TEACHING TEACHERS: TOUCHING THE FUTURE

M. Claudia Nieto C. 
mcnietoc@unal.edu.co
Publicado en Capital Letter No. 5
Mayo de 2004




Whether you are a novice or an experienced teacher, the first time you meet a group you feel anxious. Questions like how your future students would be, what their expectations are, how disposed they would be towards the class are part of the mental work teachers develop at the start of a new period. You imagine your first encounter to the detail as if following a script previously written. The experience previously narrated is more intense when your students are not regular students but in service teachers. The reflection you are going to read comes as a result of my first experience working with in a PFPD* at Universidad National de Colombia with in service public teachers belonging to four different town areas.


They know how to break down and analyze all the elements of a class. They must surely be very aware of motivation, eye control, body language, discipline control, teacher talking time, and all the variables that are the bone and tissue of a teaching situation. You start with your class with shyness. With the pass of time, you relax and the class flows. What a relief! They behave as any other group of students. Where is then the difference? In service teachers are going to put into practice in a short period of time what is analyzed and discussed in class. That's why they came for in the first place. They want to refresh their practice.


The real challenge for a teacher trainer is to touch the future. S/he can always share his/her professional and personal knowledge and provide some topics for discussion. But this practice will be incomplete if it is not deconstructed individually by the participants. By deconstructing I mean the process by which the teaching theory developed by students and enriched with the discussions topics is challenged. And challenge is change. And change causes resistance.


A student approached me at the end of one of the sessions and said: "I have made changes in my class." She explained how she had introduced new elements to her reading class, how her class reacted, and how she herself perceived the change. I was more than glad to know that I have made an impact that surpassed the boundaries of my class. Some students somewhere in Bogotá were affected by what was done in the classrooms of Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The replicating effect was there. This made me reflect on the responsibility you acquire when you decide to become a teacher. Our words and actions will one way or another determine how other professionals will be affected and will be affecting others in their professional practice.


* PFPD: Programa de Formación Permanente de Docentes de Inglés at Universidad Nacional de Colombia