NLP to master encoaching in our classrooms.

The new education

Within this new paradigm, the educators must combine their knowledge with the best practice from social media and social networking service companies. The engine of the new teacher will be engaging contents through virtual platforms to keep students spending time in educational activities while they learn how to use the new ICTs responsibly. However, we have to be really smart to manage technology in our classes. The new education might be a counterproductive and expensive experience if we don't have the creativity to implement it.

In sum, the new education will be ruled by professionals who are aware of the traditional practices in education, are able to get involved with the students at a pedagogical level by encoaching them and have a clear and ethical understanding of the processes that drive the digital era:

• Digitalization
• Virtualization
• Gamification
• Digisocialization

Teachers still have the opportunity to survive to this era but only if they understand that their role has changed and that every time it is going to be shaped by the advances in the technology.

"When schools tell students to put technology away, it's like asking a doctor to save a life with one hand tied behind his back."

Matt Miller

My Teaching Philosophy

Throughout my experience as a language teacher, I have forged a very critical point of view of teaching in which I consider three imperative elements to reach educational excellence. The educator, the learners and the environment where the magic that we so call "learning" happens are key elements to understand my own vision of teaching and learning in a Foreign Language classroom.

That being said, before considering what is teaching and the role of the teachers, it is important to understand that for me learning is the capacity of absorbing everything we have in our surroundings to use it in our advantage. In other words, learning is a process in which we intake the input to transform it into a useful output. A simple example of this is when babies learn to speak. At first, they listen to every single word their parents say tand after a while they start repeating and using these words to get something (some attention, food, water, etc.). The same happens when people are learning a new language; they listen, repeat and then produce.

As a consequence, teaching is the ability to help others to learn. We, language teachers, should help learners develop their skills in our area of expertise by providing or modeling the context that they need to learn a specific structure, set of vocabulary, idiom, etc. We create the context as we provide enough input so that the students can intake the information and eventually produce the language. Every single person has the ability to learn without a teacher and the digital era has changed the role of the educators. This is why our role is to guide, mentor, motivate, encourage and facilitate information to help the students improve themselves more efficiently. Parents are also important in this process when we have young learners, but from them I (and I guess that every teacher) only expect commitment and respect for the teacher's work.

"I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they can learn"

Albert Einstein

My teaching philosophy as a language teacher is totally student-centered. I believe that the learning process happens in every student’s brain in a different way, but it is our job to evaluate how the students learn better to provide them with the right activities that make them meet their potentialities and embrace that potential to face the real world in the future. I don't teach just a language, I show the students a whole new world by using a target language. It is for that reason that I don’t believe in the standardization of the education system. We should be able to assess students’ progress in different ways and not just exams.

Having considered all this, in my practice, it is more convenient to foster an activef and project-based learning through a communicative and social approach with a didactic and dynamic direct method. The students learn by doing and I think that the combination of these ideas provides the language teachers with the best tools and environment to help students exploit their potentialities while at the same time they learn a foreign language.

"Learning is an experience, everything else is just information"

Albert Einstein

Teacher Autonomy: Solution or problem?

It is well known that within the hierarchy of any Education System, the schools are in the bottom of the line and the teachers are the most subordinate employees in the entire structure, yet they are the most important players to support the whole business.

Teacher Autonomy is a concept that seems to be out of date in collectivist cultures where there’s a long power distance between subordinates and superiors. My guess is that this is something intentional. People who make the important decisions maybe don’t want teachers to be autonomous but rather just obedient, right?

I'll explain this by taking as an Example two different countries where I've worked.

What is Teacher Autonomy?

It is the extend to which a teacher can make important decisions on his own to benefit the students and enjoy his teaching. For example, during the 90s in my country (Venezuela), teachers had a fair amount of autonomy, they could make decisions on what to teach, how to teach a topic, when to teach it, what books to use, how to assess the students’ progress, how to correct their behavior and so on. Even when I first became a teacher in 2010, I could still do all those things. I only had a list of competencies that the students had to mater before moving to the next level and based on that I would plan all my lessons and teaching materials, including the books to use for each of my groups, I could even decide on my own schedule and the coordinators would arrange everything.

Now the new education policies within the current socialist government have left the teachers with little power till the point that in public schools if a student is not ready to be promoted to the next year based on his performance, the teachers will have to promote them anyways.

In Venezuela, this is a new problem but the high score in indulgence of its people generally make them release their impulses and desires with regard to enjoying life and having fun, so practically they still see everything with a positive attitude although they realize that there is a problem.

This issue will hopefully be conjunctural. Once the current government is replaced, the education policies and practices will be fixed to be more efficient as they used to be before for both teachers and students.

Dark Side of Teacher Autonomy

In this context where the teachers were really autonomous to manage their classes as they wanted, they had also total control over the students’ performance and everyone would rely on their professionalism and qualifications to guide the academic path of the students. Collectivist teachers would embrace individualistic practices of teaching which were congruent with their own cultural beliefs and formation. However, not all the teachers were ethically prepared to have so much power and unfortunately some of them were immoral and corrupt.                                                                                                                                                This was the reality about the Teachers’ Autonomy in some middle schools, high schools and even Universities. Being underpaid made that some teachers were easy to manipulate and they would change their minds about a student’s performance before writing the report cards if they had received generous gifts from the student. Some others were even worse and they would trade passing or better grades for money or sexual favors.

Consequences of lack of Teacher Autonomy

My experience in Turkey, where I’ve been teaching for the last 3 years, has shown me that the lack of Teacher Autonomy brings different problems not just to the teachers but in the long term to the society.

I believe that teaching is an art and the creativity only comes to those who are free. When the teacher autonomy is degraded to only the way the teachers teach an existing curriculum with an imposed material, teaching becomes something trivial and mechanical. When the teachers are not allowed to follow their instincts and experiment new things in the classrooms, their creativity is killed. As a consequence, I can list the following problems:

•  A lot of teaching but no learning
• Incompatibility of programs with specific groups
• More classroom management problems
• High teacher turnovers
• Recruitment of less qualified teachers (easier to be manipulated)
• Lack of academic excellence and reliability
• Standardization of the evaluation and assessment system

In this context, the private schools become only diploma machines because all the students will be granted one on time as long as they pay the tuition fees. It wouldn’t actually matter if they are ready to face life outside the schools, they will be promoted year after year no matter what anyways and the public schools are indoctrination centers where the students learn to be patriotic and defenders of the convenient history of their country.

Finding the right level of Autonomy

So far, it seems that Teachers’ Autonomy can represent ether a problem or a solution for collectivist education systems. In the case of Venezuela, although the academic results were outstanding, it brought problems of corruption and scandals to the classrooms while in Turkey a bit of freedom to their teachers in the decision-making process could restore the reliability of the education system and its students.

What we can do is to analyze what aspects of autonomy might be more strongly rooted in each collectivist culture, design policies to empower the teachers based on the results and implement them with a flexible supervision to support the learning environment and detect actions of corruption.

Basically, the plan is to look for the honesty point in which both teachers’ autonomy and formal policies are even, or is there more that we can do to stop everyone usurping the teachers' authority?

Reality of Private Schools in Turkey: Corruption and failure of the Education System.

Empirically, it seems that both parents and teachers have forgotten about the real purpose of teaching while the students do not have a clear idea of what learning means. Every time it is more difficult to make them understand why they come to school in the first place. The reality is that all of them were led to change their perception and now the concepts of teaching and learning are subjects of interpretation.

In Turkey, the Ministry of National Education (MEB) is the one that runs the educational administration of the country and is responsible for drawing up curricula, coordinating the work of official, private and voluntary organizations, designing and building schools, developing educational materials and so on. The Supreme Council of National Education discusses and decides on curricula and regulations prepared by the Ministry. In the provinces, the Directorates of National Education appointed by the Minister organize educational affairs, but working under the direction of the provincial governor.

When it comes to schools, millions of important decisions have already been made and all they do is to follow the existing programs. The Directorates of National Education pressure the schools to make the students get high scores and in a desperate action of following the government standards, retaining customers, keeping parents happy and attracting more clients, the schools end up cheating the system, especially in the private schools were the money plays an important role.

Since the student-centered approach came to our k12 classrooms, the learners are overestimated and parents have more power than ever before, they even think that they can teach teachers how to teach. Teachers lack of almost total autonomy and coordinators and principals are just relationists who maintain the existence of the program without any verbal complaints.

Have you heard about real (fake) exams and common (state) exams?

In most of the Turkish private schools, the only assessing system for secondary and high school is by testing the students’ knowledge. Paper based exams are the only method employed and everything the teachers were taught in the university about the evaluation process in education is left behind. Basically, the students are formally assessed only on their memory skills in one of these two exams and the rest of the activities that they do at school are only part of their learning experience. 

On the one hand, the real exams are designed by the teachers based on what they have taught in the classroom and the level of difficulty is usually challenging. The purpose of this exam is to make the learners study a bit and give teachers an idea about the potentialities and points for improvement of the students.

On the other hand, the common exams are designed to accomplish the government standards and most of the time these are multiple choice exams as if life were only about choices. These exams do not challenge the real capabilities of the students and they are practically designed to make everyone pass. However, some students do fail these tests.

The problem here is not just that the learners only study to pass an exam, but also that the results are not processed properly and in the end the exams are only done to full fill an administrative task while preparing students for life is taken too lightly. In the real exams, if the students get scores bellow 60/100 the teachers are asked to change the answers and adjust the scores accordingly to make it look better. As a general rule, the students must have more than 80 points in their exams, otherwise the failure of the students’ performance will fall under the teacher’s fault and they will face a stormy conversation with parents, coordinators and principals.

Similarly, for the common or state exams, the teachers are asked to change the scores and assign a better mark over 80/100 to accomplish the government standards

In both cases, the students have to present an excellent report card even though everyone is aware of their real capabilities.

Are we motivating or harming our students?

The answer is clear. We are promoting a fake estimation of their strengths. Students grow up believing that they are perfect, that they are knowledgeable and that they are capable of doing anything they want even though everyone knows the reality. Luckily, some students realize this fallacy by the time they are in high school and they focus their time and energy in developing their knowledge and skills, they become real students while others continue living a fantasy, however, this is not the common denominator.

In most of the cases, the students who decide to go to the university face the reality once they are there. What are the results for the students? Low grades, demotivation and anger. What are the challenges for the teachers? A big gap of knowledge and a multilevel classroom with a long breach between levels. Here is when the students self-steam gets hurt and they end up having lots of problems to catch up with all the knowledge they didn’t get in school.

But the problem does not finish here. Not all the students get accepted into the best universities of the country or are able to complete their studies there because of the high level of academic standards. In the best of the scenarios when they don’t drop out education, they decide to go into the private universities owned by the same people who own the schools where they studied. Of course, as long as they pay the tuition fees, they are accepted without going through any selection process. They finish their programs with outstanding marks and then they face the reality when they start applying for jobs.

Once, a colleague said “the students are a problem that we carry at schools till they become part of the society problems.” So, the question is: Is it ok to promote students based on fake scores? Don’t they need to master addition and subtraction before moving to multiplication and division? 

What can be done?

The solution is not easy. Through Hofstede’s model, Turkish culture has long been described as high in uncertainty avoidance and high in collectivism with large power distance while most of the western cultures, especially in the UK and the USA, where most of the Educational management framework comes from, promote more individualism and equalities among people.

This is an issue that has been studied and discussed before many times but all the solutions were made for contexts where an individualistic culture is strong. When the schools try to apply this framework of reference, they don’t realize that they are culturally unexperienced to implement it. As a consequence, they advertise a “western-like” culture that in practice is something else and brings more problems than solutions to the schools.

Empowering teachers and enhancing their Autonomy is the most common way to attack the problem. Since they have the most contact with the students, they should be able to participate in important decision-making processes and have a voice when creating policies that affect their teaching. But how can we foster teacher autonomy in a collectivist culture like Turkey?

I think that a bottom-up approach is not a realistic solution here but this is something that I will leave to your refection while I myself continue looking for the answer to that question.