21st Century Educator

Change is the only permanent in this world. This quotation applies in all areas of life, even in teaching. The way teachers teach in today’s time is different from the past, from being a traditional teacher to a 21^st century educator. Teachers adapt to changes in order to cope with their students, since everything changes, their needs, their environment and even their learning styles or the way they learn things. Teachers must take these things into consideration while preparing for the teaching-learning process. Since they are the one who direct the learning of the students. Now, how will teachers produce lifelong learners if they still do the traditional way of teaching? How will students experience authentic learning if teachers still do lecture method all the time? Therefore, in order to be an effective teacher in today’s time you have to be a 21^st century educator. To give you a concrete example, I will share my experiences during my observation at Chevalier School (CS). Every time I observe my cooperating teacher classes, I am amazed on how he manages his class and teaches his lesson. For your information, my cooperating teacher is teaching both junior and senior high school.

In his class, he is a facilitator of learning. He helps and guides his students for them to learn the lesson, he doesn’t spoon feed everything to them. Even with his grade 8 students, he guides them to direct their learning like. Like when they discussed the different type of speeches, instead of lecturing the lesson, he let them watch different videos and write their observations per group. From then, he helps the students to realize that a certain speech is like this, because... and etc. In this way, collaborative learning happens too, students help one another to a have better understanding about the videos.It is also a good way to give opportunities for the students to be actively engaged in the discussion rather than being passive listeners. This also made the learning more meaningful and relevant to them. Aside from this, he also promotes lifelong learning in his research classes. Instead of allowing students to take information from any websites he challenges his students to not to settle with outdated and unreliable sites and to read more updated books.  With these observations, I can say he is an example of a 21^st century educator, because based from The McNiel Educational Foundation a 21^st century educator has the following traits; student-centered, forward thinking, actively engaged, flipped, relevant, and collaborative, which I believe can be observed in my cooperating teacher class.