Being a teacher is not only the matter of making students understand particular things by telling them what they have to know. Many experts in teacher education believe that teaching is not only the process of information delivery from adult to younger individual that everyone can do. There are many aspects to beconsidered in order to achieve the best teaching result. One of them is how teachers position themselves among students in educational circumstance. In educational context, teacher is like an actor. What a teacher do, from the smallest to biggest thing, affects the result of teaching-learning process (Kumaravadivelu, 2003).Therefore, in this 4.0 industrial revolution era, when everything change so quickly, teacher should understand their role better. First thing that we must know about 4.0 era is that the technology has been rapidly developed and it spread into all aspects of our life. Internet, for instance, provides unlimited source of information and gadgets help us in almost all of our activities. Young generations, including students, that live and adapt in this 4.0 era are called millenial generation. Millenial students are able to utilize technology themselves without adult help. In many cases, they even master technology better than adults. So, the first role of teacher in this era is to be students’ guide in utilizing
technology. Teacher need to direct students to use technology in positive, effective, and beneficial way to support their learning. In doing so, teacher can ask students who know more about technology to help him/her (Dudeney & Hockly, 2007). By making students take advantages of technology, and continuous monitoring, technology can make a huge positive impact on students’ learning. Relating with the previous paragraph about technology, in this day, teacher can easily find materials or any teaching resources in the internet. This unlimited source of material probably makes some teachers think their job is getting easier because they don’t need to waste their time looking for material from books or making it themselves. The fact is, not all of those materials available in the internet are appropriate to be given to students. Even for a small thing like choosing a text to be learnt, teacher need to make some consideration, such as difficulty level, cultural appropriateness, or other elements of text (McCarthy, 2000). Therefore, teacher have to be able to develop their own material by modifying available materials to match with their students’ needs and teaching circumstance (Azarnoosh, Zeraatpishe, Faravani, & Kargozari, 2016). Millenial teachers cannot avoid the fact that they are charged to be material developers. Finally, the foundation of being a professional millenial teacher is to understand classroom condition. This includes analyzing students’ needs, identifying available facilities, realizing socio-political issues outside classroom that influence students’ thought, and discovering trends among students. Every classroom is unique. Teachers cannot use single way to teach multiple classrooms. The aspects that has been mentioned previously cannot be compared from one class to others. Thus, every teacher should conduct their own classroom research in order to formulate the best teaching program they want to execute (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). By conducting and mastering classroom research, teacher will be able to treat millenial students that are very divergent, active, critical, and technology dependent appropriately. Teaching, even in the friendliest circumstance, is not an easy job. But we should not consider this 4.0 industrial era as an obstacle that makes being a good teacher is impossible. Indeed, by realizing their role as students’ technology guide, material developer, and classroom researcher, teachers can make every available advantages in this millennial era as supportive tools to reach better teachinglearning result.
REFERENCES
Azarnoosh, M., Zeraatpishe, M., Faravani, A., & Kargozari, H. R. (2016). Issues in Materials Development (4th ed.). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Dudeney, G., & Hockly, N. (2007). How to Teach English With Technology.
Edinburg: Pearson Education Limited.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language
Teaching. London: Mary Jane Peluso.
McCarthy, M. (2000). Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers (Tenth).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
