My belief of teaching has never deviated from the concept that “education is hope”. Education serves as a springboard facilitating people going higher and further to their future. And teachers are bridges over all kinds of learning and developing conditions, stages, and difficulties. This is what makes teaching as a profession so significant and sacred. With this concept in mind, I have devoted myself in helping students learn well. However, passion alone can’t make teaching successful. It takes knowledge, skills and visions as well. I used to work hard restlessly and blindly spinning among endless texts, tests and students’ grades. Luckily, the educational theories and principles have helped me build up a certain degree of pedagogical knowledge and educational visions, and certainly elevate my altitude as a teacher.   

The role of a teacher

In Chinese culture, teachers have long been expected to take their social responsibilities of inspiring, cultivating, and being a role model for their students. So, on one hand, teachers are exclusively respected. However, on the other hand, teachers also become a particular group of people who are scrutinized by the public under the microscope. Any abnormality among teachers is intolerable and unforgivable. Although the traditional role of teachers has confronted challenges, and new voices against this conventional view of teachers are heard once in a while in the public, I find it necessary to maintain this tradition.

In his case study, Leander (2002) drew the a conclusion that the classroom is a site for social construction of identity, and students’ identity is stabilized through the classroom interaction. It is because as what Jean Lave (1996) perceived that learning and identity construction are closely related. Jean Lave proclaimed that through the engagement in social activities, people establish the “condition and precondition” of their existence, their identity. Likewise, from learning scenarios, which are attached to or from everyday life, and are fundamental to all participants, students accumulate or adjust their identities from their dynamic interaction with teachers and their peer classmates. In this dynamic identity formation process, the role of a teacher is particularly important due to the fact that teachers are, as what Alexander (2002) said, the surveyors or the ethnographers of their classrooms. With pedagogy, teachers construct the classroom culture, filter knowledge for students, selectively reveal or conceal themselves to construct their identity in front of students. Teachers inherit from this profession great power over the formation of classroom culture, and, thus, whatever teachers do is significant and influential to students. This is why the Chinese culture demands their teachers meet the highest standards, with the hope to construct a good environment for students to grow. It is a teacher’s holy responsibility to bring about every positive influence in his/her classroom. This is also a principle I  faithfully abide by.

Good Teaching

What does it take to be a good teacher? What makes teaching good? Routman (2000) and Beers (2003) demonstrated their teaching experiences and pedagogies in detail, providing great guidance and inspiration for teachers to conduct great teaching. Raudenbush (2009) advocated for shortening the gap of educational inequity between the dominant and the minority by ways of increasing the quantity and the quality of schooling. But good teaching must also pertain to a higher vision, a grand scale of what education is about. I am so impressed by Haberman’s (1991) definition of good teaching:

Whenever students are involved with issues they regard as vital concerns, good teaching is going on. …

Whenever students are involved with explanations of human differences, good teaching is going on. …

Whenever students are being helped to see major concepts, big ideas, and general principles and are not merely engaged in the pursuit of isolated facts good teaching is going on. …

Whenever students are directly involved in a real-life experience, it is likely that good teaching is going on. …

Whenever students are asked to think about an idea in a way that questions common sense or a widely accepted assumption, that relates new ideas to ones learned previously, or that applies an idea to the problems of living, then there is a chance that good teaching is going on. …

(pp. 5-6)

Although his categorization of the pedagogy widely used in most of the current classrooms as “pedagogy of poverty” might not be fair enough, I do find education in Taiwan is gradually confined to a very narrow view of “academic performance”. When test results and scores are held as the only benchmark, nothing creative and inspiring will survive in classroom. Finally, teaching and learning become the synonym of drills and memorization. I call them dead knowledge because students are asked to drill and memorize without knowing why or how to apply what they’ve memorized. It is ironic when education becomes a giant system that feeds students with “fast food” (drills, memorization) so that students look “fatter” (high test scores) in a short period of time, and so that education is considered efficient and successful. A lot of time, I think schools like these are the tombs of learning. Students are buried in tons of text books without having time to think, not to mention it is critical time for my high school students to build up their own value and ideas, and to acquire knowledge and wisdom attached to their daily lives. Education like this is an extravagant waste of time and money for both students and parents, and worst of all a great loss of a country. Hence, Haberman’s vision about good teaching should be something that educators in Taiwan really need to think about.   

Conclusion

There is an old Chinese saying, “Once the roots are sturdy and firm, there is no need to worry about what damage the wind will do to the tree.” To me, knowing how important the role of a teacher in a classroom is, and having a right vision toward education are the roots of the tree of education. If the roots of this education tree are healthy and strong, it is likely that the branches, leaves and fruits will grow well. Working on improving teaching skills alone only makes a teacher good at passing down certain aspect of knowledge to students, but isolated knowledge doesn’t make a student well educated.

Although none of the above concepts are really new to me, I felt more confident with the support of these teaching theories.