In today’s challenging world, teacher needs to face more challenges while they are in their classrooms. Teachers need to be proactive, demonstrate the five personalities as in the acronym OCEAN, come out from the conventional style of teaching and give a lot of freedom and space to the children.
The Indian New Education Policy 2022 says, that teachers must have 50 hours of seminars and workshops, aligning with the demand, my school management also organised a two-day seminar session on Personality Development for teachers. Our resource person here was a clinical psychologist who has a bag full of experience in teaching, conducting seminars, and workshops on professional development for teachers.
Only what you know should challenge.
So let me begin with the first activity that was done with us. All the participants were asked to go to the basketball court and then make pairs with whom they were comfortable and then break the pairs and form different pairs, standing in two concentrating circles, facing each other. The inner circle would be the artist and the outer circle would be the art. Four rounds were taken up where the artist would at first make a flower, the second time a lion, the third a tiger and the fourth was a leader.
The process was so intriguing that the last time in the activity when we interacted the participants were made to think our teachers were good and creating just copies or they were good at hurting on regionality so now that was the challenge when teachers were given a task written is must be there but the point of view is an important part in the teaching-learning process the term distributed leadership.
I choose
Default or Design
Circumstances or Choices
As teachers, we have a challenge to transform lives, rather than merely teach. And for transformation, instilling courage and trust ‘hope’ will change students’ minds to think beyond.
A second important aspect that our resource person highlighted was the debate ‘Is Education neutral?’
Education is a standpoint, that has its shade from socioeconomic religious political factors of a person. Today what I teach to my students is always an outcome of an effect of my learning experiences related to my society. So he cited the example of Finland where education is a Phenomenon based learning, starkly different from progressive and liberal education.
Now, if a teacher is not able to see a thing without the influence of any other experience related to it, that teacher is a single-story person. Single-story people are dangerous people and related to self-defeating behaviour which authorises the statement ‘I am the product of my circumstances not of choices’.
As teaching is a deliberate profession, a teacher must have a mission statement. And this mission statement circles around 6 basic questions cited as below:
1. How do you see yourself as a teacher?
2. How do others see you as a teacher?
3. What are your strengths as a teacher?
4. What are your weaknesses as a teacher?
5. What or who has played a role in shaping you as a teacher?
6. What is the source of your authority?
Now if you found out the answers to the above questions compare and analyse, are you a reflective teacher, what is my priority as a teacher, where does critical thinking exist, and as a teacher am I facilitating the students to question.
All the above activities boiled down to Need Analysis – Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes equating with the three question words, how, why and what. If these three question words are placed in three concentrating circles, which word would I place in the innermost circle? This exercise led to an important part of the workshop on personality development – The Golden Circles
The four-letter word LIFE when asked to form as many words with two letters from it, then there is only one answer to it. We can only make the word ‘IF’. That means life is all about possibilities and herein the question raised is ‘Are we choosing the right possibilities?” Time to think from the teacher’s perspective taking into account the student’s life. It’s important to revisit ourselves as teachers. Are we setting boundaries for students? Are we giving opportunities to our students? How are we giving hope to them and instilling courage in the most laid-back ones?
Sprinkled feathers 