Teacher Mediator

"Invite 40 5-year-olds to your house for a day to play, and then tell me if they want to do that for a living, every day of their lives. Teachers do it, and they don't just play, they also teach, socialize, and communicate"
Julián De Zubiría

'Teachers who use metacognition in their teaching have the advantage of mediating their students much better.' 'They are able to better control their groups and effectively support students who experience difficulties in their learning process.' 'They increase children's and adolescents' interest in knowledge and ensure their comprehensive development.' These are some of the premises that teacher Bertha Sarmiento shared at the 2019 Teacher Seminar, in her presentation, *The Didactic Competencies of the Mediator at the (Alberto Merani Institute) IAM: Derived from the Observation of the Classes of Beginning and Experienced Teachers*.

Bertha affirms that if teachers observe what students do, they learn from themselves. She also says they should ask themselves what mediation was behind their development process.

More engaging classes with a cordial atmosphere generate passion, joy, and happiness for learning, and joy in the teacher's teaching. This will encourage original questions and answers.

"There are teachers who are shocked and don't know what to do with a student who has behavioral or academic difficulties. Because they have become accustomed to a pedagogy focused on the most participative, the fastest-moving student. What isn't building resilience in students are the teachers who become accustomed to the idea that academic processes must be successful: when a child displays bad behavior or poor academic performance, it becomes a 'headache' for the teacher," says Bertha.

Every teacher has a model of authority that is built from their experiences and training. Hence, a teacher may choose to be authoritarian, permissive, or democratic when promoting order and attention in the classroom or when mediating a situation of irresponsibility or plagiarism. “Generally, adults refer to the treatment they received as children or adolescents, and relate to their students in this way.”

For this reason, we must be careful not to reproduce the patterns of the traditional school in which many were raised. An education that completely ignores the learner, that prioritizes information, memory, and correct answers; a method that uses force, yelling, scolding, and threats when the student presents any blockage, rebellion, or apathy.

The situation is different when the teacher uses that power to get students to learn, rather than to get them to give the right answers no matter what. In other words, their authority must identify the students' adaptation process, what they lack, and what could be mediated to impact their development. Furthermore, they must identify how to develop their minds so they are more perceptive, so they have more tools to communicate and adapt to the world.

“Many teachers tend to adultify children. And this dynamic is the closest thing to traditional education. That child, who is savagely “stretched” to become an adult, is forced to understand what I learned at university, for example. The child feels all this unnecessary force and develops resistance, fostered by the teacher himself,” says Professor Bertha Sarmiento.

We must not lose sight of our role as educators and the main objective, which is to guide a person who is in a learning stage. How do we captivate the most difficult adolescents? How do we encourage reading and writing in students? However, how many of us students see us reading, commenting on books, or invite them to read what we write? Let's not forget that example is the best persuasive tool there is.

Based on Reuven Feuerstein's universal competencies (Feuerstein, 2000; Terrasier, 2002; De Zubiría, Osorio, & León, 2005), Professor Bertha proposes in her presentation that the teacher's profile be defined by the intentionality or mediating attitude, the mediation of students' sense of ability, and the mediation of the meaning and cognitive behavior of what is taught. She also took into account the development of autonomy, transversal competencies, the Zone of Proximal Development, and interest in knowledge. These variables helped characterize the teacher's mediating profile.

For the Exploratory Cycle (grades 0, 1, and 2), she found that expert teachers are very empathetic with the guiding activity of the Cycle: they explore and teach how to explore, they inquire and demonstrate how to do so, they generate and demonstrate great curiosity, they act, and they create learning scenarios in which the children take ownership of the class. These teachers participate in the guiding activity, energizing learning, decentralization processes, amazement, and joy.

However, it suggests the need to plan intentionality in agreement with the group, achieve its regulation, and control cognitive behavior. In this way, teachers can anticipate mediation strategies for behavioral control and adaptations to mediate transversal competencies.

For the Conceptual Cycle (3rd, 4th, and 5th grades), teachers' empathy with students lies in their knowledge, in the strong desire to grasp and conceptualize diverse topics. Teachers who focus on the guiding activity of the Cycle make very good progress in the Zones of Proximal Development. Although they identify students with higher and lower levels of development, they lack similar work with those with less development. For this reason, they need to design scaffolding strategies for children who progress at a slower pace.

Regarding the Contextual Cycle (6th, 7th, and 8th grades), good intentionality and lesson planning stand out. Teachers explain abstract concepts and mainstream thinking at the conceptual level; however, they include very little of the guiding activity of the Cycle: discussions, debates, panels, and roundtables. They suggest using texts that present positions of tension to generate debate and develop independent judgment.

Teachers in the Projective Cycle (9th, 10th, and 11th grades) plan content-centered lessons, but conceived from a broad perspective rather than a deeper perspective, although more work should be done on mediating the sense of ability. The sense of ability should not be confused with the need for adult approval.

“The most developed skill in the observed classes across all cycles is intentionality-reciprocity, which generates a high level of interest in knowledge and class participation. The least developed skill in most observed classes is mediating the sense of ability, which involves graduating exercises by levels of complexity, making them accessible to students while still challenging them, identifying the Zone of Proximal Development, and interpreting different levels of development.”: Bertha Sarmiento

The training of beginning teachers should revolve around lesson design and teaching strategies centered on scaffolding exercises to elevate students' Zones of Proximal Development. They also need to foster transversal thinking, communication, and human understanding competencies in a more intentional manner.

Hence the importance of systematizing experiences and documents from seminars and classroom teaching as input for new teachers' adaptation processes (an initiative that should be led and appropriated by the teachers themselves).