Teacher Effectiveness: A Psychoanalytic Model

Abstract

The primary gauge of teacher efficacy has predominantly centred on students’ academic achievement. Student achievement is, at best, only one dimension of the educational goal of all-round development. This limited view needs revisiting. A teacher’s workspace is in classrooms, the school outside the classroom, the community outside the school, and the human community in a nation and world. Teacher effectiveness is the key to the evolution of a classroom teacher to a global teacher. Effectiveness, then, is beyond subject knowledge and classroom communication. The measure of teacher effectiveness should include facilitating learning, instead of teaching in conventional terms, to help students develop as lifelong self-learners, influencing and inspiring. These criteria of teacher effectiveness can be better explained by the effective use of positive ego states, keeping negative ego states in check, life positions and transactions, games teachers play and their life scripts. This paper intends to examine the relevance and importance of the psychoanalytic model, especially Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, in understanding teacher effectiveness and enhancing effectiveness by helping teachers rewrite life scripts for greater personal and teacher role effectiveness.