The Role Of A Teacher

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The role of a teacher A teacher in education is one who educates others. Often the role of a teacher is formal and ongoing, usually as an occupation or profession at a school or other forms of place of formal education. For many years, the main role of a teacher was to impart knowledge. However in recent years, the role of a teacher is often now more varied, with many teachers taking several roles simultaneously (Harden and Crosby, 2000). Twelve common roles which a teacher may be involved in arerepresented in Figure 1. Whilst it would be impossible for one teacher to take on or be competent in all twelve roles, it is important that all twelve roles are represented in teaching organisations and institutions {draw:frame} Figure 1: The twelve roles of the teacher (adapted from Harden and Crosby, 2000) The traditional responsibility of a teacher was to pass on knowledge (the lecturer). However there is more of move to a more student-centred view of learning where the teacher is a facilitator or manager of students learning. Teachers also often have very important roles to play in curriculum planning and course organisation. Variation in the roles of a teacher are particularly important with professional courses such as medicines, pharmacy and nursing. For example the twelve roles of the teacher described above is related directly to a medical teacher. In the UK for example, seven different terms have been used to describe the role of a nurse teacher and these include clinical teacher, lecturer practitioner, practice educator, link lecturer, clinical facilitator (Ramage, 2004), link teacher (Wills, 1997) and link tutor (Andrews et al., 2006) Although the role of the teacher in recent times may seem like a new revelation, infact in 1971, Myron Tribus [14] pointed out that the {draw:a} teachers {draw:a} ‘must learn to coach, not to
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