In your modern role as manager of learning, you are goal conscious. Your focus is on your output or your objective. The question you ask before you start a lesson is not what shall I do? But what do I want the learners to become? This is your purpose – a change in the behavior of the child as a result of learning. So your first concern as a manager is to set up a definite objective or purpose. This purpose should grow out of the commonly accepted wants or needs of your pupils, because a common purpose provides one of the best origins of effort.
This objective should be recognized and accepted by the learners; as they should share the purpose. If possible you should involve the learners in the setting of the objective or objectives of a lesson. Since these objectives are usually included in a prescribed course of study or teacher’s manual; all that you have to do is to motivate the children into accepting the objectives as theirs. You can lead them into stating the purpose of the lesson in their own rather than in the words of the teacher’s manual.
Since management is the “nurturing of successful action”, your next concern is to see to it that the learners combine their talents and efforts to achieve the objective or objectives they put up together. This means getting every member of the class as much as possible to make a contribution to the total effort, no matter how small the contribution might be. It also means encouraging the use of resources available to both teacher and learner. All these – the learner’s effort, the resources used, the strategies employed by the teacher – may be considered the inputs in the process of realizing your purpose or objective.
Are we achieving our objective? Is the next question that you as manager may pose to the learners? This query raises the need for evaluating the efforts the children have exerted so far and finding out if they have accomplished the objectives the objectives you have to put together. If they have achieved the objectives, they can now rejoice in their success and look forward to more “conquest”. Because the effort has been shared from the start, everyone who made a contribution share’s group success. If the learners fall short of the goal, they have to work together all over again, with you, the manager, guiding and encouraging them to do better than before.
This is what makes a manager of learning different from the traditional teacher of pupils. No longer is the teacher a mere dispenser of knowledge, pouring facts into passive unquestioning vessels which are the pupils. No longer does the gauge in terms of how much knowledge she has taught. Now she is concerned with how the learners will behave after learning, and her measure of effectiveness is how much she has helped to release the potential in every learner in her class in the pursuit of a common objective.
By: Gemma Baluyot Canare | Duale Elementary School Limay District Teacher I |
