Review what your role, responsibilities and boundaries as a teacher would be in terms of the teacher/training cycle. The key role of a teacher is to ensure students’ learning, serving as a guide to access the process of learning, with an overall responsibility to help them achieve their goals and objectives. From this overarching role of learning “facilitator” (Reece and Walker, 2003), several other roles and concomitant responsibilities develop as we progress through the five stages of the teacher/training cycle.
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Identifying needs: with any new student it is vital to establish their abilities such as literacy and numeracy, and whether there are any gaps or needs where additional support might be required to help them achieve, giving rise to the roles of assessor and interviewer. The teacher has a responsibility to assess as much whether the student is on the right course for them as whether they have the necessary skill sets to be able to do it and the mental ability to be able to cope with it.
Planning and designing learning: in order to provide relevant and up to date learning and supporting materials, the teacher will need to act as researcher, developer and producer to ensure both availability and variety of user-friendly resources, all while staying current with the curriculum and any subject specific advances. Delivering: in addition to the obvious role as deliverer of the curriculum, the teacher will also serve as a communicator, mentor and tutor to the students to ensure learning is achieved.
Unsurprisingly, there are many responsibilities associated with this stage, from using a variety of teaching methods to match different learning styles and speeds to ensuring the welfare of the students in the learning environment, both emotional, such as addressing bullying, and physical, through health and safety awareness. There is a responsibility to meet students’ needs, for example using coloured paper for students with dyslexia to providing additional work for more advanced students to prevent them from becoming bored.
Assessing: in any process, it is necessary to understand progress made in order to progress further, hence the need for the assessor or examiner role. Students’ needs and learning styles must also be taken into consideration when assessing and evaluating, as some may respond better to practical or spoken rather than written tests, requiring a range of assessment methods. Quality assurance and evaluation: assessment is meaningless without judging the results, therefore requiring the teacher to serve as an evaluator or appraiser.
Equally, evaluation is meaningless without feedback, bringing the roles of communicator and mentor into play again. The responsibility to evaluate equally, accurately and to any relevant standards or systems is matched by the need for reporting, whether that be internally to the institution, or, more crucially, to the student. Prompt positive feedback is vital in achieving progress, and it is worth noting that the process of assessment and evaluation applies as much to the teacher as the student.
There is an additional role encompassing all five stages of the teacher/training cycle, namely that of administrator, to enable not just the smooth running of the process but that all accompanying paperwork is dealt with in a timely fashion. As the teacher/training cycle is continuous , so each of these stages and the associated roles and responsibilities constantly feeds back, all acting to ensure the ultimate objective of students’ learning. Boundaries are there to protect the student and the teacher alike and can be broadly grouped under the key headings of safeguarding, behavioural, societal, and equality and diversity.
Due care must therefore be given to emotional as much as physical health and safety, and to the use of appropriate language and conduct and dress code. Organisational protocols and codes of practice must be followed, while favouritism or encroaching upon a student’s personal space during learning must be avoided, as must engaging in social activities outside the learning environment and sharing, or asking for, personal details, or offering personal advice.
