The Educator’s Role: Fostering Student Growth
Mission: The Educator’s Core Purpose
The teacher is more necessary than ever, becoming the main supporter of students’ true motivation. Amidst the falsehoods of the past and present, it is beautiful and necessary to maintain the desire for truth, whose true meaning can only be perceived by students at school. The educator’s mission is to fight for a community culture of love and life.
Key Aspects of the Modern Educator
- Personal and team reflection on teaching practice
- Permanent self-criticism and school equilibrium
- Balancing what the student “must know” with what “they know”
- Subordinating school activity to student needs
- Optimization and continuous strengthening
- Combining authority and empathy
- Bringing freedom and responsibility to students
- Teachers joining the action with the educational process
- Contributing to the formation of a positive self-concept in students
- Self-evaluating educational practice
Negative Attitudes to Avoid
- Irony, attempting humor that discourages and hurts
- Authoritarian and impulsive behavior that is frightening
- Aggressiveness that humiliates and provokes students
- Negative personal feelings seeking revenge on the learner
- Partiality that irritates, disappoints, and prevents personal relationships
- Indifference that emphasizes what is taught over the learner
- The pursuit of personal prestige, blinding vision to student needs
- Improvised insecurity, ignoring goals and methods
- Contempt for the new, avoiding comfort and sound planning
- Individualism, forgetting the student in the educational process
Quality Education Requires Quality Educators
Being an educator is not just an occupation but a vocation. It’s not simply a professional mission, but a commitment to “wait on” and “give.” Educators should conceive of education as an ethical endeavor, mirroring humanity and citizenship by example, promoting a full life and helping others to achieve it.
This involves:
- Helping without imposing
- Seeking knowledge to guide minds without molding them
- Facilitating an ongoing relationship with the truth
Key features include:
- Humanity and closeness
- Love and authority
- Humility and authenticity
- Acceptance and unconditional acceptance
- Empathy
- Dedication and commitment
An educator’s vocation requires special skills of soul and heart, diligent preparation, a willingness to explore, and an ease to innovate and adapt.
The Christian Educator
Christian teachers are true partners of God, educators who, besides acting in genuine collaboration and coordination in the field of education, must strive to give a true testimony of the Gospel through the example of life, professional competence, and uprightness, and Christian-inspired education. They are also people who believe, love, and hope.
Characteristics of the Christian Educator
- Open to dialogue
- Possesses personal and professional prestige
- Participates in the school community and works as a team
- Responsible for the educational mission
- Updated in their knowledge and spiritual life
- Shows filial loyalty to the Magisterium of the Church
- A person of prayer to speak of God to men
- A person of action, brave, and determined
- A humane person who accepts themselves and others
- Shows spontaneity, intimacy, and is capable of admiration
- Shows integrity (personal, professional, etc.)
- Shows maturity and acts autonomously
- Open to values that guide the search and discovery of values
- The choice of values involved in the Christian interpretation of values
- Sets an example of consistency with freely assumed values
- Must have a vocation
Types of Educators
- Professor stale: Good, but not worth what they teach.
- Professor pseudoprofessor: Worthless and teaches nothing of value.
- Best teacher: Dynamic, but not worth what they teach.
- Teacher-educator: Worthwhile and teaches valuable lessons.
Key Features of an Effective Educator
- Organize (materials, personal, and classroom functions)
- Explain (ensure understanding)
- Motivate (stimulate the student)
- Guide (in personal, educational, and professional development)