What if We Handle Them with Care

Introduction

The teacher is the strange entity that a student – of any age – faces when entering their classroom for the first time. Educators put themselves in front of a class for many reasons. These may be due to economic necessity, because the institution had no one else to put in front of that group, or simply because they have a vocation for service. What is undeniable is that every student who arrives at the school premises will want to achieve what their teachers challenge them to achieve. Throughout more than 15 years of teaching experience, I have been able to confirm that students will reach where the teacher allows them to, although there are some who will go even further. There is a popular saying among teachers that goes: “with, without, and in spite of the teacher.” This saying refers to the fact that students will reach where they want with their own motivation. However, the teacher is a very important agent in the development of that motivation: they can be an obstacle or a gateway to success.

Renowned American author Maya Angelou spoke about this in an interview (2013). She wanted to express that children who suffer a difficult childhood – as she tells it in her autobiography – can become strong with the help of other people and their own experiences. She referred to these children with the phrase: handle with care, which was directed at their teachers. In her own words:

What Dr. Maya was referring to was that we as educators have a great responsibility in shaping our students. And it is a combination of knowledge transmission and a dose of affection towards them that will really make them grow. I want to clarify that she was speaking from an innocent perspective, without academic support for the true teaching methodologies. However, she had a great point: handling students and knowledge with care. If we consider this for our teaching methodologies, it should be clear to us that not everything is about transmitting knowledge from one head to another, but as educators, we have an immense responsibility when we give a class. And that is when the values of the educator come in and their transmission to the students, who will also need these values inside and outside the classroom to achieve their personal objectives.

The Mission: Knowledge, Values, and Competencies through Didactics

There are different types of achievements in school. Most institutions are content with having students who can achieve scholarships in prestigious universities; or that their students can have awards in national competitions; some are simply content with their students graduating from their institution. These goals are not at all shameful, but in my opinion, they fall short compared to the abilities of the students. I believe even more that schools, just like families, should shape students into global and digital citizens of integrity, capable of leading humanity towards advanced cognitive evolution ethically. For this, the mission of the educational institution is very important. The mission should reflect that desire to give more than knowledge, always promoting the development of values in students. For this, it is extremely important that the institution make the mission its daily bread, so that teachers and each member of the team can have a clear idea of what type of information – knowledge and values – will be ingrained in the memory of the students.

The teaching method is a powerful tool for educators. This discipline has the power of creativity to reach a broader audience. With didactics, teachers can use better methods and practices to help their students develop their skills. Let’s clarify first what didactics is. Didactics has to do with the theory and prescriptive elements of reflection, deliberation, and action in pedagogical planning. In addition, didactics can be categorized into three (Gundem, 1995):

Now, how can we combine didactics with humanism? First of all, the teacher will have to have a deep understanding of the theory to implement it in practice, in order to “take on the challenge of understanding formative practices from constructivist proposals, posed by teachers, to ‘contemplate teachers as reflective professionals of teaching'” (Giroux, 1997, p.5). This means that teachers will have to handle the curriculum with mastery that demonstrates that they are true experts in their area, and thus have the power to implement teaching-learning strategies that are as effective in transmitting knowledge, developing skills, and experiencing universal values. Especially, we must pay special attention to the way we approach these three elements since the generations currently attending our school levels are different from previous generations who adapted more easily to teacher-centered teaching. Nowadays, the trend in didactics is learner-centered learning, where through planning focused on problem-solving and project-based learning, students can adjust more naturally to the current work environment. Similarly, these students can adapt to the environment in the future.

Conclusion:

Creative teaching-learning processes sound too simple in theory, but in practice, they are much more challenging to implement due to various factors that can arise within a classroom full of living beings in the development age. That is why teachers must be education professionals who integrate with the institution and know how to adapt to the era in which their students live and detach themselves from the era in which they grew up. Effective didactics is about adapting to students and getting rid of the complexities of antiquity by eradicating phrases from their vocabulary such as “in my day we used to do dictations” or “before, children were more respectful” and thinking about what really serves the student to adapt to the most progressive era this world has known. The job market is also very changing, and we must steer those children towards success. Companies like Google or Apple do not need living libraries with so much knowledge stored in their brains; they make that knowledge infinite warehouses with immediate access to their content. Our students will have to enter that work world where it doesn’t matter what they know, but how they use what they know. And that’s why we’re here: to carefully manage their development.

I wrote this text in 2016, for my Master degree program. My views might have changed since then.