Roles, responsibilities and relationships in lifelong learning

Evaluate your roles and responsibilities in relation to the teaching cycle. How do you make your delivery inclusive and maintain a safe learning environment? What are your boundaries in relation to your learners and when and how would you refer learners to other professionals?

The profession of Teaching is a challenging and rewarding occupation. There are many roles and responsibilities that teachers are required to fulfil, some of these are professional responsibilities that can also be considered pastoral.

Therefore, teachers in their roles and responsibilities should be committed to improving the quality of their methods to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of their own teaching, as the impact on learners would be a greater understanding of their capacities. That is, from closing the gap of discontentment to being open to significant learning by the use of techniques that encourage student participation and inclusion.
Making delivery inclusive is a key aspect of teaching. For example if I was teaching Religious Education in a mixed ability setting, I would initially go from group to group to help them resolve problems, but if there were particular issues that seemed to arise regularly, then I would stop the class to demonstrate the problem on the interactive white board, and encourage answers and question from the classroom.
In a high ability class, I would stop the class for a few minutes and discuss with them how they interpret what they had just heard. There may be some difficulties surrounding making sure that the majority of the students contribute to the lesson, as gifted learners can work better individually. I would deal with this by going through the register at each interjection to discuss the activity so far with that particular student. This way all of the students had to verbally make contributions to the lesson and had to listen in. I would refer learners to other professional if they were displaying particularly disruptive behaviour that made progress in the lesson difficult
One of the boundaries relating to the roles and responsibilities would be the misjudgement of limiting the strategy to a teacher’s learning style instead that of learners’, which would have an impact on the effectiveness of that teaching session in a classroom of diverse students. This comes under the Equalities Act (2010) which extends to all the aspects of a person’s identity – known as ‘protected characteristics’ eg, gender, age, ethnic origin etc. So due care must be taken to ensure that disadvantages are mitigated or minimised for a pupil. Another concern is that steps are taken to meet different needs, and finally, that a teacher must encourage participation from the learners when it’s disproportionately low. This would mean valuing the participation of all learners.
On the issue of diversity, Ajegbo (2007) reports that more identity and diversity education is needed to achieve a cohesive British society at ease with its diversity, yet teachers often lack confidence and adequate training to deliver such lessons, resulting in neglect. Secondly, in an era of globalisation with mass migration, travel and technological development (Kerr, 2003) changing long-established lifestyles, a societal reconsideration of ‘Who am I?’ seems essential (Kelly and Byrne, 2004) if all are to feel at ease with their own, and others, identities and the diversity around them.

There are many ideas on classroom management. While personality and subject knowledge are vital ingredients of a good teacher, successful pupil learning depends as much on effective classroom management skills. While these can be developed and refined with experience and through continuing professional development activities, there are some techniques that may work well.

Plan and Prepare Well. Making sure you know what you are expected to teach and what books and other resources you will use. Pupils will surely respond better to confident, knowledgeable teachers who care enough about them to prepare good, interesting lessons. Give Regular Praise and Constructive Feedback. Praise and encouragement are powerful motivators, and should be given regularly to individual pupils for good/improved behaviour and/or performance as well as to the whole class, e.g. at the end of a lesson during which a lot has been achieved.
Embrace Positive Reinforcement Techniques is also very useful. The Behaviourist Theory suggests that children will respond best to positive reinforcement, in other words rewards. The attention of adults is important to children and some learn that the only way to get attention is by exhibiting negative behaviour. The only time they feel noticed is when they are being chastised for unwanted behaviour. Their logic tells them that in repeating the unwanted behaviour they will get more attention. If we try to ignore negative behaviour (as far as is safe to do so) but reward positive behaviour then the child learns that more attention is gained through being 'good'.
Support student participation can be enhanced by asking students to work within groups that they normally would not associate with as a good way to increase a sense of team work within the classroom and also belonging for those students who are often left to feel left out. By developing activities that are tailored to engage students with their peers and their lessons in new and differing ways to the norm.
In order for students to feel safe in their classroom, their teacher must provide them a safe and supportive learning environment. Students must feel comfortable and as a teacher I must be friendly and approachable to ensure that all students in the school feel confident in coming to me for guidance or help, and not just the students in my class.