Assistant teacher course/Teachers' handbook

A curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.

—Democracy and Education, John Dewey

Introduction

Assuming that it is possible, should we allow parents to have their children genetically modified for intelligence and health? We are more than happy for parents to try to enhance intelligence and health through education. If a school were to develop a programme that resulted in pupils gaining dramatically in both, it would no doubt be applauded. Parents would rightly seek to get their children admitted. They would demand to know why similar techniques weren't used at other schools.

—The Philosophy Gym, Stephen Law

The teachers' handbook tries to give some recommendations to teachers who have a group of assistant teachers available.

The course invited the assistant teachers in several places to make suboptimal or questionable choices in order to provide motivation for the other pupils to become politically active and to try to influence the situation. Teachers should be aware what suboptimal solutions have been implemented intentionally and what better solutions the assistant teachers would prefer themselves. At some time pupils and assistant teachers may need encouragement to change existing arrangements in order to prevent significant disadvantages for the pupils.

The normal run of events, however, should be that pupils discover the inadequate solutions and alert their grade to the fact that something might have to be changed.

The advantage of having assistant teachers available should be that the teacher can focus on teaching, pedagogy and classroom management. The role of supervisor should mostly be delegated to the assistant teachers. A teacher can also delegate the role of lecturer, which allows to focus on monitoring the class or to attend to individual pupils.

This teacher's handbook is meant as a convenient entry for teachers but should not be interpreted to mean that teachers shouldn't read the whole course.

Content

References

See also

• Corporate social responsibility policy for school operators

This resource has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. This applies worldwide. You are advised to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intellectual property rights claims that do require mentoring duties in compensation ("either mentoring or trouble with extraterrestrials"). Content released into the public domain may be used for any purpose without attribution, including commercial activities and creation of derivative works.