Teacher’s Professional Development- Factors Influencing Students’ Learning- Knowing the Learners’ and Teachers’ Roles

Name : Malasari
Title : Teacher’s professional development- Factors influencing students’ learning- Knowing the learners’ and teachers’ roles
Date : 5th May, 2012

In teaching-learning, two main elements needed are teacher and students. A good teacher is a professional teacher. Harmer (2001) stated three ways to be a professional teacher. There are reflection paths, action research, and developing with others. In the other hand, the very first students teacher should do are to learn and to get trained. This is exactly like I am having now. I learn how to be a professional teacher by reading and knowing many theories. Besides that, I also get a chance to have a simulation teaching. The simulation will be evaluated by my lecturers and friends. Not only simulation teaching, I also take a job being a private English teacher in order to train me handling my nervousness facing with students. In this report I will explain about teachers’ and learners’ roles. There are some roles teacher might play through teaching in the class. Generally, teachers act as a facilitator for the students (Harmer, 2001). In details, Harmer (2001) suggested five roles of teachers. Those roles are teacher as controller, teacher as prompter, teacher as participant, teacher as resource, and teacher as tutor. Harmer (2001) stated that teacher as controller always happen in a conventional education. Teacher controls all matters happen and what will happen in the class. By being the controller, sometimes students will act as teacher wishes. For example, when I was in the elementary school, my teacher came to the class and then checked the attendance firstly. After that, she gave a quite long explanation about the materials. She talked almost all the time in the class. She rarely gave us chances to talk. The only one chance she gave is when she asked us to answer her question. Sometimes, she read aloud the question although the question was from our textbook. This is, in my opinion, is the teacher’s negative backwash of being a controller. Teacher does not give the students much opportunity to develop themselves. In the contrary, the positive backwash from being a controller is that teacher can manage her/his class very well. Next role is teacher as resource. The implication of being a resource is that students will be more creative in asking teacher about anything (Brown, 2001). For example is my lecture in the previous semester. We were doing some speech translation from Indonesian to English. The speeches we translated were economic English, business English, sport English, etc. Since we are not students from those fields, we did not know some vocabularies and idioms related to those fields. Then, we asked the lecturer about the vocabularies or idioms fit to our speech. However, problems may come up when students have too big curiosity. I used to do it also. Some teachers could answer my question when the rest were not. Those who cannot answer had some tricks to cope that problem. One of the tricks was pretending to answer the question in the next meeting, wished me to forget it by a week. This action actually made them become entrusted. In my opinion, teacher can act as if she/he is recruiting a co-resource. She/he can ask the whole class to find the answer and promise to discuss it in the next meeting. It will burn students’ motivation to learn. The next role is teacher as prompter. When I was in the senior high school, I came to the front of the class to talk about something. I did not do it smoothly. I forgot some vocabularies and did not know how to speak well because of the nervousness. I made some gestures and eyes contact with my teacher. It was aimed to get some helps from her. When she realized me got stuck on my talk, she helped me by saying the words that already there on my head but was so hard to say. Teacher as participant is an enjoyable play (Harmer, 2001). When I got a lecture in the previous semester, the lecture asked the class to divide into groups. By the time went, she walked to each group to check the group’s work and to have discussion with the group. By joining the activities directly, teacher tries to show her/his friendliness. The last role as Harmer (2001) explained is teacher as tutor. Harmer (2001) said that tutoring may happen in the long time project. For example is on my writing projecy in the second semester. Besides the class meetings, my lecturer asked us to come to him personally to talk about the project’s progress. I felt really comfortable. I knew my faults obviously. The direct feedbacks were useful. However, in my opinion, this tutoring activity cannot work well in a large class. It also may take a lot of teacher’s time. After knowing teachers’ roles, then the question is, what is the best role should teacher play in the class? It is awkward if teacher only play one role either all roles. The best way is to switch the roles. The considerations in switching the role are the class situations, the learning goals, the learning materials, the students’ characteristics, etc. Besides knowing the teacher’ roles, it is also needed to know the learners’ roles. The very first of learners’ role is to study consistently and being motivated while learning. Another role is that learners have to know what kind of learners they are (Loras, 2010). By knowing whether they are visual, audio, or kinesthetic learners, it will help them in learning and enhancing their outcomes. Not only knowing the learners’ characteristics, the method and approach teacher uses in the class can influence the students’ outcomes. Other factors like class situation and school’s facilities may affect the students’ outcomes.

Reference
Brown, H. Douglas. (2001). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
Harmer, Jeremy. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
Loras, Vicky. (2010). Teachers’ and Learners’ Roles that Complement Each Other. Retrieved from http://vickylorus.worpress.com/2010/02/08/teachers-and-learners-roles-that-complement-each-other/