Six Types of Educators according to KQED

From KQED.org:

Have you ever wondered what type of educator you might be? Are you a Teacher 2.0, a Motivator, or a Scholar? Maybe you’re more of a Social Justice Champion, a Cultivator, or a Project Planner? Take the quiz to discover your teacher type and refresh your teaching skills in time for the upcoming school year by signing up for KQED Teach. https://ww2.kqed.org/education/2016/07/08/what-type-of-21st-century-educator-are-you/

Six Types of Educators

1. Teacher 2.0 - You're constantly looking for new tools and solutions to apply to the classroom. You believe that digital literacy is the most important skill students need for the future. Some of your key values include technology literacy, adaptability, creativity, collaboration, communication, and media literacy.
2. Motivator - You focus on activating intrinsic motivation in students and inspiring students to be self-directed learners in order to prepare them for professional and personal challenges. Some of your key values include flexibility, self-direction, intrinsic motivation, tenacity, and resilience.
3. Scholar: You value traditions and knowledge in your content area. Your lessons focus on building essential academic skills to prepare students for college. Some of your key values include cultural literacy, traditional literacy skills, accountability, and mastery of content knowledge.
4. Social Justice Champion: Your lessons focus on a critical examination of society, institutions, and authority in order to empower students to lead change. Some of your key values include initiative, leadership, cross-cultural skills, global awareness, civic literacy, and media literacy.
5. Cultivator: Your lessons focus on students social and emotional well-being. You make assignments personal, ensure all students needs are being met, and value reflection and emotional growth. Some of your key values include student health and well being, self-awareness, social skills, and resilience.
6. Project Planner: You value deep learning experiences in order to make content relevant to your students. You consistently promote active engagement with real-world problems in your lessons. Some of your key values include critical thinking, problem solving, self-direction, collaboration, and producing for an authentic audience.

Teaching as assisted performance - Tharp & Gallimore 1988

Tharp, R. G. & Gallimore, R. (1988). The redefinition of teaching and schooling (Chapter 1, pp. 13-26), A theory of teaching as assisted performance (Chapter 2, pp. 27-43) in Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning and schooling in social context. New York. Cambridge University

Thesis: Teaching must be redefined as assisted performance. Teaching consists in assisting performance. Teaching is occurring when performance is achieved with assistance.

Traditional "teaching": lecturing, explaining, and asking students questions

Duffy and his associates (Duffy, 1981; Duffy, Lanier, & Roehler, 1980) summarized the work on teacher effectiveness and drew two conclusions: (a) The most effective teachers of basic skills generate the greatest opportunity to learn. (b) Such teachers are technical managers of instructional materials and activities rather than theory-driven and reflective decision makers.

Teaching as assistance

• Of what does this "other" kind of teaching consist? For one thing, it clearly involves subject-matter competence. To do more than manage activities and allow students to learn on their own, teachers must command the knowledge and skills they seek to impart (Shulman, 1986). The point of teaching is to impart knowledge and the capacity to process that knowledge
• But knowing the subject matter is not sufficient for teachers. Pedagogical expertise is also required (Berliner, 1986), of which there are many kinds.

Rousing minds to life

• Until internalization occurs, performance must be assisted.
• Assisted performance identifies a fundamental process of development and learning.
• Students cannot be left to learn on their own; teachers cannot be content to provide opportunities to learn and then assess outcomes; recitation must be deemphasized; responsive, assisting interactions must become commonplace in the classroom. Minds must be roused to life.
• "If seek to promote the quality of teaching, reforms should also provide [teachers] some means to improve"
• How are we to achieve in schools the conditions that will make them places for teachers as well as students? The solution will involve others besides teachers.

In one view, the definitions of teaching and teachers are straightforward and readily mastered: Teaching can be reduced to a few days of standard in-service training that teachers can implement on their own. Such teaching can be assessed with an observation form and teachers can be assessed with a test. The results of teaching can be checked by standardized achievement tests. (p.24)

In an other view. teaching is a complex, humane activity at which a teacher can grow steadily more proficient over the years by means of disciplined curiosity, continuous training, and skillful assistance. Teachers can be supported and evaluated by persons - including principals - who join with them in mastering and advancing the craft. In this view, one influences teachers primarily by organizing the support and recognition that will permit them to realize the higher motives of service that bring them to teaching.

Supervision should be defined - particularly in an institution devoted to teaching - as assisting performance in precisely the terms we used to define teaching.

"In collaborative settings, teachers acquire and develop better skills through their collective analysis, evaluation, and experimentation with new teaching strategies." (Rosenholtz, 1986, p. 518)

Chapter 2 - A theory of teaching as assisted performance

Assisted performance defines what a child can do with help, with the support of the environment, of others, and of the self. For Vygotsky, the contrast between assisted performance and unassisted performance identified the fundamental nexus of development and learning that he called the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

Vygotsky's work principally discusses children, but identical processes can be seen operating in the learning adult.

T & G's general definition of teaching: Teaching consists in assisting performance through the ZPD. Teaching can be said to occur when assistance is offered at points in the ZPD at which performance requires assistance.

The four stages of the ZPD:
Stage I: Where performance is assisted by more capable others
Stage II: Where performance is assisted by the self
Stage III: Where performance is developed, automatize, and "fossilized"
Stage IV: Where de-automatization of performance leads to recursion back through the ZPD

Responsive assistance
In the transition from other-assistance to self-assistance (and automatization) there are variations in the means and patterns of adult assistance to the child. At the earlier phases, assistance may be frequent and elaborate. Later, it occurs less often and is truncated . Adult assistance is contingent on and responsive to the child's level of performance.

If the truncated guidance fails, the adult may add additional hints, testing to find that minimum level of help the child needs to proceed. This continual adjustment of the level and amount of help is responsive to the child's level of performance and perceived need.

However, patient, contingent, responsive, and accurately tuned adult assistance does not always occur. A major variable here is the nature of the task or performance.

"Assistance" offered at too high a level will disrupt child performance and is not effective teaching. Once independent skill has been achieved, "assistance" becomes "interference."

That's why T & G say teaching occurs when assistance is offered at points in the ZPD at which performance requires assistance.

As common as assisted performance is in the interactions of parents and children, it is uncommon in those of teachers and students. Why?
First, to provide assistance in the ZPD, the assistor must be in close touch with the learner's relationship to the task. Sensitive and accurate assistance that challenges but does not dismay the learner cannot be achieved in the absence of information.
Second, while most parents do not need to be trained to assist performance, most teachers do. Teachers need a more elaborate set of skills in assistance, and they need to be more conscious of their application. Teachers need to learn good pedagogical practices.

Scaffolding; A theory of the teacher - Greenfield (1984)

Greenfield, P. (1984). A theory of the teacher in the learning activities of everyday life. In B. Rogoff and J. Lave (Eds.), Everyday cognition (pp. 117-138). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development
The scaffold is a metaphor, originated by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), to describe the ideal role of the teacher. This metaphor is the basis for a theoretical model of the teacher in informal education. The scaffold, as it is known in building construction, has five characteristics:

1. it provides a support;
2. it functions as a tool;
3. it extends the range of the worker;
4. it allows the worker to accomplish a task not otherwise possible; and
5. it is used selectively to aid the worker where needed.

Scaffolding thus closes the gap between task requirements and the skill level of the learner, creating what Hunt (1961) called "the match" between the cognitive level of the learner and the characteristics of instruction, or what Brown (1975, 1979) referred to as "headfitting."

• The "region of sensitivity" to instruction lies in the gap between comprehension and production
• Shaping involves a series of successive approximations to the ultimate task goal. While the learner is successful at every point in the process, he or she starts with a simplified version of the ultimate task.
• Scaffolding, in contrast, does not involve simplifying the task during the period of learning. Instead, it holds the task constant, while simplifying the learner's role through the graduated intervention of the teacher.

Language Learning in Los Angeles was examined: mothers engaged in both shaping and scaffolding communications

Learning to Weave in Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico: The role of scaffolding in informal instruction was also illustrated in weaving in Zinacantan

Other ideas:

• The basic idea that a scaffold functions to close the gap between learner abilities and task requirements implies that more scaffolding will be used in the harder parts of the task.
• Equally fundamental to the scaffolding concept is sensitivity to the skill level of the learner and the idea that the scaffold supports what the learner can already do.
• There is an interesting commonality here with the language learning process: the use of multiple and potentially redundant communication channels also decreased as the learner became competent in going from words to meaning.
• An unanswered question is the extent to which school instruction could be improved by greater use of the principle of scaffolding, thus putting more emphasis on cooperative success in the early stages of learning and less emphasis on independent discovery through a process of trial-and-error.
• Scaffolding is also related to the concept of cooperation. It can be conceived as an asymmetric type of cooperation where one person takes greater responsibility than the other for the successful accomplishment of a task by compensating for the other person's weaknesses.
• This concept of scaffolding and its potentially broad applicability to situations of everyday learning raises questions as to the cognitive skills required of the teacher. Usually the focus is on the cognitive development of the learner. Perhaps more important in real life is the cognitive development which allows a person to become an effective teacher.
• What are the cognitive skills involved in scaffolding?