Walter Geerts & René van Kralingen - The Teachers' Handbook

Introduction

goals. Colleagues who train future teachers at their own school are actually not educating the teachers for that particular school. They are educating teachers for all secondary education and senior secondary vocational education and training (VET, or MBO ) institutions. Hence, it should be a wide-scope approach beyond the schoolyard: the focus of the teaching profession in general demands a re search-oriented approach, a broad ranging interest, an eye for current develop ments as well as a vision of future developments. The next section will illustrate these developments while simultaneously providing direction for the structure and composition of this textbook. As authors, one of our main goals is to enable a new generation of teachers to practise the teaching profession by means of using a wide scope as opposed to adhering to a more or less random style or approach. People usually have very specific ideas concerning what constitutes the best way to teach students. Some teachers strongly prefer their students to develop new knowledge: they focus on this. They ensure a suitable education programme and the right treatment and they present the subject matter in an academic manner. Other teachers are strong advocates of group learning: especially the added value of interaction among stu dents constitutes the ideal teaching method, in their opinion. The latter perform their teaching duties from a strongly social and personally meaningful stance. They intentionally or unintentionally choose a specific form of education, which is again connected to specific learning theories. Obtaining knowledge of these theories does not guarantee a suitable, ready-to-use teaching model, but it does provide some kind of direction to the educational design process. The fact that individual teachers, even within teams, decide to make different choices in teaching practice means that they undermine each other’s approach. This holds for their lesson planning but even more so for their approach to teaching. Where, for instance, some teachers immediately penalise students who fail to do their homework, others let it go. Some teachers invest in their students’ development and build in time to talk to them, their parents and colleagues out side of the classroom. Others believe they are not responsible for their students’ upbringing and leave this to the parents themselves. We strongly believe that teachers should not act aimlessly and based on per sonal preferences. A consistent policy, jointly reinforced, ensures an unambigu ous approach to students while simultaneously ensuring its acceptance and im plementation. Reflecting on choices Many professionals are frequently asked to justify their approach, but generally speaking teachers are not used to this kind of question. In general there tends to Goals A wide scope

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