Functions of Teachers

All of us do learning every day for which we have no teachers, so evidently they are not necessary ingredients of the learning process. Yet our whole educational system is built on the argument that learning can be more efficient with teachers than without. Why?

• Teachers supply long-term objectives and plans for achievement. Left to chance discovery, much that students now learn in school would certainly not be learned. Teachers ensures learners will encounter certain materials and ideas society feels should be included in education. They plan an overall sequence and continuity in the curriculum, a balance of the many elements that need to be included and a relationship of the concepts from different curriculum areas. Some may debate these tasks are not always well done but they are functions learners especially immature ones, would have a very hard time performing without the leaders.
  
• Teachers are an efficiency of learning. Teachers as guides can always take one over strange territory much faster and easier than one can take oneself. From the outset, guides mobilizes energies and enthusiasm for the adventure and prepares the travelers for what lies ahead. Assessment of readiness are made and equipment are provided at the right levels of difficulty. Learning activities are tailored to induce the kinds of experience from which the desired learning can come.


• Teachers are coaches. As learning proceeds, teachers keep helping learners to identify and formulate the problems to be solved, decide where and how to look for answers, evaluate progress, allocate further effort and keep up enthusiasm. They anticipate where the trouble spots will be and plan accordingly, make resource materials available, gauge when more practice is needed or unnecessary. They make sure important points stand out clearly; especially difficult ideas can be gone over again a little differently, demonstrated graphically or the use of some other median to guarantee comprehension. Teachers keep checking on the learners mastery before proceeding to the next level.


• Teachers set the emotional and social climate of a classroom. The emotional tone and the pattern of social interaction established by teachers may determine whether members will learn to cooperate or compete, to value an activity or to hate it, to be imaginative and self reliant or docile and dependent.
  
• Teachers evaluate learning. It is often hard for the learners to be sure how they are really doing. Teachers have a broader basis for judgement, are more objective in assessment and can be much more precise in identifying strengths and weaknesses.

In summary, teachers functions have been stressed as guides for learners in progress toward maturity. As architects of the learning process, they emphasize learning is multiple in the sense of working with skills, tasks and people. Practice leads to experience which eventually become knowledge. Learning is only purposeful when demonstrated through actions.

Some people see teachers as those who connects the storage tank of knowledge to the empty tank of students mind and pumps in as much as will go. Others see teachers as molders of personalities akin to the way a potter molds clay into a beautiful shapes. How do you see teachers functions? What do you think of the outlined concepts? Have you run into others? Can computers replace teachers and how?