TEACHER CENTER ROLE
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This chapter establishes the role of the teacher as a learning facilitator. Teaching from the teacher's experience should be focused on the students. Likewise, in the teaching process, there must be the active participation of the students that facilitates the teacher to give the content. The teacher's role is as a learning facilitator that is student-centered. It is important to know how the classroom is organized; that is to say, what role do the teacher and the students have? For example, who delivers the content? Who answers the questions? Who reviews the material? almost always the master would win this competition. But, the role of the students is passive because they only observe what the teacher does. On the other hand, teachers who focus on students try to make them master the material and develop learning skills. Likewise, there are some descriptions with metaphors for the teacher. For example, they say that the teacher is like a guide, a coach, a driver, a midwife, etc. In addition, the role of the teacher is student-centered because they focus on what students do and students’ needs, they have to adjust teaching. The participation of the students in the learning tasks is the most important thing and when possible, the students should do it and they should not only be satisfied with the teacher’s explanation such as copying the same examples that the teacher gives, their participation is active when he asks, when he makes his own prayers, etc. Moreover, an experiment has been carried out in a university that shows that lectures are more focused on the teacher and students are passive recipients of knowledge. Student-centered learning is considered difficult to achieve because it depends on the collaboration and interest of students in learning. "You cannot force a student to learn, students completely control the most important part of any educational experience” (Spratt, Pulverness & Williams, 2011). They have to be autonomous. Implementing the role of the teacher as a facilitator can be guided as a set of principles: teacher let’s do learners more tasks, the teacher should do less telling so that students can do more discovering, the teacher must do instructional design work more carefully, faculty more explicitly model how experts learn; when solving problems through critical thinking, encourage students to learn from and with each other, teacher and students work to create climates for learning, and use evaluation to promote learning.
To sum up, the role of the teacher is to be a facilitator of the learning content. This person is the one who guides the learning process and motivates students to be active members of the class. However, focusing learning on the student is complex because it is necessary for the student to self-educate. On the other hand, the teacher gives the content but the students' results in the tasks do not meet his objectives so that he must change his way of teaching by implementing methodologies, strategies, techniques, feedback, and interactive activities. In the classroom, the teacher must do more task activities for the students. For example, introducing a warm-up activity like the hot seat should encourage students to ask questions to guess the word on the board. When doing a practice activity, the teacher should provide worksheets, ask questions in pairs, discuss a topic, etc.
As well, the teacher can do the instructional design work with more care. For example, when doing an activity, the learning styles, educational needs, and level of English that the students have must be taken into account so that the activities can be directed.
TEFL & TESOL Courses - TTT. (2017, November 18). Teaching English as a Foreign Language -Teachers & Learners- Role of the Teacher. [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaYh61skBpM
Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2011). The TKT Course Modules 1, 2 and 3 (2nd ed., TKT Course). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139062398
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