Week+Three


 * Week 3 - So you want to be a teacher!**


 * Guest Lecturer: Dr Howard Nicholas**

//Week beginning March 16th 2009//

Hello its Ian here and I would like to welcome you all to week 3 of the Issues wiki. It is my turn to provide a summary of this weeks lecture. This week we had guest speaker, Dr Howard Nicholas, pose us all a very important question; **“So you want to be a teacher?”** He provided a number of examples in visual, audio and print form of how people have viewed teaching in the past and present. These included:
 * ‘The Wall’ by Pink Floyd (Representation of a school as a factory)
 * Jaime Escalante (Difficult feelings experienced by teachers)
 * 'School of Rock' (“Sticking it to the man!”)
 * Victorian Government Regulations of 1872 (Older view)
 * Carl Di Stefano (Teaching as a magical experience)

Dr Nicholas then asked us to reflect on our views on:
 * Content (eg British girl’s knowledge of Tsunamis and Dutch class building a coffin for their dying teacher)
 * Physical world (eg Uneven distribution of resources)
 * Economic (eg Increase in global night lights since 1992)
 * Ethical, spiritual and moral (eg Depiction of Christ in a coffin by Hans Holbein)

He also explained that Teachers are bound by their own limitations. He provided a personal story of a friend of his Greg who died under tragic circumstances. Dr Nicholas then highlighted through music and text the changing of times and how education needs to change with these times. One of these examples compared a letter dated 1910 to a mobile text message from modern day that conveyed similar information. He also briefly described the Oaktree foundation, an organisation where volunteers under the age of 26 strive to make other peoples lives better. The next part of the lecture put Australian education in context and also examined the social context of education. The final and most important part of the lecture focused on ‘Teaching and You’. Many important questions were asked by Dr Nicholas, the main ones being:
 * Who are you and who are your students?
 * How will you relate theory and practice?
 * What are the elements of practice you need to have?
 * What kind of theory will you need?

He left us with the final thought that a sense of humour is essential! When reflecting on Dr Nicholas’s lecture and also the week 3 readings, I have come to the conclusion that YES, I DO WANT TO BE A TEACHER! It feels really exciting to write that and really believe it. I might not have all the answers to the questions posed this week but I feel I am already developing my professional identity as a teacher. I enjoyed reading the Ayers article ‘The Challenge of Teaching’. I found I shared the same passion as the writer. It was also important in the context of the lecture, as Ayers said: ‘The Challenge of teaching is to decide who you want to be as a teacher, what you care about and what you value, and how you will conduct yourself in classrooms with students’. I hope we all become the teachers we want to be. I look forward to reading the reflections of the rest of the group.

Hi everyone. This is Ken Nee. Thoughts that I have taken away from this week's lecture and readings - relevant to my professional identity as a teacher - include some of the following. It is important to develop great rapport with students by being real and expressing how we really feel and what we really think, and really honouring and recognising each student as a person of intrinsic worth, based on the Rogers and Freiberg (1994) article on "The Inter-personal Relationship in the Facilitation of Learning". Then there were two articles that were about bridging theory and practice in teacher education through continuous self-reflectivity as well as practice-reflectivity. Some important questions raised pertaining to teacher self-reflectivity were : Was I clear in my objectives ? Were the lessons meaningful and relevant to the students ? Where is each student at in terms of who they are and what they know ? Did I fully appreciate my students ? Did I fully appreciate my self ? Did I encourage them to think deeply about the subject ? Did I help them become more conscious and aware of themselves and their place in a larger world ? How can I continuously improve ? There was another article about teaching History that suggested History teachers were still passing on to students that there was such a thing as an 'Absolute Truth' in terms of viewing history. They were presenting 'facts' instead of revealing that History is nothing more than different subjective ways of __interpreting__ known - and incomplete - information. They were promoting passive rote learning over active critical analysis; 'knowledge' over knowledge- **construction** as a //continuous process//..... The article by Bernie Neville on "Teaching and Transformation" was my favourite. I inferred the following message from it:
 * Encourage Transformation in Every One and at the same time Accept Every One for WHO THEY ARE NOW.**

Hello everyone it's Nick here, I would like you all to know that at this precise moment I am in fact employing the advice of Jaime Escalante, 'keep your cool', because I just typed a stunning entry and then pressed the 'delete everything you just wrote' button, wherever that may be on the keyboard and now my minor work of genius is little bits of binary code all over the internet. The horror....

I refer everyone to the very handy 'save draft' button below in future.

But yes I thought Jaime Escalante was a great character to watch. I am currently very open to positive role models as a result of reading Lance Armstrong's biography so Jaime has come along at just the right time for me. I like the idea that a good primary school teacher can take many guises and does not need to fit any particular mold.

I enjoyed the Workshop discussions this week as well. The discussion questions were tight and relevant. My group addressed the question, 'how important is it for you to involve parents in their child's education', you will all no doubt remember it, it was a minor work of oratory genius. If not, we all agreed that it was essential to involve parents so that the learning cycle can continue at home and compliment their progress in school. Greg made the very good point however that if you do bring parents into the classroom environment that you need to set clear boundaries so as not to lose control of your classroom.

I feel good about the whole program at the moment though the teetering tower of looming assessment is occupying more than a modicum of my thoughts at the moment.

Nick