A vision of a Teacher

A VISION OF A TEACHER

A vision for a school can be most clearly developed by describing what teachers and students would actually be doing. Observation and experience show that one of the most important things that professionals do in high-performing organizations is learn from one another. Whether an organization’s focus is banking, engineering, or medicine, there are daily opportunities for dialogue with colleagues to empower them to identify, reflect, and experiment with ways to improve practice. Similarly, one attribute of an ideal school is the existence of a professional culture that supports teachers' continuous efforts to improve what is taught and how it is taught. As Hall and Hord (1987, preface) noted, "Change is a process and not an event"-that is, school improvement must be seen as continuous process.

Teachers develop and lead initiatives at school to integrate technology into the curriculum in new ways. The need for continuous improvement is based on the recognition that perfection will never be achieved-we will always be engaged in "work in progress."  Likewise, the best teachers are those who continuously observe, try out, and evaluate the effects of different instructional methods on student outcomes.

As good teachers recognize that textbooks are no substitute for identifying critical curricular goals, nor do current standardized tests offer an adequate basis for developing a coherent curriculum. The emergence of standards in the various content areas, however, has been a positive development, because they can help teachers identify critical student outcomes and develop appropriate assessment methods to measure them.

In the absence of establishing shared goals based on standards, new instructional methods will be baseless, and change-rather than improvement-will continue to be the norm.

The key to success requires that teachers should be encouraged to experiment with promising instructional methods as well as the responsibility to evaluate effectiveness.

D. Rama Madhav