Boundaries of the Level 3 Award in Education and Training teacher (AET)

Knowing your boundaries in any workplace is important including your role in a teaching setting. My boundaries as a teacher training and in particular the Level 3 Award in Education and Training are knowing what my role is as a teacher and within the organisation. I also need to know what my boundaries are with the awarding body. Boundaries are important in many ways, that I work within my job role, I don’t step into someone else’s job role, and I don’t personally overstep my boundaries with our learners. Normally educators whether at work or in the classroom are typically nice people. I’ve come across a few individuals who are not the most helpful, if you watch Bad Teacher by Cameron Diaz or Fist Fight with Ice Cube, you’ll get a good sense of what not to do, but all in all, 95% of teachers are nice people and do their best to help their learners and sometimes they take it too far.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training job title

Your job title and roles will dictate your boundaries, you can certainly help your learners adjust their tutoring sessions, but you cannot help them with bus fares and childcare. Knowing this will help you, but you have to be aware that you cannot provide all of the support yourself. And knowing this is crucial. In the Level 3 Award in Education and Training, we train the trainers to identify their boundaries and to ask for help and its ok to ask for help. Imagine you work for a small training provider, your boundaries are going to be quite varied where if you worked at the University of Cambridge, you are going to have other professionals trained to help in many situations.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training IT issues

Imagine this, you connected your laptop to the projector, but nothing happened. So, you try to move your PowerPoint across to a connected computer, you move the HDMI lead across, login and then all of a sudden nothing works. The USB stick has set off a firewall and then the whole system is logged out. You try to wing your session without any display and 10 minutes in, IT support comes in to notify you that you’ve spread a virus across the whole campus and student’s personal details have been hacked. The purpose of the Level 3 Award in Education and Training is to remind you that you need to stick to your boundaries, don’t try and troubleshoot things out of your job description, you have an IT department for this.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training personal boundaries

Let’s talk personal boundaries, quite often learners will try to befriend you. Especially in further education, you are likely to develop good relationships over time with your learners and like human nature, you will develop better relationships with some. The key is to remain professional, are you being too friendly in your role as a tutor where you may pass a learner who hasn’t quite reached the assessment level but you’ve referred another learner who has done exactly the same so you need to be aware of the difficulties can arise from this. Then we have social media, learners will reach out to you on social media, this isn’t the worst thing in the world when teaching adults as it does allow me to give extra support but what if you are teaching in a school? Remember, we need to set boundaries and stick to them to remain professional and not to compromise our learners.