Revisiting What it Means to be a 21st Century Educator

Being an educator in the 21st century means being able to perform a high stakes juggling act. You are entirely responsible for what students learn and how well they learn it. Teaching is full of interruptions, students, volunteers and ed. techs coming in and out and there are a million topics to cover in a single day, and this is where the juggling comes in. Teachers in the 21st century have to grab their students and keep them hooked, as well as teach the curriculum and the Maine Learning Results.
Teachers rarely have their students for an entire day. Students come to class, go to breakfast, have a French class, go to Orchestra, come back for a lesson and read aloud, go to recess, go to lunch, have science class, go to the library, come back and get ready to go home. A teacher has to use his or her time wisely and utilize every spare teachable moment even if that moment is while students eat their snacks.
Students need to be engrossed in their learning. It is simply not enough for a teacher to stand up in front of the class, tell students a grammatical rule and then handout a worksheet for them to practice. Students need to dive in, find the grammatical rule in books, and play a game online that helps them better understand it, cut up and glue together sentences. Teachers need to use the resources readily available to them and one of the biggest of those resources is technology. Wheel in a smart board and students who have had previous experience with one of these great machines become extremely excited. It doesn’t matter what you are teaching them, they are anxious to get their hands on it, manipulate it, mold it, and try it out for themselves, after all isn’t that what learning is all about?
Teachers have to answer and live by the curriculum and the Maine Learning Results. They are guided as to what to teach, but they have so much freedom in how to teach it. Teachers are undoubtedly held responsible for precisely what their students know, but if teachers embraced the many tools and strategies that abound them, their task would be much easier and they would become highly more effective. Teachers will always have to juggle, but what’s the point of juggling things that are not helping their students learn?
Education in the 21st century is fast-paced and ever changing. New strategies and technologies surface continuously and teachers are always finding new ways to reach their students. As students and society become increasingly digitized, as does the art of teaching. Teaching in the 21st century means always changing your game plan and constantly searching for that one tool that may help your students learn and truly get it. In some cases, technology just may be that key tool. Click here for more information.