With education going online, the role of teachers is also going to take a drastic change, says Minal Anand 

Teachers are the role model for every student irrespective of their age, culture, and tradition. The role of a teacher is to shape the minds of the younger generation. This shaping will be on positive lines, development of a scientific and humanistic attitude and temper, self-discipline. This means that the role of the teacher is to act as an agent for change within the classroom. The recognition of this is the key in relation to global learning.

In the 21st century classroom, teachers are facilitators of student learning and creators of productive classroom environments, in which students can develop the skills they might need at present or in the future. In today’s teaching procedure discussion, problem-solving, seminar, workshop, project, etc. are involved. Based on child-centric education, the teacher has to pay attention to the demand of the students.

Teachers should play the role of a leader who will lead the team to have the goal. They should assist, inspire, and encourage the learners whenever they feel so from the teacher. The pandemic has disrupted the education system very badly, and adapting to the changes has been one of the most important factors especially for the teachers.

With education going online, the role of teachers is also going to take a drastic change. With a more integrated technology classroom, the teachers no longer decide what is happening in class in terms of control over the information and thus lose their monopoly of authority they have over the class, students, and most importantly on the flow of information. The teacher’s role changes into a manager, collaborator, assistor, and assessor. But he/she still remains a subject specialist with that of a manager.

The future role of teachers would change in different ways, not just in terms of teaching. The changes include transforming in the relationship with pupils, alteration in the task to of the facilitators and executors who support learning in totality, change in the content and scope of teaching, and finally changing locus of control, from teacher to learner.

Teachers of tomorrow require a fresh advancement to their career and an innovative idea of what it means to teach and what it means to learn. The ‘new’ teacher requires to adopt an approach that is fairly broad, to seek out, to instigate, sustain and aid learning, and finally to create an atmosphere favourable to learning. Teachers set the tone of their classrooms, build a warm environment, mentor and nurture students, become role models, and listen and look for signs of trouble.

For a while now, teacher’s around the world have been talking about the need to rethink how we educate future generations. This might just be the disruption that the education sector needed to get us all to rethink how we educate, and question what we need to teach and what we are preparing our students for.

The writer is Founder, CEO Guruq