Knowledge Overload – Too Much To Handle for Teaches !

I had wanted to write about it for quite some time now. The post came through as a result of my recent interaction with a group. I feel there is too muck knowledge/ information being bombarded on the teachers these days and it is all happening in the name of their development. Be it technology, be is psychology, be it self-management, the teachers have to attend all. I have seen teacher being made to undergo such a rigorous training schedule that it could lead to burn-out in them. All the year through, teachers are busy with their numerous academic and non-academic stuff. The academics get over and the teachers get busy with student examination. The examination gets over and the teachers get busy with paper checking, result preparation, etc. Once this gets over the teachers are put through a series of workshops, trainings to prepare them for the academic session ahead.

Gone are the days when 'teaching' was considered as an art, to be performed with passion. Nowadays, 'teaching' has become 'clinical' in nature. The passion is gone because there is too much on a teachers' plate to handle. Teachers are Humans and not Robots, so why feed them with whatever, in the name of effective teaching/ learning. Like anybody else, a teacher also needs a drive and intrinsic motivation to perform but where do they derive it from, in the midst of all this chaos. Teachers do not get time to dwell and reflect on what they want to improve. The way every child is different, the same way every teacher is different too. Every teacher needs some time and space to do self introspection and identify his/ her areas of improvement. We need to put our faith in teachers because every teacher wants to be an effective one and provide the best learning to the child.

E-Teacher = Learning Facilitator+Technologist

The last 7 years that i have spent in the domain of 'Technology Enabled Edfucation' had helped me know the things better and look at the technology integration process from various perspectives. Since i have always believed in the cause of teacher empowerment, I believe the need of the hour is to create more e-teachers. According to me, we in academia need to focus on smoothening the transition from a teacher to an e-teacher. My definition or philosophy of e-teacher is "a teacher who uses 'e(electronic)' components to good advantage in his/her teaching-learning process". I have always believed that for a teacher/ educator to become an e-teacher/e-educator, there is a need to understand about the process of learning to ensure children learn better and secondly, there is a definite need to know about technologies that could facilitate the learning process. So, to start with, an e-teacher should explore as many e-tools as possible and scrutinise/ analyse them from the perspective of a child/ student. After all, teachers/ educators exists to help children/ students reach their potential and that can happen only when proper learning has occured. In this post, I do not intend to delve too deep into strategies that could facilitate effective learning but would like to stress that let all our e's (used for e-teaching) be foucsed on ensuring an effective learning for children/ student.