Ptlls

Task 1 : Produce a report on the roles, responsibilities and boundaries of the teaching role “Your main role as a teacher should be to teach your subject in a way that actively involves and engages your learners during every session.” (Gravells, A 2011 p.6). However a teacher will find him or herself wearing many hats when it comes to their roles and responsibilities. The aim of this assignment is to cover these roles and responsibilities and also highlight the different boundaries a teacher must establish between themselves and their students; it will look at how these issues can relate to the teaching of beauty therapy. Many factors can affect teaching in both a positive and negative way. These may be the experience of the teacher or the students and even the environment both find themselves in. A good teacher must follow a cycle that involves identifying needs, planning learning, enabling learning, assessing learning and quality assurance and evaluation. A teacher will first need to not only identify the needs of the students in their class, but also the needs of the school, what needs to be taught and with what resources. Some students may have learning difficulties or external circumstances that may affect their learning. One on one meetings and initial assessments will help determine these needs and individual learning plans can be put in place. Once these needs have been identified, it is the teacher’s responsibility to prepare, to plan what will be taught, when it shall be taught and with what resources. To plan and cover all that is expected of the syllabus is key to teaching in order to ensure students will learn all that is required. A teacher must at all times act professionally by not disclosing personal information to the students. ‘Boundaries are about knowing where your role as a teacher stops and working within the limits of that role.’ (Gravells A. 2011 p.11) A teacher must not have any physical contact with a student nor have a personal relationship with a student. It is the teacher’s job to manufacture a professional relationship with their students based on trust and respect while still maintaining equal opportunity to all of their students and not favour or be biased toward any individual or group. There is legislation and codes of practice that teachers must follow. Four key pieces of legislation are equality, health and safety, data protection and safeguarding. The Equality Act (2010) ensure everyone’s rights to an education as well as their rights to achieve in education no matter their gender, ethnic origin, age, social class or disability. This act has now been extended to include marital status and sexuality. Teachers must make sure students are taught in a safe environment and that they themselves are healthy. The Health and Safety Act (1974) states teachers must identify risks and take steps to manage them. In beauty therapy the therapist works with electrical equipment and also applies products to the skin of clients making health and safety a primary concern and the safety of the client all important. Risks must be identified through risk assessments and action taken to prevent accidents. The Data Protection Act (1998) amended 2003) makes sure that any information collected could not be shared with any other organisation without permission; this may have included information on a student such as a learning difficulty. This act is particularly important in the beauty therapy industry as the data held on clients will include not only their identity and personal details but also the possibility of some medical conditions. Teachers also have a duty of care to safeguard and protect a student in their care. The college is legally obliged to act on bullying under the Education and Inspection Act 2006. In their role teachers should encourage respect for one another and good behaviour to prevent bullying. The Code of Professional Practice was set up by The Institute for Learning (IFL) on April 1 2008 and is set procedure to which teacher’s behaviour should adhere. The code is based on seven behaviours; Professional Integrity, Respect, Reasonable Care, Professional Practice, Criminal offence Disclosure, Responsibility during Institute Investigations and Responsibility to the Institute. If the Code of Professional Practice is not followed a sanction will be imposed in the form of disciplinary action. Respect and reasonable care are important in teaching beauty therapy, mainly as there is a lot of practical work involved. As beauty therapy students work in a salon setting with equipment such as hot wax, lamps and sharp tools reasonable care should be implicated to ensure the safety and welfare of the beauty therapy students. Initial assessments are used to find out all about students abilities, prior knowledge and experience. Practice tests, presentations and interviews are all ways to find out more about students before they start a new course or subject. Staff at Cirencester College set summer assignments to assess new students and get them thinking about the subject they are about to study. Once in the class room the teacher can observe the way the students work, interact and answer questions to assess their abilities. Should the teacher find that some of his or her students require extra help and support, the college has many departments in which they will find this. If an initial assessment shows that a student has dyslexia or the information comes from the student’s previous school, the college will be able to support this student in many ways from having different coloured hand-outs to support workers. Other internal points of referral students and staff can go to are counsellors, mentors, career advisers, first-aiders and colleagues. There are also sources of support available externally such as charities, health centres and general practitioners, its is up to the teacher to judge what support may be necessary for their student. Teachers will find that not all their students will learn at the same level, thus having diversity in the group. Teachers should always remember to not be judgemental, to not advantage or disadvantage learners and deliver activities at the right level. By doing this teachers will not directly or indirectly exclude anyone and all students can take part and feel valued. ‘Learning programmes may, where possible, be designed around a set of aims and behavioural objectives with test criteria built in to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning’ (Walkin, 2000 pg134). In order to track how well a student is doing on the course the teacher will need to test the student on their knowledge. How well a student understands the material being taught is best monitored through criterion tests, however this may not be applicable to practical based subjects such as beauty therapy where the level of understanding is often measured on results in the treatment room. Students shall be tested before, during and after the course with the results being recorded and feedback given throughout. This will show if the objectives of the course have been achieved. This is also a good way for a teacher to monitor his or her teaching methods. For example if the students results are dropping it may mean that they are finding the lessons boring and are not fully engrossed in what is being taught. Functional skills are key and very important in beauty therapy. Therapists need good communication skills to build a friendly relationship with their clients. They will also be handling money and running promotions in the salon so need to have good numeracy skills. ICT has in recent years become valuable to therapists as appointment diaries and client records are now kept electronically. The advantages of embedding these skills into teaching beauty therapy enable the students to be prepared for employment with the confidence to be a great all-round therapist. Teachers can incorporate the use of computers in their lessons to encourage student to gain ICT skills, allowing students to find resources online would naturally further their knowledge of computing, however keeping their focus on the task is far more difficult when you allow them the distraction of the internet. By using role play in a mock salon setting students will combine numeracy and communication skills in a fun informal way. This is crucial in beauty therapy and is a much better way to assess the students than by setting essays, although the teacher will need to keep the ‘informal’ lesson relevant and back it up with ‘formal’ assessments. Functional skills can also be taught by specialist teachers as a separate lesson thought still part of the same course. Not all beauty therapy teachers will be experts in functional skills and may find fully embedding these skills into a practical lesson challenging. Therefore it is common for beauty therapy students to have separate lessons on functional skill as part of the beauty therapy course. Keeping records are vital for all teachers no matter what subject or level. Records should be kept in order to monitor each student on the course, not only in the form of test results but also attendance figures, individual achievement goals and incident forms to name a few. If a student is achieving below expected test results it may be easy to understand why if the teacher can refer to his or her records and see that the student has not been attending many lessons. Maintaining records are important for a number of reasons, not only to support the teacher but records should also be maintained as a requirement to satisfy anyone wishing to know such information e.g. inspectors. These documents should be kept in a secure confidential place on the college’s premises. It is quite clear that a teacher’s main role is to teach the subject the students are there to learn. It is the teacher’s main responsibility to ensure they do this in the best possible way, at the right level and using the appropriate techniques so that the learner has the best opportunity to understand. With many boundaries to work within, it is crucial that the teacher stays focussed, honest and most of all committed to the task in hand, the reward of seeing students achieve in the subject area is worth the effort.