Creating Great Teachers

Teacher training does not make great teachers.

This comes from the last training I conducted for teachers. I recognised that while a lot of focus is on subject matter expertise, CCE, classroom management etc., it is like applying cold cream on cow dung.

Unless teachers become self-aware, they'll not become good teachers. Why do I say so?

Our beliefs and mindsets lie at the root of our actions. What we believe about the child, about learning and about assessing, shows up in how we deal with children.

Teachers who believe that they need to know everything, don't give themselves the option to admit they don't know. They would rather shut up a child asking an interesting higher order question, than admit that they don't know and will find out the answer later. 

Teachers who believe that children need to listen when the teacher is talking insist on pin drop silence. Their belief makes them create lectures where they become the fountainhead of knowledge and children the silent receptacles.

Teachers who believe that some children are born smart and some are not, focus on telling children whether they are smart or dumb, hard working or lazy and creative or not. Their belief focuses them on results and scores and makes them categorise the classrooms into haves and have nots.

Bear in mind, that most teachers mean well. They are in this profession to do good. They want their students to succeed. But being prisoners of their beliefs and mindsets, they act in ways that run contrary to their intent.

So we have a swarm of teachers who intend well, but act bad. And no amount of Continuous and Comprehensive Examination or Classroom Management strategies will help. It is the beliefs that need to be pulled out from their sub-conscious level to the conscious level where they can examined. Until that happens, teachers continue to be driven by their beliefs without being aware of them!

One of the basic belief that needs altering is our belief about talent. Most teachers believe that talent is inborn. Their assessments are designed to find who are talented. Their reporting give each child a label of poor, fair, good, very good - categorising them into the talent have's and have not's.

Carol Dweck's pathbreaking work has proven that talent is not inborn. Interest is. Effort and practice is what builds talent. Once teachers adopt this belief, they focus on children's behaviour, not labels. And children in those classrooms, focus on what they have learnt and how much more they need to learn, not whether they are talented or not.

Another belief is about children as learners. Are they reluctant learners who need to be coerced or cajoled to learn, who continuously need to be told to pay attention, who need to be put in a classroom lest they get distracted? Or are they curious learners who want to know more and figure out things as long as it is interesting for them? Depending on which belief we adopt, our actions as teachers, alter.

There are a host of others beliefs that run teachers - about children, about learning, about school and about their role as teachers. As teachers become aware of their existing beliefs, they can see the actions that spring from these beliefs. And they can also see why their actions end up contrary to their intentions.

Teacher Education needs to start from examining their underlying beliefs and then creating a skill set for teaching. Else, we'll continue to have teachers who intend well but act bad.