Teachers as Agents of Change/Activators
As a child of an elementary school teacher; who has taught special education, home room, physical education and coached many teams and led many clubs, I knew that there is much more to being a teacher than just teaching the mandatory curriculum in your classroom. If teachers want to make a positive difference and be agents of change for their students, they need to be leaders and actively involved within their school and the surrounding community.
From the perspective of a student, I remember the teachers that got "involved" the most. The teachers who coached teams, ran the musical, chaperoned a club, or ran a community outreach program, those were the teachers you remember the most. The teachers who were passionate and loved what they were teaching, either made you love it almost as much, or at least respect their love for it enough to try your best at it. The teachers who took an interest in you as a student; who asked you how your day was going or how your hockey game went the night before. Those were the teachers who made a positive impact on their students, by showing that the cared and by being leaders and role models for their students. That's the kind of teacher I want to be.
According to Dr. Coral Mitchell, teachers who are seen as leaders, agents of change or activators, build learning capacity, as well as, identify and address challenges. They also are willing to take risks and introduce innovations within their school and classroom. Teachers who are leaders negotiate understanding, practices and expectations with their students and establish priorities, plan and organize. But mainly they move the work of teaching and learning forward (2011).
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This concept is taken one step farther by Michael Fullan, who believes that the 21st century teacher needs to be an agent of positive change and help their students find passion, purpose and spark their interest to help them become life-long learners (Drake et al., 165). For John Hattie, it is the responsibility of the teacher to be an expert in their field (Drake et al., 165). Dr. Hattie believes the fundamental role of a teachers is to help students exceed their own expectations and potential. This concept of "teachers as experts" means they have a deep understanding of their subject matter, which allows them to facilitate both surface and deep learning outcomes, as well as, give constructive feedback and continuously evaluate their impact on students' learning (Drake et al., 165). In his meta-analysis of 1000 research studies, john Hattie establishes that teachers and students are learning partners (Fullan, 2013). In comparing instructional practices he discovered in his research that, "teacher as an activator" has an effect size of .60, which is good by his standards (Fullan, 2013). In practice, Dr Hattie said "teacher as an activator" would look like; reciprocal teaching, feedback, teacher/student self-verbalization, meta-cognition, goal challenging and frequent checks on the effect of their teaching (Fullan, 2013). This is explained in this short video below, where he simplifies his theory on teachers as experts and agents of change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XWMAteuaks
If you want to learn more about how to implement this concept of a teacher as an activator, watch this video by Michael Fullan, which shows how teachers become activators and agents of change through the integration of technology and the "flipped classroom", which also allows students to become partners in learning and the use of technology fuels communication and collaboration amongst all participants (teachers and students). Other activating strategies for the classroom can be found here, using some of these ideas can help you to get your students involved in their own learning and help you to become an activator in your classroom.
References
Drake, S.M., Reid, J.L., Kolohon, W. (2013). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: Engaging the 21st-century learner. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.
Fullan, M. (2013). The new pedagogy: Students and teachers as learning partners. Learning Landscape, 6, 23-29.
Mitchell, C., & Sackney, L. (2011). Building
and leading within learning
ecologies. In
T. Townsend & J. MacBeath
(Eds.), International
Handbook
of
Leadership for Learning (pp.
975-990). London, UK: Springer.
