Role of the Teacher

Role of the teacher:

According to collective argumentation model by Brown and Renshaw (2000) the skills of representation, comparison, explanation, justification, agreement and validation are to be used in co-ordinating the phases of their interaction in small groups. The use of these strategies is realized in small group situations in which the teacher first guides the students in sharing their personal views on interpretation of the problem or task in question. This is followed by comparing, explaining and justifying various perspectives in small groups, by establishing a joint agreement, and then by presenting the group’s joint representation to the whole class for validation. The teacher’s participation in the interactions of the small groups includes allocating management of the problem-solving process to the group, reminding the students about the norms of participation, supporting the development of conjectures and refutations, modeling ways of constructing arguments and the use of appropriate domain-specific language, encouraging the class to engage in the evaluation of co-constructed arguments or perspectives, and providing strategies for dealing with interpersonal conflicts.

Wells (1999) narrated that no classroom interaction takes place in a vacuum. Rather, it is embedded in the socio-cultural context of an activity, shaped by its practices and participants -both the teacher and students- across time. In teacher-student interaction, it is often the teacher who controls the content on interaction and the distribution of speaking turns. The nature of teacher’s facilitation of classroom interaction demonstrates that the interpretative authority of ideas and solutions was distributed in the classroom. Here, all members ...

... middle of paper ...

...s their co-operation; shares the control and responsibilities; encourages the pupils’ ideas and initiatives.

Under integrative teachers the pupils make great contributions to the lesson; show great appreciation of others; are more friendly and co-operative; are less inattentive, aggressive and resistant to instruction. Moreover, researchers said that it is the pupil who adapt to the teacher rather than vice versa. The teachers remain consistence in their teaching style even with different classes of children. But the pupils change their behavior as a function of the teaching style. When pupils move from an integrative to dominative teacher (or vice versa) marked changes in their behavior occur. It is the teacher, then, who is the principal creator of the climate that prevails in the classroom; the pupils’ responses are largely determined by the teacher’s behavior.