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Teaching may be one of the most ancient practices in human relations as parents teach their children how to develop skills to survive and thrive in the world and then the social interactions naturally provoke more of it. Although daily life provides endless situations of teaching and learning through sharing experiences, the schools are the center for so, and the teacher is the one who plays the main roles in this process. The present essay will discuss how to describe the role of the teacher based on three brief points of view: the etymological reference, historical context, followed by the ESL ITT standpoint. From a social perspective, it is universally understood that a teacher is expected to be an intelligent person who has fair knowledge about some specific topics and is skilled enough to show and share it with one or more students, usually in a educational center such as a school or university or any other meeting point. This description seems familiar mainly if we analyze it from a common sense point of view, but if we go deeper into the meaning of the teacher character, through etymology it is easy to find connections, as explored in the next paragraphs. The etymological roots of the words “teach” and “teacher” are considered for this essay in order to investigate the core of these concepts, what are the oldest meanings of these words and roles, what the teacher character is meant to be. Researches in English etymology show the roots of the word “teach” has resolutions as “to show”, “to demonstrate”, “to point out”, “to give instructions”, “to guide”… While for “teacher” it is possible to find the meaning as: someone who teaches. Therefore, considering these concept bases, one can understand that a teacher is a person who is able to show and explain something, add information, bring awareness, guide the others. This way, the common sense perspective is not far from the etymological science and is confirmed by the historical facts of practices in education. Historically saying, the teacher’s role, for centuries, was to concentrate all knowledge and show it to the students in an educational center where the students’ role was basically to memorize and reproduce what was shown during the lessons. As a result, this kind of “teacher-centered” practice is still common in many societies around the globe but it no longer supplies the real needs of the present multicultural, technological and scientific world. The teacher’s responsibilities have being changing through time responding to cultural, economical and social requirements, in a non-stop phenomenon, tending to be like that for the next years. Nowadays, as internet has been spreading its endless loads of information reaching everywhere in fractions of seconds all the time, consequently the teacher can no more be the only source of knowledge. This is one of the main reasons why the role of a teacher for the present times must be dynamic in order to truly reach the learning development of the students. If it is possible to find all types of information on the internet, schools and teachers must find ways to provide knowledge with features less likely to have online, for instance: good rapport, lively/loving/kind/motivating/helpful interaction. This idea is supported by Brown, H. Douglas (2007) “teachers can play many roles in the course of teaching and this might facilitate learning. Their ability to carry these out effectively will depend to a large extent on the rapport they establish with their students, and of course, on their own level of knowledge and skills.” From an ESL standpoint, based on the Unit I of the ITT 120hs material, there are around nine main roles of a teacher, as follows: manager/controller, organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, tutor, resource/facilitator, model, observer/monitor. It is a matter of time to know how and when to use each of these possibilities, because they all depend on the activity to be done, it also depends on the students and the educational center requirements. In general, a teacher can play many of these roles in one single lesson, so it is important to be dynamic and sensitive to the class. In conclusion, the description of a teacher’s roles may largely vary according to the educational center, the student’s needs, as well as the topics to be approached, but in a general perspective to truly educate someone is to take them from one state of understanding to another, this is really something unchangeable through times.
