Education and Teacher Dispositions

Education and Teacher Dispositions
(First published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Taking a fairly long walk has become an essential part of my daily routine for some time now. From the beginning I saw to it that my calf muscles start aching before I stop walking. Through experience I have determined the distance that should be covered, and the time it should take to produce that amount of fatigue in my legs in the particular terrain where I daily perform this exercise. Occasionally, circumstances intervene, and I am required to curtail my walk before I reach my ‘saturation point’, which leaves me with a sense of having cheated myself. Once I pondered over why I get this feeling, and traced its origin to these words of a favourite teacher of ours: “Don’t think that you have done an honest piece of work, be it in sports or studies, unless you feel a little exhausted after doing it”. He taught us a subject known as General Science at that time some fifty years ago, and sometimes doubled as our PT master. He was a strict disciplinarian and a committed teacher. We used to await his arrival for lessons with trepidation as well as expectation. If I am confident enough to make any claim to at least a modest degree of professionalism in whatever work I undertake, I believe I owe that confidence to what I learned from teachers like him.
Many of us have recollections like these about our favourite teachers. Often we do not remember them for the subject knowledge they imparted. We remember them for the influence they exercised on our lives through their dispositions or perceptions or attitudes as revealed through their behaviours towards us their students. Teacher dispositions are vitally important for long-term as well as short-term student success in terms of academic achievement and personality development. That is why some of our old school teachers seem to reach out to us over many decades from the past.
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in the USA, a national organisation that helps establish the preparation of high quality teachers, specialists, and administrators by conferring accreditation to schools, colleges, and departments of education describes teacher dispositions as “Professional attitudes, values, beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviours as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and communities” (as quoted by Maura Kate Hallam in ‘The Language Educator’, January 2009).
A key factor that is essential for academic success is student engagement. Engaged students are those who involve themselves in educational activities out of intrinsic motivation; they are self-reliant; they make themselves responsible for their own learning. There is a second equally important factor which contributes to student achievement: students’ perception of their own academic competence (which means positive feelings about one’s ability to be succeed academically). Students’ active involvement in the educational endeavour and their perception of academic competence are both important attitudes that play a central role in student success. These attitudes flourish in an atmosphere in which students have a sense of autonomy, and feel confident in their own capacity for success in future academic pursuits. Two factors are vital for stimulating such attitudes: supportive teachers and high behavioural expectations.
Desirable student attitudes are formed as a result of learning experiences in an educational context dominated by these elements. Social stimulation through examples and opinions of teachers, parents and peers also play a part. Canadian Professor Albert Bandura is often considered the father of the cognitivist movement (as opposed to B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism). According to his observational learning (or social learning) theory, a model’s behaviour can cause an observer’s behaviour to change either positively or negatively through the positive or negative consequences (vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment) of a model’s behaviour. He looked at personality as an interactive relationship among three elements: a person’s environment, behaviour, and psychological processes. Teacher dispositions affects the formation of learner attitudes.
Educators need to possess positive dispositions in addition to subject knowledge and pedagogical (i.e. teaching) skills. The NCATE mentioned above expects schools of education to assess their candidates on the principles of fairness, and the belief that all students can learn. Some researchers regard commonsense notions about teacher perceptions to be too ‘soft’ to serve as real research, insisting on quantifiable data. Mark Wasicsko, Director of the National Network for the Study of Educator Dispositions (NNSED) does not agree. He explains, on the organisation’s website, that effective teacher dispositions can be grouped into four ‘measurable’ domains as suggested below:
1. Most effective teachers perceive themselves as such. They are competent, and have confidence in their own ability. Capable teachers are usually outgoing in social interaction; they can identify with a broad range of diverse people.
2. Effective teachers believe that all students can learn.
3. Their frame of reference is broad. They relate what they do to a larger purpose. Teaching for them involves creating a disposition for learning.
4. Such teachers take cognizance of the human element.
Teacher dispositions are important in any educational setup, but they are particularly so in the English language classroom, which I wish to use here as an example to demonstrate teacher dispositions. For effective language learning to take place, as much communicative interaction among the learners as possible through English should be provided. Their ‘affective filter’ has to be lowered by making them feel comfortable, confident, and uninhibited. [“Affective filter” refers to an impediment to learning brought on by ‘affective’ (i.e. emotional) responses to one’s environment in terms of a hypothesis first proposed by Stephen Krashen in the 1970’s.] The teacher’s attitude determines much of the general atmosphere of the classroom and can either lower or raise the learners’ affective filters.
Of course, the English classrooms in Sri Lanka are not what they used to be in the past. Teachers seem to have a more inclusive attitude than before: for a long time there was a widely held notion, especially in rural areas, that only some students had the ability to learn English; many lost interest in learning it, and turned their attention to something else; even teachers gave up on them. But today English is being taught on the basis that it can be learned by all students; exclusivity associated with English in this sense is a thing of the past (No allusion is intended here to exclusivity based on class consciousness which, to all appearances, is a thing of the past as well). Different pedagogies are being tried out. The students have ample opportunity to relate the English they learn to their experience of the wider world through technology-mediated communication. In this context, teacher attitudes assume unprecedented importance.
Because learning has become learner-centred and autonomous more than ever before with the emergence of revolutionary new information and communications technologies, the teacher’s value as a mere conduit for the transfer of subject matter knowledge has substantially decreased. While teaching or instruction in the traditional sense has not become totally irrelevant, the stage manager role of the teaching professional has become more pronounced (To stage-manage in the formal educational context means to prepare the environment and plan the range of activities that the learners must perform both autonomously and in collaboration with colleagues for the achievement of a predetermined outcome through managing the interrelationships between the school setting, student attitudes and behaviour, and student achievement). In the final analysis, teacher dispositions are about bringing out the individual best in each student in the short term as well as in the long term (irrespective of the calibre of that ‘individual best’).
Sources consulted:
Maura Kate Hallam: The Language Educator, January 2009
Theresa M. Akey, PhD: “Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behaviour, and Academic Achievement” (Paper), 2005