Knowledge

As I continue to research my topics of interest and work on my potential lines of enquiry, I keep coming back to the section on knowledge in Reader 4. I thought about the knowledge and skills needed to be a professional in my field. At work we had recently had a training on attributes that contribute to what makes a great teacher. Popular choices were:

Trust
Be inspiring
Creative
Confident
Able to multi task
Patience
Be caring

We had to list them in order of importance and it was interesting to see how different everyone's views were. It just shows that there is no set rule book to being a good teacher. You have to go with what you feel and create your own teaching style that suits you.
I think it's also essential as a teacher to be open to always learning new knowledge from your colleagues. Learning in the workplace is important. Innovative ideas to tackle new problems are always welcome. I also feel that every kid I teach teaches me something as well. Whether it's how to manage a certain behaviour or understanding a child's unique learning skills and personal traits. Every child is different and demands different skills. 

"Workplace knowledge doesn't always fit into neat categories" (Reader 4) 

"Knowledge of how different disciplines function, how they articulate a problem, investigate it and report on the outcomes and knowledge of the values that guide their thinking  and practising provides students with a wider repertoire of learning tools, which is clearly an advantage in a complex world." (Kreber, 2009, p16) 

Knowledge is also about the business and management side of running a school. You can be the most fantastic teacher but this side of the job requires a different skill set. You need to be efficient, organised, firm, decisive, be a good leader....but then you can also use your knowledge of being a teacher and bring those attributes in too as running a school requires creativity, confidence and all the other skill sets mentioned above. 
Inter discipline is when more than one discipline is being used to contextualise the knowledge.  
I jotted down in my notepad too that "Identifying knowledge and skills in the workplace can be part of the questioning process of professional enquiry" (Reader 4) This is something I need to keep referring back to. I also wanted to make a note about competence and capability. 
Competence - the ability to do a specific job
Capability - the scope to which a person can gain new knowledge. This is an over riding concept in WBL. 
It made me think about my job and how often am I just doing the essentials and how often to I go above and beyond to gain new knowledge and really learn something new. I think many people in all careers just do their job. They feel they have done their exams, their training, they know what they are doing. They have no desire to push themselves to learn more. This got me thinking about my future and think about what knowledge and skills I need to learn. I am starting to think I might go into Dramatherapy. The skills and knowledge I need to acquire are slightly different to what I do now as some of the work will be 1-1. Also, most of the children I currently teach want to be there. They love drama. It will be challenging trying to engage children who have a variety of different social or personal issues. I think I need to work on my patience and I can be indecisive too. I also stress a lot! I take things to heart and am a real worrier at times! I'm a real perfectionist!  I admire a lot of my colleagues at work and hope to gain more knowledge of how to improve these skills in the next year. I can look at other professionals in my field who I don't work with and also learn from them.