Quality Essentials of the 21st Century Teacher!

Dheeraj Mehrotra MS(Ed.Mgmt), MPhil(Ed.), Research Scholar(Ed.)

Head, TQM in Education, City Montessori School & Degree College, Lucknow, INDIA

W: sixsigmaineducation.com E: tqmhead@aol.com W: http://dheerajmehrotra.tripod.com

Teaching is an art with perfection gained through the years of Experience and
Education. The requirement of the Modern Day Classroom is not the old traditional
Chalk and the Duster based but requires a new preface of Cheese and the
Championship Culture. Over the years it has been rightly observed that the Quality of
an educational environment is evaluated with the inspiring and motivating efforts for the
staff, students and the collaborative parents at large.

Giving credit to Alec Couros couros, open thinking - Uploaded with a demo version of
FlickrExport 2. The following picture shows how OPEN BOX thinking is done to
encapsulate the requirements of the Quality Teacher of the Century, above all the
segments of route and learning.

Pix Credit Alec Couros

The 21st century education demands with change in the teaching learning with the
witnessing of the importance of Students’ Activities as the ultimate learning
methodology today. The students are empowered towards better learning, decision
making and ultimately made to be disciplined through self disciplined modules and
leadership skills. It is mandatory for all to have and imbibe the Leadership skills to make
them a better and Total Quality Person in future.

The demand of the children and the parents mount every year, every session with the
march of time but the supply is limited from the side of the teachers. The challenge is to
be more explicit in their inclusion in core content, incorporating real world problems to
bring them into focus for students and drawing on digital tools and resources that can
support them.
In some respects, the potential of 21st century skills lies in the exploration of how digital
tools which largely include, cameras, presentation software, computing equipment apart
from the online resources can support and enhance traditional subject skills and
teaching practices.
As a matter of fact, the researchers quote the requirements as follows:
1) You drive me crazy, if you are learner as you are going to face the learners, you have
to be a learner first than a trainer or a teacher. The children demand “ Sir, tell us
something new, it is given in the book”. So the learners need to be driving the seat of
Knowledge. The new learner is transforming himself from a passive actor into an
active, is becoming a conscious leader of his personal lifelong learning path.

2) There has to have a Deep access to information, tools and experts in ways not
possible before, but has to be in the heart and soul of the teachers with time and
requirements.

3) What is also required is the ability to network and team up with other learners who
have the same interests, independently of their age, location or experience. The social
networking and sites like BLOGIT.COM or to be more precise the VOKI.COM work
wonders. Above all the google groups and yahoo groups have been a part and parcel of
the effective learning mechanism in schools these days as many of them can not glue to
their INTRANET modules in particular.

4) There has to be an emergence of the technology dependent learner with change of

time and modules as the requirements and the demands from the interested parties
change with time on a very frequent basis. Both outside and inside traditional
educational institutions a new breed of guides, coaches, facilitators and advisers is
already emerging and creating new classless learning ecosystems.

The following is the research quote of Andrew Churches, which aptly defines and
stretches upon the need of the 21st Century Educator in addition to the above.
As obvious with the demands from the new century learners, the educators are student-
centric, holistic and they are teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the
subject area. But highly effective teachers in today’s classrooms are more than this -
much more.

Viz-a-Viz:

Educators must be able to adapt software and hardware designed for a business model
into tools to be used by a variety of age groups and abilities.

Educators must also be able to adapt to a dynamic teaching experience.

With time they need to be looking across the disciplines and through the curricula; they
must see the potential in the emerging tools and web technologies, grasp these and
manipulate them to serve their needs.

They need to be Educators too, must be collaborators with a preface of Sharing,

Contributing, Adapting and Inventing. Above all, the educators must take risks and
sometimes surrender themselves to the students' knowledge. They need to have a
vision of what they would want to do and achieve in time to come. They need to identify
the goals and facilitate the learning and above all use the strengths of the digital
natives/ cyberspace to understand and navigate information. There has to be the need
and feel of Learning and Adapting as the horizons and the landscapes change
frequently.

To have anywhere, anytime learning, the teacher must be anywhere and anytime. As
the new nomenclature of WWW i.e. the World Wide Web is now Whereever, Whatever
and Whenever.

The 21st century teacher has to be fluent in tools and technologies that enable
communication and collaboration. They go beyond learning just how to communicate
and collaborate; they also know how to in addition of all academic requirements, need
to be of the nature to facilate, stimulate, control, moderate and manage through and
with communication and collaboration effectively.

Above all, The 21st century educator also models tolerance, global awareness, and
reflective practice, whether it is the quiet, personal inspection of their teaching and
learning, or through the blogging, Twitting, Facebooking or what not. He must learn to
adapt to change with time and tide.

One of the key points of Learning for the 21st Century, according to John Wilson, is that
we are defining essential skills too narrowly. "As our nation focuses on the basics, it is
noteworthy that government, educators, and private industry are unified in underlining
that 21st century skills must be part of today's basics," he says.

The report states, "Literacy in the 21st century means more than basic reading, writing,
and computing skills. As writer Alvin Toffler points out, 'The illiterate of the 21st century
will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and
relearn”. I invite reader to share their blogs on www.sixsigmaineducation.com