The Invisible Tasks of School: A Comprehensive Guide for Teachers
The Invisible Tasks of School
Homework encompasses various activities, both inside and outside the classroom. These activities can have diverse sequences, and if a sequence repeats, it can reveal the teacher’s teaching style.
Tasks of the Teacher
The three fundamental tasks are: Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation. Within these, there are also: exposing, questioning, debating, moderating, proposing, deciding, telling, dictating, motivating, observing, correcting, etc.
Tasks of the Student
These include: deciding, planning, expressing, receiving information, utilizing information, studying, remembering, etc.
Dimensions of School Work
These are common elements of teaching and learning strategies:
Sequence: The order in which tasks are carried out.
Interaction (Social System): Student-student and student-teacher relationships.
Content: The curricular element concerning the breadth, depth, and organization of content.
Teaching Resources: The means by which content is presented.
Space and Time Distribution: Key to organizing activities; includes the location of the school and teachers.
Control or Decision-Making: Who decides what to do, the location, and materials.
Instructive Action: The way the lesson is delivered.
Student Behavior
Rhythm: The pace of the learning process.
Duration
Ambiguity: The clarity with which an activity is presented.
Functions of Homework
Teacher Styles
We can distinguish between two styles (Gimeno):
Indirect: Minimal teacher direction; motivating students to act, accepting their ideas, and helping them develop those ideas.
Direct: The teacher gives orders, grants limited student autonomy, and uses authority to impose compliance.
Analyzing teaching style involves more than just verbal classroom interactions. Bennet differentiates between two styles:
Progressive | Traditional |
|---|---|
Integrated Materials Teacher as Guide Active Student Student Participation in Curriculum Intrinsic Motivation No Academic Standards Few Tests Teamwork Teaching Beyond the Classroom Creativity Detection Techniques | Independent Subjects Teacher as Knowledge Distributor Passive Student No Student Participation in Curriculum Memorization, Practice, and Repetition External Rewards Academic Standards Regular Tests Individual Work Classroom-Limited Teaching Limited Creativity |
Systematic Teaching Style
Review daily tasks
Presentation of new materials and content
Guided student practice
Feedback and correction
Independent student practice
Weekly and monthly review
Reviews: Suitable only for younger children; not appropriate for problem-solving, creativity, independence, or intellectual curiosity.
Socialization
The Teacher
Teachers were once students themselves, completed internships, and many have given private lessons. Now professionals, they must learn to adapt their behavior to their current role. Through experience, they learn how to socialize and carry out their professional work.
Teachers are subject to requirements such as the official curriculum, inspections, families, students, and personal inclinations, all of which influence their socialization.
Classroom innovation can be “questionable innovation.” When a teacher uses a different teaching method, colleagues may doubt or reject it. The teacher must defend their method without claiming superiority, which can lead to confrontations. The innovative teacher must adapt or revert.
Socialization is a dialectical relationship between accepting institutional rules and resisting or rejecting them.
Teacher autonomy is also important. While teachers can adapt the curriculum, they must adhere to minimum requirements. This autonomy is socially and bureaucratically constrained by textbook publishers’ interpretations, tests based on those books, and the teacher’s own interpretation.
The Student
Socialization is not sociability. Even without interaction, children socialize by gradually acquiring the rules of conduct of a specific environment to meet school demands. Socialization is understanding expected student behavior.
Adjustment problems can arise when a child changes schools or teachers due to the difficulty of socializing in a new environment. An adjustment period is necessary. This also happens with subject changes, even with the same teacher, as the child’s behavior must adapt to each subject’s activities.
Cognitive Aspects
From the cognitive psychology perspective, students are information processors. The strategies they use to understand reality and process information are crucial, and these strategies depend on the tasks they face, becoming a measure of learning processes.
The progressive perspective argues that cultural content is less important than the development of processes.
The relationship between content and tasks seems to vary across subjects. Different cognitive processes are used, and each subject’s peculiarities require different instructional approaches.
Classroom Management
The teacher must engage students in the work and deliver content effectively. However, the diverse nature of classrooms makes it challenging to meet all needs. When tasks are explained beforehand, students can work autonomously without disruption (except for varying work paces). Without prior explanation, disorder often arises, requiring authoritarian and repressive actions to restore order.
Classroom discipline is not pre-established; it arises from the type of work. Some tasks require more organization than others.
Closed Tasks: Students are told precisely what to do.
Open Tasks: Require understanding and greater teacher intervention.
This creates a contradiction for teachers, as more extensive activities are harder to manage.
Teacher Professionalism and Development
Teacher professionalism manifests in designing and implementing student tasks, through which the curriculum is delivered. These operations are: Planning (pre-active activity), Development (interactive activities), and Evaluation (post-active activity).
Educational planning is the teacher’s fundamental function, a process and a product. Teachers use schemes when planning, and there’s a reciprocal relationship between planned and executed tasks.
Gimeno identifies five key aspects in designing practice:
Consider the curriculum aspects to be addressed.
Resource availability.
Type of interaction.
Classroom arrangement.
Educational processes to be developed.
A professional educator adjusts their design when practice reveals flaws.