What is a Teacher? A teacher must wear many hats.

Within a classroom setting, a teacher must be primarily, a teacher with all the abilities that entails; knowledgeable in their chosen field of education, flexible to change, resourceful with their teaching aids, engaging to the learners and imaginative to create an environment conducive to learning. They must also be a sympathetic ear and empathic to the needs of learners and a disciplinarian when re uired. They are re uired to be an advocate to the learners and a spokesperson to the classroom. !erhaps most importantly, teacher is also a learner. A teacher should never believe that they have learnt all that is necessary to allow them to teach. A learner feels a sense of fulfilment and delight when imparting previously unknown knowledge to a teacher. "utside of a classroom setting, a teacher is a moral figurehead within their community and must remain so to keep the respect of their learners and peers. A teacher is also a representative of their school, their profession, their community and their chosen fields of education. A teacher is a learner outside of a classroom setting also, constantly seeking for new methods and processes that will improve their teaching skills and expand their sub#ects and approaches. $b% Teaching has many methods of imparting new information to learners. All of these have positive and negative aspects associated with them. Teaching on an individual, or one to one basis can be extremely helpful in building up good communication skills between the learner and teacher and also means that the learner can feel no personal embarrassment or hindrance in asking uestions of the teacher This method also helps the teacher keep an accurate assessment of the student and can pitch the curriculum for the sub#ect being taught more accurately. The downside to this method is the learner can not participate in team work with other learners or discuss ideas or theories as a group. &t is also very time'consuming.

Teaching in small groups is advantageous as the teacher can impart the information to the group as a whole. &f an individual within the group needs extra assistance, aid can be given without the group suffering as a whole in the loss of time needed to give the help. &n many cases the group will rally to the support of its individuals as a sense of team spirit is heavily involved in this type of teaching. This type of teaching also aids communication and makes for active learning but again the downside is that the same methodologies can be applied to many learners in a classroom and, while it works well with groups, is inefficient. Teaching in a classroom is perhaps the most efficient method of teaching. This allows the teacher to impart a great deal of information to a large group all at once. &ronically, while being efficient, this practice also has more disadvantages. &t is harder for a teacher to assess a large group. The learners are tend to be more passive as the larger the group, the smaller the scope for activity in the class. The teaching only proceeds at the pace of the average learner, so learners with a greater ability uickly become bored and frustrated and the learners who re uire the greatest help get (lost in the crowd).

*uestion +. $a% Whole and !art learning are two methods of teaching that re uire a teacher to asses the types of learners they are teaching to decide the best method to use. A teacher may decide to use Whole learning, where the complete sub#ect is taught from beginning to end, if the sub#ect being taught is easy to understand, the students have the maturity or experience to understand it readily, the sub#ect does not re uire a great deal time to teach it or if the necessity to fully understand it only re uires that the learner needs to know the #ust the key points. !art learning may be used where the sub#ect being taught; is long and complicated, re uires deconstructing to fully appreciate its intricacies, the learners may need to have the sub#ect in smaller uantities to make it more understandable or if the time needed to teach the sub#ect is not an influencing factor. $b% When a learner receives their results, whether for an exam, a practical test, an assessment or for the end of a course, their convictions and expectations for the result are #ustified dependent upon how much effort or work they feel they have contributed to it. ,nowledge of results is an extrinsic reward for their endeavours, as theorised by -.../kinner. The results a learner receives will directly affect their motivation to seek other learning opportunities. $c% "ne of the more traditional methods of teaching in the past was 0ote learning. This method, where learners repeat in parrot fashion anything from counting numbers, multiplication tables to the capital cities of various countries was and still is a useful learning tool. .rom this method, young learners could recall their times tables and the alphabet but the disadvantages are that the learners may have no understanding of precisely what was being taught until a later stage and the learners were passive, relying on the teacher to lead them.

Active learning is a more modern method of learning. 1earners play an important and direct role in their learning, the teacher plays a more passive role and the learning is through teacher facilitation and guided2self discovery. This method relies more on the learners attitude to learning and re uires much more time than rote learning and must be thoroughly prepared by the teacher.

*uestion 3. $a% 4emory has three forms, /ensory, /hort'term and 1ong term. /ensory memory is information though the senses, iconic $visual%, echoic $audio% and eidetic $olfactory 5 this method being the most powerful for recall%. /hort term memory is an entirely entropic process, by this we mean that the short term memory is constantly decaying. 6ata that appears in short'term memory rarely gets archived into long'term memory. As new information arrives, old information is shunted aside unless an encoding pattern is used, such as repeating a phone number or address over and over to ourselves to create storage pattern for the long term memory to process and archive. 1ong term memory has never been fully understood. The storage capacity for the human brain seems to be limitless. This is no surprise given how no computer in the world can match our brains in terms of its computational skills, neural connectivity or speed. 1ong term memory is believed to work through three stages, input data arrives into short term memory and is reinforced to be stored into long term memory by encoding ' our method by which we decide that which is to be remembered until it is archived into our memory and recalled at a later date. $c% !hysical disabilities can present a barrier to many learners, not #ust in terms of accessibility to a classroom or use of facilities but also the negative stereotypes and expectations that those without disability continue to believe. When planning for the needs of learners with physical disabilities, discover from the learners first what they re uire and act accordingly. Accessibility must be the foremost consideration in the teachers mind in regard to this. access to the venue and with disabled parking. reflect the needs of the learners. The classroom or learning environment must be accessible by wheelchair and on the ground floor close to the street &t must be free from obstacles or hindrance and the resources within, such as the tables, walkways and facilities must

$d% 1earners who take notes during a lesson provide themselves with a useful tool. This is of course dependent upon the uality of the notes. 7otes allow a learner to stress key points or important data that can be used for revision for an exam or to further flesh out an essay or dissertation. When a teacher reviews a class at the end of a lesson, the learners can go over their own notes and reassure themselves that they have missed nothing important and have managed to cover the topic to their own satisfaction, if they have missed an item, they have the opportunity to ask or clarify any data they feel they need. This also applies to the beginning of a lesson where a teacher will go over previous topics and again the learner can allow the information to be better remembered and used. 7otes help a learner to emphasis the most important part of re uired data.