Checking your performance as a teacher and keeping up-to-date

Published on 01/06/2015 by admin

Filed under Internal Medicine

Last modified 01/06/2015

Print this page

rate 1 star rate 2 star rate 3 star rate 4 star rate 5 star
Your rating: none, Average: 5 (1 votes)

This article have been viewed 1382 times

5 Checking your performance as a teacher and keeping up-to-date

Teachers should take responsibility for their personal continuing professional development and regularly assess and review their own competence.

Teaching is a professional activity that requires:

• mastery of the subject matter that is being taught

• mastery of approaches to teaching that result in students’ effective and efficient learning.

It should be apparent from the earlier chapters that teaching is an immensely complex and multifaceted activity that involves a wide range of competencies and attributes. Teachers, if they are to meet their responsibilities, require a range of technical skills that equip them to impart knowledge, teach practical skills, assess students, conduct small group sessions and facilitate students’ learning in a range of contexts. These technical skills represented by the inner circle in Figure 5.1 are covered more fully in later chapters of the book. The teacher is a professional and not simply a technician. As described in the earlier chapters in this section, teachers have to approach their work with an understanding of the underpinning educational principles, with the necessary passion and appropriate attitudes, and using a combination of evidence-based decision-making and intuition (the middle circle in Figure 5.1).

image

Fig 5.1 Three-circle model of the competencies required of a teacher.

In this chapter we focus on the personal development and professionalism of a teacher. This is the outer circle in Figure 5.1. Key professional responsibilities include the need for teachers to:

• reflect upon and be aware of their own strengths and weaknesses as a teacher and to be an inquirer into their own competence

• keep up-to-date with new approaches to teaching and learning

• recognise that the teacher is part of a team which involves collaborating with others engaged in the education process.

A general statement of the values and commitments of a teacher that embody the principles of professionalism is given in Appendix 1.

Enquiring into your own competence

As a professional, a key task for teachers is to take responsibility for the quality of their teaching and for the assessment of their own competence as a teacher. In choosing to read this book readers have demonstrated an interest in teaching and hopefully in their own performance as a teacher. In some areas it should be apparent whether a teacher has the required competencies. The expertise necessary to set appropriate standards for assessment procedures or to prepare an e-learning programme are obvious. In other areas, such as lecturing or the facilitation of learning in small groups, the level of expertise required may be less clear.

Most teachers at some stage in their career will have given one or more lectures, run a small group discussion or counselled a student or trainee, without necessarily having reflected on their performance in relation to the task. Self-assessment with an assessment of personal strengths and weaknesses is notoriously difficult. There is good evidence that the poorer performer is more likely to make an over-inflated assessment of their competence. The teacher may believe that he or she has given an outstanding lecture while in practice students find the lecture incomprehensible, boring and irrelevant. A teacher may use a small group session to express his or her own views and thoughts on a topic without appreciating that he or she has failed to engage the students actively in discussion and to stimulate their reflection. The teacher may think that his or her counselling session and feedback provided for the student or trainee in difficulty has gone well, while the opposite is the case and the student is left without any real understanding of his or her problems and what can be done to remedy them. Here are some suggestions that may help teachers to assess their teaching prowess:

• Stop and reflect on your own performance as a teacher. By reading this book you have started this process.

• Study feedback from students

Related posts:

What is a good teacher? Default ThumbnailRecognising the importance of the education environment Default ThumbnailAssessment for admission to medicine and postgraduate training Describing and communicating the learning outcomes Teaching and learning in the clinical context Making the apprenticeship model and work-based learning more effective