TEACHING (The Role of Institution, Teachers, The Teaching Process, The Learning Process, Application of Curriculum, Through Lesson Plan)

TEACHING

The Role of Institution, Teachers, The Teaching Process, The Learning Process, Application of Curriculum, Through Lesson Plan

James Dean Brown said that teaching is a complex and controversial profession, and the education literature is full of teaching models that present varied conceptualizations of the nature of teaching. He will be using a narrow definition of teaching that includes only those activities rationally selected by the teacher to help student achieve learning. To be rational, these activities must be justified according to the kinds of objectives that the program has developed and the teachers have set out to accomplish, but also must be related to the overall approaches and syllabuses that motivate and organize the curriculum.

A. The Role of Institution

1. The organization culture

The organization culture of a school refers to the ethos and environment that exist within a school, the kind of
communications and decision making that take place, and the management and staffing structure they support. Basic to the organization culture of an institution is its management structure, because, as Devidson and Tesh point out (1997), its organization design “is built by managerial decision that delineate the number and type of jobs in the organization and the processes that subordinate, control and link them, such as authority relationships, communication networks, and specific planning and organizational techniques” (Devidson and Tesh, 1997).

2. Quality indicators in an institution

Language teaching institutions very greatly in terms of how they view their educational mission. Some schools – hopefully the majority – are committed to providing quality educational services. They have a clearly articulated mission. They take the seriously the development of a sound curriculum and set of programs, hire the best available teachers, and provide quality instruction and the kinds of support teachers need to achieve their best. The following characteristics are indicators of the quality of school or educational institution (Morris 1994).

• A sense of mission: what goals does the institution have? Does it exist to serve an important educational purpose that provides the rationale for the range of courses and services it offers? A useful format for articulating a school’s sense of mission is in the form of mission statement. Such a statement should be developed collectively by those who have a commitment to the success of the institution.

• A strategic plan: a description of the long-term vision and goals of an institution and the means it undertakes for fulfilling them. Based on approaches used in successful businesses and industries, the notion of strategic planning is now increasingly seen as essential to the success of any organization, including schools. Klinghammer (1997) provides a useful overview of the function of strategic planning in effective language programs, and identifies six elements of a good strategic plan: vision, values, purpose, mission, goals, and strategies.

• The quality of mechanism: refer to systems a school has in place to ensure the quality of its practices.

• A sound curriculum: reflected in the following features of a school’s programs.

• Flexible organizational framework: effective schools and language programs are characterized by administrators who are open to change, flexible, and who encourage teachers to innovate.

• Good international communications: depend on setting up systems that facilitate communications among teachers and between teachers and administrators.

• Professional treatment of teachers: the extent to which teachers are regarded as professionals is indicated.

• Opportunities for teacher development: teachers need to develop long term career goals and expand their roles and responsibilities over time if they are no continue to find teaching rewarding.

3. The teaching context

• Size and staff structure: the size of schools and its administrative influences many aspects of a teachers work.

• Equipment: schools very greatly in the amount they have invested in equipment and technology.

• Support staff: adequate support staff can also facilitate teacher’s work.

• Teachers work space: one way of determining how seriously a school regards its teachers and the work they do is the work space it provides for its teachers.

• Teachers resource room: teachers need access to a good range of current ESL textbooks, resource book, material, and magazines located in a resource room or similar facilities in order to update their professional knowledge and get new ideas to feed in to their teaching.

• Teaching facilities: where does teaching take palace and how adequate are teaching facilities.

• Class size: the optimal class-size needs for each type of course should be established based on teachers, learner and school factors, and when needed, the reasons for standards set need to be explained to clients.

B. Teachers

Many things can be done to create a context for good teaching, but it is teachers themselves who ultimately determine the success of program.

1. Skill and qualifications

Language teaching institutions very greatly in the type of they employ. Increasingly, language schools are recruiting better trained and better qualified language teachers and operating within defined standards of quality. A number o attempts have been made to conceptualize the nature of teacher knowledge and skill. Core components of teacher knowledge include the following:

• Practical knowledge

• Content knowledge

• Contextual knowledge

• Pedagogical knowledge

• Personal knowledge

• Reflective knowledge

The UCLES certificate in Language Teaching to Adults, a widely taught initial qualification for language teachers, focus on six areas of basic teaching skills:

• Language awareness

• The learner, the teacher, and teaching/learning context

• Planning for effective teaching of adult learners of English

• Classroom management and teaching skills

• Resources and materials for teaching

• Professional development

2. Support for teachers

If teacher is expected to teach well and to develop their teaching skill and knowledge every time, they need ongoing support.

• Orientation: new teachers need a careful orientation to teaching assignment in order to clarify the goals of the program, teaching approaches, resources, problems to anticipate, and solutions.

• Adequate material: teachers need good materials to teach from either in the form of commercial textbooks or institutionally prepared materials.

• Course guides: course guide should be provided for each course offered in the program wit information on the course, aims, and objectives, recommended materials and method, suggested learning activities, and procedures for assessment.

• Division of responsibilities: teachers have many different responsibilities apart from teaching. They may be involved in course planning, course coordination, testing, preparation of materials and mentoring.

• Further training: teachers in an institution may not always have the particular knowledge and skills a program needs, so it may be important to select staff for specialized training to meet these needs.

• Teaching release: if teachers are expected to play a key role in some aspect of the program such as materials development or mentoring, they may need to be given release time from teaching to enable to devote time to this.

• Mentor: a system of mentoring is often helpful in a school where there are teachers of different levels of experience and training.

• Feedback: teachers need to be told when they are doing well and when there are problems with their performance.

• Rewards: teachers who perform well should receive acknowledgement for good service.

• Help lines: teachers often work for long periods in relative isolation. Teachers should know exactly whom to turn to for help in solving different kind of problems.

• Review: time should be allocated for regular review of the program, problem solving, and critical reflection. These activities help solve practical probles and also develop a sense of collegiality among staff.

C. The Teaching Process

The focus here is on the teaching practices that occur within a program, how these can be characterized, and how quality teaching can be achieved and maintained.

1. Teaching model and principle

Robert (1998) compares two teaching models implicit in many language programs: the operative model and the problem solving model:

In an operative model the teacher is restricted to meeting the requirements of a centralized system, such as the delivery of a textbook as planned, to a set timescale. In the case of the problem-solving model, a decentralized curriculum gives teachers greater autonomy in making educational decisions.

Teachers principles are a product of their experience, their training, and their beliefs. (Breen), comments: any innovation in classroom practice from the adoption of a new task or textbook to the implementation of a new curriculum has to be accommodated are on the part of the designer of curriculum planner and, indeed the teachers themselves, will facilitate harmony between a particular innovation and the teacher’s enacted interpretation of it in the classroom. The opportunity for teachers to reflect upon the evolving relationship between their own beliefs and their practices at the heart of curriculum change.

2. Maintaining good teaching

Quality teaching cannot simply be assumed to happen. It result from an active, ongoing effort on the part of teachers and administrators to ensure that good teaching practices are being maintained. This involves the establishment of shared commitment to quality teaching and the selection of appropriate measures to bring it about.

• Monitoring: information need to be collected regularly on all aspect of the program to find out how teachers are teaching the course, what is working well or proving difficult, and what issues teachers need to resolve.

• Observation: regular observation of teachers by others teachers or supervisor can provide positive feedback on teaching as well as help identify areas that might need attention.

• Identification and resolution of problems: timely identification of a problems in a program is essential to ensure that small problems do not develop into bigger ones.

• Shared planning: during process planning, potential problems can often be identified and resolved.

• Documentation and sharing of good practices: teachers should be encouraged to report on their positive teaching experience. Meetings or mini-conferences can be arranged in which teachers report in classroom innovations or others activities they wish to share with colleagues.

• Self-study of the program: study of the program’s practices and values as part of the process of self evaluations and review.

3. Evaluating teaching

If a program seeks to provide quality teaching, it is essential that teacher performance be regularly reviewed. This involves the development of an appraisal system. The type of appraisal:

• Developing the appraisal system: in appraisal system is likely to have greater credibility if it represents both teachers and administrators views. It should therefore be produced collaboratively and represent all points of view.

• The focus of the appraisal conducting the appraisal: the focus of appraisal my include a number of other aspects of teachers work, such as; lesson plan, teacher-made classroom materials, course outline and handouts, class assignments, participation in profession development activities.

• Conducting in appraisal: a teaching appraisal may be carry out by a supervisor, a colleague, the teacher him self, or herself, or students.

D. The Learning Process

1. Understanding of the course

It is important to ensure that the learners understand the goals of the course, the reason for the way it is organized and taught, and the approaches to learning they will be encouraged to take. It can not be simply assumed that learners will be positively disposed toward to course, will have the appropriate skills the course demands, or will share the teacher’s understanding of what the goals of the course are.

2. Views of learning

Learner enter a course with their own views of teaching and learning and these may not be identical to those of their own teachers. How do they see the roles of teachers and learners? How happy are learners with the roles expected of them? Will they need any special orientation or teaching in order to carry out these roles effectively?

3. Learning styles

Learners learning styles may be an important factor in the success of teaching and may not necessary reflect those that teachers recommend. In study of the learning style of adult ESL students, Willing (1988) found four different learners type:

• Concrete learners: these learners preferred learning by games, pictures, film, video, talking in pairs, learning through the use of cassettes, and going on excursions.

• Analytic learners: these learners likes studying grammar, studying English books, studying alone, finding their own mistakes, having problems to work on, learning through reading a newspaper.

• Communicative learners: this group liked to learn by observing and listening to native speakers, talking to friends in English, watching TV in English, using in shops and so on, learning English words by hearing them and learning by conversations.

• Authority-oriental learners: these student liked the teacher explain everything, writing everything in notebook, having their textbook, learning to read, studying grammar, and learning English words by seeing them.

4. Motivation

it is also important to find out what the learners motivation are for taking the course. Why are the learners in the course and how will it affect their lives? What they do from it? Witch aspect of it are they most interested in? it may be that learners have very different priorities.

5. Support

Support mechanism provided for learners are another component of courses delivery. These include the kinds of feedback learners will get about their learning and opportunities that are provided for faster or slower learners. Self access component might be provided to allow learners to address specific learning need and interest.

E. Application of Curriculum

F. Through Lesson Plan

The definition of through lesson plan: Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary written that planning is the act or process of making plans for something and learning is the act of teaching something to somebody. So, the learning plan is a plan for teachers to teach certain subjects at certain grade levels and, to a certain topic, and to one or more meetings.

Component learning plan according to the book entitled Teaching and Learning Strategies by Syaiful Bahri Djamarah & Aswan Zain learning plan components consist of:

1. Objective

A goal is a goal to be achieved from the implementation of an activity. The aim in learning is a component that can affect other components such as teaching learning materials, learning activities, selection methods, tools, resources, and the plates evaluation.

2. Material

Lesson material is a substance that will be delivered in teaching and learning. Therefore, teachers who will teach and master the materials certainly have a lesson to be conveyed to the students.

3. Method

The method is a means used to achieve those objectives. Teaching methods include:

• Methods Project; the way of presenting lessons starting point of a problem, then discussed the various aspects related to the solution as a whole and meaningful.

• Experimental Methods; that is how the presentation of lessons in which students conduct experiments with the experience and prove to yourself something is learned.

• Duties and recitation methods; the method of presenting the material in which the teacher provides for students to perform specific tasks and learning activities.

• Discussion Method; that is how the presentation of lessons, where students faced with a problem that can be either statements or questions that are problematic to be discussed and solved together.

• Method socio drama; namely dramatize behavior in relation to social problems.

• Demonstration Method; way of presenting teaching materials with demonstrate to the students of a process, situation, or particular object being studied, whether real or artificial, which is often accompanied by verbal explanations.

• Problem Solving Method; that is using other methods that start with looking up data to draw conclusions.

• Method Study Tour, which invites students to learn outside school, to review a particular place or another object.

• FAQs method, ie the way of presenting a lesson in the form of questions to be answered, especially from teachers to students, but may also from students to teachers.

• Method of Exercise; that is a good way of teaching to instill certain habits.

• Teaching Method; that is how the presentation of lessons that teachers do with the narrative or oral explanation directly to the student.

4. Media

Tool is anything that can be used in order to achieve the goal of teaching. For example: charts, graphs, computer, OHP, and others.

5. Evaluation

Evaluation is an activity to collect data broad, deep, concerned with students' capability to determine cause and effect and student learning outcomes that can encourage and develop the ability to learn. For example: written test, oral, practical, and others.