An overview of teacher managerial function in the class room

Historically, most of teachers restricted their role to teaching. The different government organizations and departments provided a guide line for the role and responsibility of the teacher. The teacher plays multiple roles in the school. The role of teacher is assessed in terms of his/her attendance in the class, completion of the course and interpersonal relation in the school. 

Till now, hardly any indicator is developed to assess the performance of teacher on the basis of learning achievement of the student. The critical managerial functions of a teacher in elementary education are similar to those in other sectors. These are: 

(i) Administration. Administration refers to the direction, control, management and organization of human and material resources for educational growth and development. 

(ii) Personnel management. Planning and managing human resources is personnel management. It includes recruitment, transfer and redeployment; promotional opportunities and performance appraisal systems, grievance redressal mechanisms and professional development issues. 

(iii) Planning. Planning is a systematic exercise of determining a future course of action in accordance with identified objectives, needs, priorities and existing/likely capacities, within a given time frame, reflecting cost-effective choices. 

(iv) Financial management. Financial management refers to mobilization, deployment and efficient use of financial resources as per stated objectives and strategies. 

(v) Supervision, monitoring and support. Monitoring and facilitation of teaching-learning processes, and other school development activities, for enhancing their quality through suitable tools, methods and mechanisms. The focus is on school, because this is the unit where primary learning takes place, and any effort to improve the quality of processes should ultimately be reflected here.

(vi) Information management and communication. Management of information as an institutional resource is “Information Management”. It includes aspects of collection, processing, dissemination and use of information. “Communication” refers to the process of exchange of information and feedback. 

Management processes are not always clearly defined and are applied in unambiguous terms. It is common to come across a varied understanding of the same function by different organizations/units/ persons in the same sector. The perception also depends, to a large extent, on the way the particular organization/unit/person handles the function at its level. 

Some studies has tried to understand and assess the processes against commonly defined functions. The processes have been defined from the perspective of quality, effectiveness and efficiency. The stakeholders’ perspective is also in-built in these definitions. Unlike business operations, where standardized procedures based on uniform interpretations of guiding principles are more common, the guiding principles of management functions in education could be interpreted effectively in more than one way. 

The strength of a particular choice for a process in educational management also lies in whether the sequence brings about a change in totality as well as at different steps. The effectiveness is, thus, linked not only to the quality of output/ outcome, but also to the quality and impact of individual activities.