Teachers face multiple decisions regarding the social aspects of teaching on a daily basis. They need to know how to differentiate their conversation techniques between, family, colleagues, students and student’s parents. This is something that takes time for someone new to this like to adapt. As my mentor always say, you will need years of experience to be proficient in the thing you do.

 

Social aspect in terms of students. Teachers should be approachable by their students at any time. There has to be a good teacher-student relationship in class to have a conducive classroom. My mentor said that we have to be sharper then the students when giving them instructions or not they will not do what is asked and they will keep on asking you to repeat what have been told. Hence, there were a set of rules that the class as a whole and Ms. Chin came up with at the beginning of the year. It is agreed by all students and they wrote their names on the paper with the class rules as a symbol of agreement. In class when Ms. Chin is teaching her tone will be a little strict to ensure that the students do not get overboard with excitement. She usually does this when they are carrying out activities. I would say that this is practical as students at age eight to nine tend to get extremely excited when they carry out experiments and hand on activities. The class would become haywire if the teacher is not strict. Hence, Ms. Chin will be one notch stricter. When she is teaching a normal lesson her intonation would be a little milder and she will only get angry and raise her voice when a student misbehaves. I could observe that a classroom is never perfect with all students behaving perfectly during the teaching process. There will always be someone in the class talking or disturbing their friends when the teacher is speaking. Thus we will have to know how we should handle this type of situations when it occurs. The way we handle it is also very important because the words and action we use to react against these students have a lot of impact on the student and the class.

 

On the other hand, I did not get much chance to observe how my mentor interact with parents. The only few times I did observe this is in the morning when some of the parents will walk their child to class. Ms. Chin would great the parents with a smile. She did tell me how much parents love seeing their child’s work being displayed all around the classroom. Students are always asked to write their names on all the pieces of work that they do so that their parents will be able to know which ones were done by their child when they have a look at the notice board. Sometimes parents will ask on a regular basis on how their child is in class when they come in the morning. According to the TIS KL handbook for teachers, it is highly not advisable to interact with parents using social medias such as Facebook and twitter. They are also not allowed to send out letters unless it is approved by higher authority. 

 

I also did not get much chance to see how Ms. Chin interacts with her colleagues as I am always in the class. But there were a few times that I observe how it goes. The year leader will come in the class once in a while to see how the class is going on. I can observe the difference in how she interacts with the year leader and the class all at once. There is a difference in intonation and flexibility in speaking. I think there is a balance in some sense because we as teacher do need to set some boundaries when communicating with students but when it comes to colleagues, we can be a little more flexible and sometimes speak our minds out. Sometimes we can discuss certain problems we face in class with our colleagues to find out what will their approach is and how we should handle the situation. I have also seen my mentor spending time with some of the other teachers in the staffroom. They just sit around the table and have a chat before class starts. It is nice to spend some time with the other teachers and just talk about life and other topics which is not education base. It is also a form of relaxation for the mind after hours of teaching.   

Social Aspect of Teaching