Teacher's Power in the Classroom by Mark Angelo S. dela Peña

Education, for the past centuries, has undergone developments and innovations. New techniques, approaches and methods of teaching are being developed from time to time. In spite of the technologies and researches that this modern world has brought to the walls of schools and to the covers of the textbooks, the traditional view of education still prevails: learners must submit themselves to the teacher.

This view means that the teacher's authority inside the classroom and over the learners cannot be questioned. The foundation for this view is the belief that without the power of the teacher, the learners wouldn't learn.

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Some educators believe that teachers must communicate a certain degree of power to give way for learning. This way, learning is defined as the maintenance of power of the teacher over the students -- which is rather questionable. Others continue to suggest that the more power the teacher employed, the more often he must use it.

The teaching-learning process aims to attain learning and what is the teaching process, by the way? Other educators argue that communication, itself, is the teaching process. Knowing something isn't teaching yet until it is communicated. Teaching is a skill and so is good communication. They also stress that there are two things to be communicated among the learners: information and power.

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Power and communication are interrelated. Power that is not used is power that doesn't exist and communication is required to use power. Powerless is a teacher, therefore, without his ability to communicate. In the same way, the ways and extents that a teacher communicates with the learners determine, in some extent, the degree of power that he holds.

Power, when used effectively, will have a great impact on the teaching-learning process because teaching is communication.

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But what is power, anyway? Power can be defined differently across different cultures and disciplines. We need the the definition of power which can describe that which the teacher holds inside the classroom.

Three educators defined power as "the teacher's ability to affect, in some way, the student's well-being beyond the student's control." The problem is that this view didn't take into account intellectual assent to influence on the part of the learners.

A broader view says that power is the teacher's "ability to influence a learner's or a group of learners' behavior." This broad view was successful to include the teacher's ability to let a learner do something which he would not do had he not been influenced by the teacher. This is particularly true in some instances where a teacher was able to influence a student's decision or choice.

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The definitions of power above are well said and well accepted until the came of French and Raven's (1968) BASES OF POWER. They qualified these definitions by noting that the result of a power must be the effect of a specific type of power exerted by the teacher and not just any combination of other external forces. The result of the specific power exerted must be specific and thus the birth of the FIVE BASES OF POWER: coercive, reward, legitimate, referent and expert powers.