The people who say we can deal with the lack of Computing teachers by using ‘facilitators’, or getting the kids to learn from each other, don’t know what they’re talking about. A good ICT or Computing teacher, by which I mean one that understands what real teaching is, will do everything a so-called ‘facilitator’ would do, and more.
- They love the subject, and are genuinely fascinated by it and its possibilities.
- They keep up to date with developments through popular magazines, books, radio and tv programmes.
- They keep up to date with academic research in the subject.
- They proactively seek and take part in professional development opportunities.
- They introduce topics with what Ausubel called 'Advance Organisers'. That is, information and activities about things they already know about, in order to lead on to things they do not know about.
- They set up activities which are challenging, not quite within the pupils’ comfort zone, technically known as the zone of proximal development. For example, they will ask the pupils not just to program a turtle to move from point A to point B, but to build in code to deal with an unexpected event during its journey.
- They set up activities which have an interesting context, and preferably with some potential real-world application.
- They know enough to be able to answer pupils’ questions, at least when it comes to matters of fact. If a pupil says “How can I set up a series of ‘IF’ statements in a spreadsheet in a more efficient way?”, the teacher should be able to give a proper, ie practically useful, answer.
- “Facilitating” is done as a technique to work in a particular context, not as an unthinking default position.
- Ditto so-called 'discovery learning'.
- They will pair up pupils in such a way that an expert in one thing will help the non-expert – and changing the groupings for concepts/areas in which the expert and non-expert roles are different, perhaps even reversed.
- Will ask difficult questions of the pupils, to move them on to the next level. For example, if a pupil has written a brilliant program, a good teacher will ask her how the interface could be made more user-friendly for use by non-programmers, or she will ask if the program can handle particular types of user error.
- They will be highly critical, in a positive way of course, and not accept any old output. I have seen pupil videos in which the ‘background’ music is so loud that you can’t hear the commentary. That is poor editing and should have been dealt with before the video was released. That's what a real ICT or Computing teacher would do. Similarly, a spreadsheet full of nested ‘IF’ statements which is so complicated that it’s all but impossible to look at it and work out what each element actually does should prompt a request to find a more user-friendly way of achieving the same result.
- They have a bank of resources the pupils can refer to if they need to.
- They actually teach the class for at least some parts of at least some lessons.
- They set appropriate out-of-school work.
- They assess what the pupils have done, not just rely on self-assessment or peer-assessment.
- They understand how people learn. Quite frankly, anyone can be a facilitator: the school caretaker allowing you to run a computer club after school is a facilitator. A teacher needs to be more than that.
- They enthuse and motivate pupils to learn more and achieve higher. That’s an active process, it’s not something that can be achieved by merely ‘facilitating’.
- A good teacher, of any subject, will know how to pace the lesson, when to intervene if someone needs help, how to stop some pupils disrupting the lesson -- in other words, a good teacher will be able to manage a class of 30 kids doing several different activities.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider signing up to my free newsletter, Digital Education, for news, views, reviews and the odd rant. More information here: Digital Education.