Personalised Teacher Quotes

The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.

It is one of the great contributions of Sri Ramakrishna to Indian religious tradition that his spiritual experience has identified the Sakti not as a mere female counterpart of the Absolute, but as the Absolute Himself personalised—the Saguna Brahman of the Vedanta who is the origin, the support and the end of the manifold universe. The Saguna Brahman is, in a devotional sense, Father or Mother, and, for the matter of that, can be invoked in any other loving relationship as Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher and so on. But the Master described the Saguna Brahman specially by the epithet ‘Mother’ and conceived and invoked Him as the Mother of all beings. In doing so, it must be clearly understood that he did not have in mind the contrast between masculinity and femininity or the bipolarity of a male and a female element in the Deity as in orthodox Sakta theologies, although he often used the current phraseology of the Sakta schools. In other words, when God is called Mother, the implication is not so much to give us a Female Deity as to remind men that in His function of redemption (Anugraha), Motherhood is the most adequate of all humanly understandable concepts to describe His unconditioned love to those who seek shelter in Him, abandoning all other support.

Unlike most of the teachers, Paul hadn’t added his own touches. There were no potted plants or children’s artwork, no personalised coffee cups or mementoes. As far as he was concerned, things like that were clutter, distractions. All designed purely to stop someone from doing their core job.

The concrete experience stage of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle plays a predominant role in didactic approach, as learners are expected to hurriedly absorb information into their heads through sensory cortex, mostly by auditory means. There will be less time, if at all, expended on reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages. All the learners are expected to commit the information divulged to memory in an identical manner promoting conformity ahead of creativity (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2016); there will be no encouragement for unique, personalised knowledge creation internally in the head of the learner. Further, the teacher demonstrates an authoritative role, resembling knowing everything (as an omnipotent god) and attempting to fill the empty heads of students with something disregarding the notions of social-emotional learning altogether. Didactic teaching-learning environments have a negative impact more specifically on visual-spatial or creative/gifted learners, firstly because they usually resist authoritarianism, possibly due to their higher sensitivity levels, and secondly because they tend to grasp knowledge slowly in a deeper sense via reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation phases; visual-spatial learners will be more relaxed and emotionally stable in a nonauthoritative environment with an appropriate pace of presentation that would help them to think/reflect/conceptualise in pictures and objects than pure auditory means.

In other words, the learner plays a more active role in learning in an emotionally and socially supported environment, creating knowledge, while the teacher’s role is somewhat passive, guiding learners in the knowledge creation process. In pedagogy, this scenario is referred to as a dialectic teaching-learning process. As we can see, the dialectic approach has a deeper and critical focus to learning, while the didactic approach is more likely to produce a surface approach to learning. In the dialectic approach, the delivery is so paced and toned that the learners are in a more emotionally and socially comfortable position to engage in reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages of the Kolb’s cycle. We can also see student-centred learning from another important point of view: it is possible that individual students get more attention from the teacher to possibly get individual feedback and individual issues addressed for more purposeful learning and development. Also, the teacher gets to know students individually based on the discussions they engage in, thus getting to know their personality traits, as widely referred to by psychologists, so that appropriate personalised feedback can be provided. This learner-centred approach accommodates for a more authentic learning experience for each student, and at the same time, it caters for a more authentic evaluation of individual students.