Improving educators’ professional development is critical to changing schools and enhancing academic success from a global viewpoint of the new normal in education. To meet democratic requirements as well as public expectations for school and student performance, a country must improve teacher skills and knowledge so that every teacher is knowledgeable about student learning, competent in a complex core academic content, and skilled in teaching dexterities.
The concept of master teachers developed from a desire to harness the skills of outstanding classroom teachers and apply them to the growth of both students and colleagues. Fuller et al. (2018) trace the development of England’s status-based Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) grade, which was established to recognize and reward excellent teachers. Based on research with 849 ASTs, they note rates that recognize and reward teaching excellence contribute in fundamental ways to a teacher’s professional identity by increasing a sense of recognition, reward, and job satisfaction, and it allows highly accomplished teachers to remain where they want to be, which is in the classroom. Utley, Basile, and Rhodes (2018) found that research and inquiry were successful strategies of promoting leadership in their study of the role of master teachers in coordinating personal and professional development at 31 primary school sites connected with Columbia University in the United States.
According to Buskist (2019), master teachers focus on thinking processes and problem solving while simultaneously delivering current subject material with excitement, based on in-depth interviews with 20 students. They show seemingly endless interest in their students and workplace. Conflicts originate from divergent concepts of professionalism, according to Montecinos et al. (2019), as shown by interviews with five master teachers in Chile. Members of the ‘Instructors of Teachers Network’ had to conceal their status as master teachers in order to cooperate with others who didn’t want to accept ‘forced improvement’ from standard professional development approaches. This corresponds to Stevenson’s (2017) claim that teacher leadership might be seen as managerial.
In recent decades, school reform programs have recognized teacher professional development as a critical component of change and an essential link between the standards movement and student performance. Teachers must learn how to instruct in ways that encourage higher-order thinking and performance. To prepare for future schooling and professions in the twenty-first century, students are required to learn more complex and analytical skills. These new demands necessitate a new type of instruction, delivered by teachers who understand both learning and teaching, who can meet students’ needs as well as the demands of their disciplines, and who can build bridges between students’ experiences and curricular objectives.
The only way to improve student success is to improve teachers’ ability to improve their instructional practice and school systems’ capacity to increase teacher learning. In this way, the education system needs highly proficient individuals who are competent to be instructional leaders, such as master teachers. Master teachers are highly trained classroom instructors who take on leadership and management roles corresponding with their compensation grades, according to the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (2018). A master teacher’s duties include enhancing a school’s teaching staff’s ability, knowledge, and performance, as well as the school’s curricular programs. In most cases, master teachers are in charge of organizing a group of teachers in order to enhance teaching and learning. Modeling, cooperating, coaching, and employing procedures to improve knowledge, practice, and professional involvement, as well as organizing and professional assistance from peers, are examples of this.
According to the State of New Jersey Department of Education (2019), the master teacher’s main job is to visit classes and support colleagues in using reflective practice to improve teaching. The master teacher’s responsibilities include curriculum creation, professional development, and support, such as providing individual assistance and arranging small group sessions or instructor training. They’ve also mastered classroom management skills and developed a way to speed up learning for all of their students as skilled leaders. These teachers are great communicators who create strong ties with their students and personalize the curriculum to their specific requirements. They recognize that education is about much more than simply imparting knowledge. As a consequence, lifelong learning is encouraged, as is the concept of teaching as a profession requiring expert knowledge and specialized skills earned and maintained via rigorous and continuing study (UNESCO, 2014).
Master teachers as instructional leaders, on the other hand, continue to be a challenge in virtually every school throughout the world, partially because they are expected to be the best classroom instructors, mentors, and principal supporters. Teachers are the most important component in students’ learning progress, according to Geringer (2014), and teacher quality outweighs other variables such as motivation, money, and class size. Teachers’ performance is crucial in the field of education. Teaching entails more than merely passing on knowledge. It’s a teacher-student relationship in which the teacher’s position influences the learner’s cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor activity. Appropriateness, sufficient, suited to the need, or adequately qualified are all adjectives used to define a teacher’s competence. Admissibility and suitability for capacity are other terms used to describe a teacher’s competency. It may relate to adequate preparation for beginning a professional career in a variety of ways. Competent teachers are also essential, according to Anbuthasan and Balakrishnan (2016), for students to benefit from educational institutions, one of which is the school they attend for the majority of their education. Various teacher evaluation systems examine or evaluate teachers’ teaching abilities based on student achievement. Classroom observation, student ratings, peer ratings, principal and administrator evaluations, self-rating, teacher interview, parent rating, competency assessments, and other indirect measures and competence evaluations like researches are some of the other ways to evaluate a teacher’s instructional competence. “As a result, this research is suggested to evaluate master teachers’ instructional leadership, competency, and performance in the middle of a pandemic, when they are most essential.
By: Mr. Marciano P. Melchor Jr. |Master Teacher II| Tapinac Senior High School, Olongapo City
