JP/6/SIMON Teachers should be encouraged to be learners too

Simon Marcus Gower Principal, Harapan Bangsa High School, Kotamodern Tangerang, Banten

As the government moves towards the adoption of a new schools curriculum -- planned for 2004 -- the role of teacher's will change. Demands will be made of teachers that require that they work much more closely with their students and so have to, in turn, be much more open to students' inquisitiveness.

Teachers will less and less be thought of as the ultimate source of knowledge and more and more be the guides and facilitators that lead students. "Traditional" perceptions of teachers as respected, unquestionable and quite distant will have to change.

An uncomfortable silence resided over a high school class recently. A student asked a question and for a moment there was a flicker of concern on the face of the teacher. The situation is fraught with potential worries and embarrassments for the teacher.

The teacher's position could seemingly be undermined by this lapse. Lack of knowledge is seen as a threat; it diminishes the teacher's standing. So what did the teacher do? Essentially, he side-stepped the question with the hurried response, "We don't have to look at that now" and a brisk "OK let's move on to the next page."

Was this evasiveness either acceptable or necessary?

It was not acceptable and should be seen to be unnecessary by all teachers, but regrettably very often teachers feel pressured to take such evasive actions. Too often teachers believe that they must be all-knowing and indomitable.

There is still a widely held perception that the teacher should be the ultimate authority on his subject and there should be no gaps in knowledge that the students might perceive as a weakness.

But this is an archaic misperception of the role of the teacher that exemplifies weakness rather than strength. Worse still it is a perception that is bedded in the notion that students are and will remain dependent on the teacher.

This should not be allowed to be the case, the teacher should be encouraging and guiding students towards autonomy that allows them to be independent in their studies. This is, after all, what they will be graduating to as they continue their studies to university level.

It should not really be seen as weakness for a teacher to say to his student or students "I don't really know the answer to that question." To be sufficiently open and honest about the situation seems entirely honourable and, perhaps as importantly, shows that the teacher possesses the right qualities of character that include willingness to increase knowledge and understanding.

In this context, the ability to say "I don't know" also reflects that it is reasonable for teachers to make use of reference material. Indeed this is good practice that actually constitutes a good role-model for students. No academic of any quality stands alone.

All effective academics make reference to predecessors or colleagues in their field and the teacher that is willing to show his reference to texts or other sources is following this accepted and reasonable practice.

Naturally, it would be unreasonable for a teacher to constantly be saying to students "Sorry I don't know".

But occasionally willingness and openness to say "I don't know" can lead to more effective learning and hence more successful teaching.

The teacher that is willing to be evasive and close-up about any lack of knowledge is likely to be reinforcing ignorance, whether obvious and overt or obscured and hidden.

Numerous examples have been witnessed in which a teacher suffers an awkward pause after a difficult question and then proceeds to avoid the question. The result of such action means that either the question goes unanswered, which is unsatisfactory as ignorance remains, or the question is dismissed as being outside of "learning necessity" and so is disregarded, which is really rather ignorant conduct towards the questioner.

It is much better for a teacher to have the strength of character to say, "I don't know, let's find the answer to that question together." Here a sense of inclusion and willingness to participate in learning is being shown that will inevitably assist the students in their own learning and fits with the government's desire for more communicative and competence-based education.

Consider this small example of a teacher's willingness to exhibit learning skills. During an English class with final year senior high students a teacher was eliciting vocabulary from the students.

New words were being drawn from the students and their meaning was being checked with the students and the teacher would then provide confirmation or reinforcement of the definitions that the students provided. Here then the teacher was acting as the catalyst for actions and participation and the teacher-role, as the source of knowledge, was being used acceptably as words were checked and definitions clarified.

However, at one point in this free-flowing interaction a student produced a word that the teacher could not provide a definition for.

The word was zephyr, but the teacher had the presence of mind and openness to say, "That's an interesting word and, you know, I'm not really sure what it means." The student was then asked to give his definition of the word and the teacher was able to follow this up with, "OK, good, let's check that in the dictionary."

What followed was near full participation of students plus the teacher looking the word up in their dictionaries -- teacher and students learning together, participating in the learning process together.

This is, then, good practice for both teachers and students alike. No one expects teachers to be walking encyclopaedias and any teacher that believes that they need not check and reference their work is likely to wallow in ignorance and probably never really fulfill teaching ideals.

To say "I don't know, let's check" is the intelligent thing to do and probably more teachers in Indonesia should be comfortable to do this. The above teacher and students found that zephyr, a noun, is a name for a soft gentle wind.