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