Based on past experiences as a leader, your future intentions and your study of the course notes and related references, Identify with justification your core values with examples of the behavioural norms they generate. Justify the logical link between your core values and your selected leadership theory/concept.

1. Introduction

In a piece titled 'The Goal of Education is Becoming,' the renowned expert on education, Marc Prensky, has challenged the idea that the purpose of education is learning (Prensky 2014). He writes, 'very few educators or parents have learning or scholarship in their hearts as the endgame for their children, except in the sense of their kids’ getting good grades.' (Prensky 2014) Instead, he believes, most people today think about enabling their children to become adept at the challenges put forth by life in all quarters, whether it is about working in a team or behaving with peers and others around or taking care of oneself, and other practical purposes. The importance once attributed to knowledge qua information about a specific field, it is argued, is losing its relative predominance in education.

And yet, competition over education seems to be as high as ever, if higher education statistics are anything to go by. Adams ( 2018) reports that there have been 7400 more applications in 2018 from international students in the United Kingdom compared with 2018.  At the most elementary level too, this impact of education as a social force is seen: as reported by Roser & Ortiz-Ospina (2018), the years 1990 to 2014 saw an increase in the world literacy rate from 68% to 85% – an increase almost of 20%. Thus, it is clear that education is a very contested terrain, as well as a very important part of the functioning of society; on the other hand, the search for a better approach to education has intensified.

As emerging professionals in the field of teaching, a fair amount of exposure to these two central questions thus seems mandatory. Teaching is a hands-on, practical activity that must be learnt from experience. Yet, it also involves a necessary reflective aspect, in which it must take cue from perspectives that have been derived not only from experience, but also from earlier reflection on its own practice.

This essay is an attempt to explore the question of the significance – and the significant ways of imparting – education from the point of view of a teaching professional. This essay is based upon reflection from teaching of sciences at school. The following section gives a detailed discussion of the goals and purposes of education in literature. The final section discusses the development of a professional teacher, and the role that considerations of goals plays in this development.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)