Purple Tod Consulting

The voice of our novice teachers (2)

• “As a teacher, you play the role of mother, father, priest. Certain things that happen with learners in their home life, they share with you, that’s rather unexpected at times. As I’m still young, I don’t always have the right words, at times I find myself lacking.”
• “Being a teacher doesn’t end the moment they walk out the door, your job doesn’t end with teaching, you take into consideration their social wellbeing, any learning difficulties they might have.”
• “I expected to play the role of being the everything to the child, you play that motherly role, you have to be a teacher, you have to be a security guard.”
• “It’s in stark contrast what I believe now and the ideology I held when I was a student.”
•  “There’s a lot of freedom, you prepare your lesson plans, you teach according to your lesson plans.”
• “How I prepare and how I teach is up to me, being in charge of whatever I’m going to use to teach a lesson makes me feel empowered.”
• “In class, as the teacher, you the only person here so there is freedom to make choices. In class you have the most freedom to choose what you going to do, I’m in charge, I do things the way I feel it should be done.”
• “I’m in charge in my class, I have that freedom there, that’s where I feel more confident, the power comes in there, then I forget about whoever is above me.”
• “There is freedom at times and at times it feels like there is none.”
• “that his professional autonomy and conformity to policy is “50/50, whatever I do is guided by policy but the way I do it is up to me.”
• “I feel empowered because I empower myself, I make the choices. In the class, what goes on here goes on because either I allow it to happen or I don’t allow it to happen.”
• “You have to choose your battles.”
• “Helping them to learn is empowering.”
• “I feel empowered because I’m empowering them, because they learning and I’m the one that’s providing the knowledge.”
• “We work together and share the way we do things.”
• “Being in conversation with other teachers makes me accept the highs and the lows because I’m not experiencing it alone.”
• “I have parents in teaching, I’m taking my parents guidance. I’m taking my Head of Department’s guidance.”
• “You that facilitator just guiding them and when the parents are involved then it’s even better.”
• “Not only is the co-operation of parents empowering but also the co-operation of the learners which helps to build a positive teacher-learner relationship enabling the practice of certain personal values - “I think having that relationship with the child does enable you because they listen to you, often they will listen to you more than they listen to their own parents.”
• “Just the label, a teacher, makes me feel empowered. I am the youngest in my family so I don’t have people coming to me saying ‘How do I do this?”