Role of the Teacher = “Patience + Professionalism + Understanding Child Potential

P is a powerful letter for the ESL Teacher. A teacher must be prompt, punctual, powerfully engaging, capable of potential assessment, and professional. A teacher must be take pride in teaching and build on the promise available. However, for purpose of time placement, the three important P’s in the role of the ESL teacher are: patience, potentiality, and professionalism. A teacher must direct students to take initiative both actively and in a constructive way. An educator’s role also relies on the teacher assessing potential - each child is a promise of what can be and what should be.

A teacher must value potential and treat the student’s potential with the mandatory respect and regard all humans deserve. An educator must be held responsible for each student’s productivity by maintaining a degree of professionalism. As a cultivator, facilitator, care giver, and instructor, the teacher is responsible for all observable and unobservable changes within a learner. A teacher must always conduct him or herself with regard for the learning process, be punctual when arriving in the classroom, and prompt with readily available materials for students. By maintaining patience, valuing the student as a unique being with multiple capabilities and abilities, and being able to show change through observable behaviors and thinking patterns through observable professionalism, this all important P-triad will help the teacher make the formula that equals a productive adult.

PATIENCE

A teacher and ESL teacher is particular must activate and execute patience in all learning and behavior situations with students. In Canter’s Assertive Discipline, the role of the teacher is clearly defined as one who remains calm and distances oneself from the anger of the student, gives students limits, and provides positive recognition and support. A patient teacher is not only a teacher who waits for the student to correctly answer a question but can meet the adversity of a tired, frustrated, angry learner within the classroom setting. Patience, in the role of the teacher, is perseverance regardless of the classroom scenario.

UNDERSTANDING CHILD POTENTIAL

The learner is a multi-faceted being with boundless potential and multiple abilities that interact together to create a unique being. According to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory, a student contains eight intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist (Gardner, 2007). The teacher can gauge the strengths and areas for improvement of a learner, what skills to cultivate, and what skills to challenge. An educator can utilize multiple learning styles to help expand these intelligences: through exercises that allow movement, touching, listening, seeing, and feeling. The teacher can affirm what will benefit the pupil and student body.

PROFESSIONALISM

A Professional teacher practices classroom management, is prompt and ready at the beginning of class, and takes the responsibility of teaching seriously. A professional has classroom management that is flexible enough for the students needs and structured enough for educational discipline to occur. All students are entitled to a safe environment that revolves around an orderly classroom, lesson plans with developmentally appropriate subject matter, and appreciation of diversity. A learner must be treated with patience and pushed to achieve maximum capacity by the educator. A professional is always prompt in the classroom and even teachers who rotate classrooms must have their materials readily available to pull out in each different room. Finally, a professional teacher takes teaching seriously by getting to know her or his students. A professional teacher incorporates important parts of the students’ lives into the lessons. By getting basic information about students, obtaining information about the student’s prior educational experience, and being aware of the student’s home culture, the role of professional teacher is played (Peregoy & Owen, 2005). A professional educator makes all information relevant to the learner without relying on the student’s native language. A professional educator takes the business of getting to know the student and working within the context of the English language seriously.

Simple as the English letters X, Y, Z, the teacher role is the three P’s, patience, understanding potential, and professionalism.

Meryl Bazaman