Educator wants teachers to better understand themselves
PROFESSOR Loraine Cook, educational psychologist and senior lecturer at The University of the West Indies, Mona, has called on teachers to better understand themselves in managing students, saying training institutions should focus on helping educators unpack their own life history, experiences and beliefs, which she says shapes their classroom approach.
Cook, a senior in research methods and educational psychology at the School of Education, in delivering her inaugural professorial lecture last Thursday evening, titled ‘Differences in the classroom — deeper than what you see or think’, said “the Jamaican educational problem is multifaceted and requires a multidisciplinary solution.”
“The call is for teachers to better understand themselves, how their differences impact the classroom and how those differences interact with children’s differences. Of course this involves teacher training institutions administering different instruments to help teachers in training to understand their own life history and how their own experiences and beliefs will influence interactions in the classroom,” Professor Cook pointed out.
She said, “In so doing, those teachers who are disposed to using verbal abuse as a tool for behavioural management will be able to understand themselves early in their career and how their experiences with harsh disciplinary strategies as children disposed them to use the same disciplinary strategies as adults towards children who they are not responsible for in the classroom”.
“As educators we need to understand how our psychological differences influence how we manage ourselves, the students, and the delivery of the curriculum. In other words, our psychology will shape our pedagogy [teaching] and through understanding children’s temperament,”Cook said.
“We have a professional and moral responsibility as teacher educators to close the gap or remediate the situation in the education system. It seems that our quality of education and student outcome has not changed much for 30 years. We need to figure out what our next steps are,” she said further.
In demonstrating the strength of her theory she said that in a research intervention done with early childhood teachers, teachers before the intervention made comments like, ‘I just thought these children were downright out of order’, ‘They don’t know how to behave’, ‘I thought they were lazy and needed to go back to basic school or stay home with their parents’, ‘I just thought they were rude children who didn’t know how to sit still’.
However, after the intervention those same teachers said they better understood the temperaments of different children highlighted through the intervention.
Said Cook: “Children need to be taught by adults and trained by adults how to control the challenging sides of their temperaments. The poor child itself is wondering ‘Why am I behaving so badly and can’t figure it out?’ “
She said findings from her study indicated that educators, next to parents, are the most influential on students.
“As such they become role models and significant others in students’ lives — therefore, one of the goals should be to prepare teachers to take responsibility for outcomes in the classroom,” she said.
In emphasising that teachers’ instructional and interpersonal skills are the attributes most remembered by students, she said it is essential that teachers in the classroom become aware of their emotions, their thoughts, their motivations and their actions.
Noting that there was a rising culture of violence outside the classroom, with over 1,329 individuals murdered up to November this year, Professor Cook said combined with the social problems in the country, schools at all levels of the education system have poor student outcomes academically and in terms of student behaviour.
“The examination of our educational context raises the following questions, which give urgency to the lecture: When we graduate young people from high school who are not literate, who are not capable of working, where do they go, what do they do? What is happening in the classrooms not only to the students but to our teachers? Could our crime rate and senseless killings be connected to the issues in those two questions?” Cook asked.
Referencing the 2021 Jamaica Education Transformation Commission Report which, among other things, said the quality of care and training are unsatisfactory in schools, Cook said “as educators we seem to be failing our students”.