What do you consider are the major competences required of a successful teacher in primary education in today’s educational environment? How do you consider these competences are best developed and maintained? Introduction The aim of teaching is to make student learning possible. They are in an ideal position to assist children with their social and emotional development (McLaughlin, 1999, 13-22). Teachers occupy an important place in the lives of children when they are in school.
The aspect of this relationship that is most persuasive is the fact that their presence is a constant. The cycle of the daily routine puts students and teachers together in each other’s company with predictable regularity. Teachers are also in an ideal position to get their concerns to the attention of parents and offer guidance on different strategies and sources of help which can be needed. According to Barnes, Britton, and Torbe (1990) “Teaching is a highly skilled activity which needs of the teacher an instantaneous response to events as they develop.
He or she should attend not only to long-term goals but also to the urgent details of individual pupils’ participation in the lesson. The teacher should judge instantly whether the moment requires a suggestion and provocation to explain, a discouraging glance, an anecdote, a joke, a reprimand, or the setting of a new task. These immediate decisions depend inevitably upon intuitive judgment…. ” (Barnes, Britton, and Torbe, 1990, p. 8) The aim of this essay is to recognize the needs for becoming successful teacher in primary education.
It discusses key skill that required teaching effectively as they help learners improve their learning and performance in education, work and life. It further discusses the role and function of the teacher and planning to raise achievement. Moreover it is also been discussed that to develop and maintain competencies there should be control that transmit and share the knowledge base of the curriculum. Being a Skilful and Competent Professional Teachers are, quite rightly, concerned with their capability to cope with teaching particular classes of children. Without this control, teaching cannot take place.
Being incapable to control a specific class does not mean that the teacher is proficiently incompetent and that the necessary competence cannot be acquired throughout training or support. In fact it can be the case that specific children are being integrated in the class and the school at the expense of the education of the majority of those who are well behaved, and that other teachers in the same school would resist with equal difficulty to control and teach them. Lots of teachers with reputations for dealing competently with difficult children would find it hard work without the suitable support and resources.
The most significant resource is the individual teacher’s resilience, capability to reflect and learn from mistakes, and the power of their own personality, that is, their sense of being themselves. Doubts in professional competence can come mainly from trying to treat the act of teaching as a performance rather than developing skills that fit your own individual personality so that it is probable to use them well, all the time. Teachers are directed by emerging professional concepts (of education, teaching and learning) and by their actual classroom experiences.
Over time, the capability to apply principles associated with a favored ideal of good practice firms up, increased by novel insights and innovations throughout periods of training and further professional development. But the varying situations in which teachers learn how to educate are complex. They are complex because teachers’ professional proficiency is—from the start—subject to several influences from central government legislation, from classroom and school communities and (at first) from the kind of help and instruction given on teacher-education courses.
OFSTED 2000 defines good or excellent teaching as: “The teaching of skills and subject matter is knowledgeable, stimulating and perceptive. It uses imaginative resources and makes intellectual and creative demands on pupils to extend their learning. Challenging questions are used to consolidate, extend and verify what pupils know and understand. The methods chosen are well geared to the particular focus and demands of the lesson and make the most productive use of the time available. Relationships in the classroom provide a confident and positive atmosphere in which achievement flourishes.
Pupils are keen to learn, rise to challenges in creative ways and think further. They work well for extended periods of time and make very good progress”. (OFSTED, 2000:49) Approach to Competent Teaching The assumption that the primary aim of teaching is to make student learning probable leads to the contention that each and every teaching action, and every operation to appraise or improve teaching, must be judged against the simple criterion of whether it can reasonably be expected to guide to the kind of student learning which is desired by lecturers.
This in turn leads to an argument for a thoughtful and enquiring approach as a necessary condition for improving teaching. Such a strategy has always been reasonable good teachers down the ages have constantly used what they learned from their students to improve their practice. But it is perhaps easier to implement it today than it was twenty years ago. All through this time there have occurred some significant investigations which have looked, from the students’ viewpoint, at the processes and conditions of effective learning in primary education.
These proffer a valuable foundation for the development of higher-quality teaching. One effect of the knowledge gained through this research is confirmation of a fact that several educators have known for years—that teaching and learning in primary education are inextricably and richly linked. To teach is to make an assumption concerning what and how the student learns; therefore, to teach well implies learning about students’ learning. ‘Learning and teaching are continually interchanging activities. One learns by teaching; one cannot teach excepting by constantly learning’ (Eble, 1988, p. 9).
A recurring finding of this research into student learning is that we can never presume that the impact of teaching on student learning is what we suppose it to be. Students’ thoughts and actions are intensely affected by the educational context or environment in which they learn. They respond to the demands of teaching and assessment in ways that are hard to predict: a lot of their ‘learning’ is not directly about chemistry or history or economics, however about learning how to please lecturers and gain high marks.
These strategies all too often lead to them using methods of study that focus on just recalling and reproducing information rather than the actions which will lead to changes in their understanding. A significant part of good teaching is to try to understand these appropriate effects and to adapt assessment and teaching strategies accordingly. Good teaching entails striving persistently to learn about students’ understanding and the effects of teaching on it.