Teaching, coaching, mentoring, facilitating, motivating, directing...what is a teacher to do?

摘要

We often tell our students that we are not responsible for their learning. Is this correct? What are we responsible for?..teaching, coaching, mentoring, facilitating, motivating, directing? The easy answer is that, it depends. We believe holistic teaching methods result in greater synthesis of knowledge and understanding. To foster deeper and more meaningful learning, teachers need to take into account a student's unique background, experiences, knowledge, skills, abilities, personality type, socialstyle, and/or personal styles and values. This can be achieved through student-centered learning plans. Effective teachers should attempt to design and deliver individualized instructional sequences to provide the greatest opportunity for student growth. Failure to do so results in teaching to "the middle" and providing material that is too challenging for some students and too simple for others.