Teaching Learner Strategies for Vocabulary Acquisition by Darron Board - 4

Naturally a teacher such as myself would want to be an assimilator. Amongst other things, Nyikos argues that assimilators model at least three different strategies per class and use multiple and multi-sensory strategies. They also ask their students to analyse and discuss their strategies, something that separated "successful" teachers from the rest. This is a tall order for any teacher. Middle-grounders, she argues, take a more compartmentalised approach and relied on "activities to carry the burden of responsibility for student learning" (1996:116). Until now I have always approached SI from the typical "coursebook" angle of introducing strategies as activities (e.g. an activity on learning new vocabulary as a stand-alone activity). The key to being a successful "strategy instructor" lies in constant integration of strategies.

Cohen defined the shift in the teacher's role when SI is taken on board,
"one potentially beneficial shift in teacher roles is from that of being exclusively the manager, controller and instructor to that of being a change agent - a facilitator of learning, whose role is to help their students to become more independent more responsible for their own learning. In this role the teachers become partners in the learning process" (1998:97).
So as a teacher actively teaching learning strategies, how does my role as a "change agent" develop? Cohen identifies a variety of sub-roles:

The following diagram, taken from Cohen, shows how these sub-roles connect with each other:

(Teacher as change agent Cohen 1998:99)

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