by Ally Chan

Created on: May 10, 2008

A teacher needs impeccable content knowledge and pedagogical skills in order to ensure the best educational opportunities for students. With the increase in training time at National Institute of Education as well as the increased post-graduation training hours (to 100 hours during school holidays), it is clear that the Ministry of Education regards teacher training and upgrading as crucial to the profession. In addition, there has been many changes to the curriculum and syllabi, which concentrate on giving teachers more free time to develop and try new teaching strategies and methodologies. Teachers in this era are also fortunate to have easy access to information and ideas through the use of IT. Indeed, websites on teaching ideas and styles, as well as those exploring educational psychology theories, proliferate on the Internet. It is very easy and convenient for teachers to retrieve and peruse new ideas in the field.

I am also of the opinion that teachers need to understand and keep pace with policy changes and the reasons behind various changes made in order to translate them at ground level into workable situations that are beneficial to students. In addition, if there are perceived flaws in the policies, or in their rationale, teachers should also seek to rectify them. They can initiate discussions and dialogues to ferret out the loopholes and find solutions, rather than leave everything in the hands of the ministry and take an apathetic stance.

However, despite the policy changes at the Ministerial level, some basic principles of teaching cannot change. Teachers need to have a strong set of personal values in order to be bulwarks against the plethora of possibly negative influences that exist in the world. However, I do wonder how far, as flawed human beings, we can seek to dominate the right to influence students. Although I would like to believe that all teachers seek to resolve any emotional or social issues within themselves before stepping into the classroom, I have met many who lack self awareness to an astonishing degree. This is the trickiest part of all. How can we ensure that we are not narrow-minded, unwise, unjust and short-sighted? These are not things that can be taught, and truly everyone has different value systems. Values are frequently rooted in religion or thought systems like Confucianism, and many of these clash. This can be detrimental with dealing with controversial ideas about sex, homosexuality, abortion and even historical events. I think it is crucially important, since teachers are regarded as mentors or role models to students by society at large, to know where one's own values come from, how this might influence one's thought, deed and speech, and how these might clash with someone from a different value system. Thus, developing self-awareness is the toughest non-academic job of a teacher.

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