Teachers' Roles in the Changing World

In this rapidly changing world, ensuring sustainable development and ever-lasting peace, requires every society to focus on educating its young people in order to meet those challenges. Educational reforms have become top priorities and much is demanded from teachers to prepare learners to face the new challenges and to compete in the global markets.  In the context of the United Arab Emirates, new educational reforms have been carried out since 2015. A series of actions were taken including, to name few, developing a new K-12 curriculum that reflects Emirati focus with an international perspective, implementing ASP programs in a number of elite UAE schools, developing new subjects (e.g. Creative Thinking and Computer Science), and empowering teachers with high-quality and specialized training.  Seeing the emerging challenges in the roles of teachers, I think it is imperative to familiarize teachers with their pivotal roles and ensure their readiness to cope with these changes.

Obviously, teaching in the 21^st-century is an altogether new phenomenon. Therefore, teachers should reconsider the traditional teaching/learning approaches, as they do not prepare students for their future workplaces. Traditional approaches to teaching may hinder students' natural curiosity to acquire knowledge and learn new skills. Alternatively, teachers should consider the 21^st-Century pedagogies in teaching/ learning in order to promote critical thinking, problem- solving, collaboration, and self- direction amongst their students. More interestingly, teachers should open a new window for thinking seriously of how to enhance and incorporate the 21^st-Century skills in their classroom practices. 21^st-Century teachers should be facilitators, influential, reflective, impactful and inspirational models for their students. They have to be more challenging and able to bring the best out of their students. With all the tools available, students, on the other hand, should not only learn to use knowledge creatively and connect all the dots, but to think also like scientists when they process and/ or analyze information.

Further, teachers should ensure effective integration of smart phone technology into the classroom, to modernize education and to help bring students' outside world to the classroom. Teachers should encourage the use of these smart devices in the classroom to support students' learning and to help them produce a meaningful digital content (e.g. blogs, infographics, videos and even tutorials on how to do things, etc.)

There have been many positive changes in the field of education since the Ministry of Education have embarked on new educational approaches. Accordingly, teachers are expected to become agents of change for embedding the 21st-Century skills and knowledge in their teaching practices and assessments. They should understand clearly that preparing students for a multiple career life-path, requires going far beyond preparing students for standardized tests (teaching for the test) to teaching the 21st century skills altogether with other social skills such as tolerance, perseverance and optimism. 

By: Faiza Mohamed Al Tabib

UAE Teachers' Council