Dichotomies in Teaching Professionalism

Teaching professionalism is a lifelong process in which teachers are supposed to acquire capacities, upgrade their professional status, fulfill the highest standards, and achieve excellence. For evaluating the quality and quantity of such capacities and standards, certain benchmarking criteria have been developed in the realm of teacher education. In this line of inquiry, this paper proposes a model of teaching professionalism in which teachers are supposed to experience simultaneously developing strands in which they start as novice teachers, pass through some intermediate stages of semi-professionalism, and in a piecemeal fashion transform into expert teachers with the highest integrity and competence. For ease of understanding, the starting point and the final point as the extremes of each continuum are depicted as dichotomies to give a better picture of the developmental process of teacher professionalism. This conceptual model of professionalism can equip prospective teachers with an analytical framework to broaden their horizons and direct their attention and efforts towards developing core competencies by moving away from the left side of each continuum and approaching to the right side.