There are many challenges that teachers are coping and balancing beside teaching in the classroom.
This short article is not going to discuss all the challenges but I intend to just highlight a few in this article for your reflection and further discussion.
Endless administrative work
In this present age, most teachers are really Jack of all trades but master of none.
Each teacher usually would need to oversee and organise more than one school event yearly.
Organise and plan duties for other teachers. They may also need to find the fund needed for the event.
We are also involved in school donation drive so that the fund can be used to improve school facilities or help students with financial needs.
Most teachers are involved in extracurricular activities. These activities can take up at least one afternoon each week and there can also be competitions that they may be involved in for many afternoons.
When there is a discipline problem, we may not just handle it but there can be lots of different forms to fill for documentations depending on each school’s requirements.
There are many other administrative work that are not mentioned.
We have to balance our classroom duties and administrative work concurrently.
Integrate disabilities and special needs into mainstream
It is great that most schools have put into different considerations to cater to disabilities and special needs to have an inclusive environment.
Lifts and special facilities are built to assist in this integration.
The brutal fact is classroom teachers will need to deal with the psychological readiness of the other students as most students may not necessarily be understanding and helpful to students with disabilities or special needs.
Teachers need to be aware and prevent possible bullying by the other students. Teachers also need to cope with the self-efficacy of the student with disabilities or special needs.
I do agree that it provides opportunities for our students to acquire empathy leading to character building for possible awareness of the need for future social contributions.
School support will definitely be important for teachers who need to support students with disabilities and special needs.
Cyberbully
This may not happen in the classroom but it can happen very often out of the classroom resulting in many psychological stress in students.
Students may even give up their precious lives due to cyberbully.
Classroom tutors will still need to address the issue of cyberbully. It may often involve more than one student within the same class or other classes.
There can be many investigations with the discipline department of the school. This can result in lots of time taken up since cyberbully cases do not occur during our lessons.
Social problems
Teachers may face with students without home support with absence of adult supervision.
Most of our students may come from families where both parents are working while others may have only one parent due to divorce cases.
There are also students who are abused by their parents or caretakers.
Another challenge can be students who are orphans or parents who are both in prison.
Students without parent supervision can have low self-esteem leading to low self-efficacy. They may not be motivated to learn and school can be just a place to vent out their frustrations and angers.
Teachers would need to understand each student’s profile to cope with problems beyond the classroom context.
Teachers would need to customise individual learning plan and intervention needed with other professionals like counsellors or child psychologists.
Integrate of new educational initiatives
Every few years, there may be new educational changes due to global changes leading to different economic demands.
Education aims to address future skills to cope with possible future jobs as well as to help the country economic needs since we do understand the importance of human resource.
With new educational initiatives, there are constant need for accommodation and adaptation of new initiatives to our current classroom teaching strategies and pedagogies.
These constant changes can pose serious challenges especially for older teachers as they may be used to the routines or accustomed teaching styles.
Teachers are also regularly involved in action research that can take up a lot of their time after school hours.
Parents
With more parents who are more educated, they may have their own opinion of how their children should be taught.
They may not always agree with what is being done in the classroom.
Many of the educated parents may want to advise or instruct teachers how they should teach.
Without educational pedagogical background, many of these suggestions may not necessary be appropriate or helpful.
Teachers would need to be tactful in communicating their reasons for different classroom interventions and teaching strategies with interpretations that parents can understand.
On the other hand, there are parents who totally do not involve in helping their children in their studies. They simply provide their physical needs and neglect their psychological and emotional needs.
There can be many extreme cases that teachers must deal with.
In conclusion
There are still many challenges that this short article has not highlighted.
Teachers are also coping with cyber addiction as well as new technology requirements in their classroom teaching.
With many different job requirements beside classroom teaching, teachers definitely need to learn how to manage their own time effectively.
They also need to learn when to take some time off for self-care.
Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://fun2learn.vornix.blog/2018/08/31/challenges-that-a-school-teacher-may-face/