Last week, I was reminded of the multiple personae that teachers are required to project.

At a meeting of heads of sixth, the focus was on the technical coaching skills teachers need when working alongside individuals.

The book I had taken to read (obviously not during the session) was William Kitchen’s Authority and the Teacher, which argues that in the pursuit of knowledge, the teacher’s authority should be absolute.

Neither of these approaches is wrong - indeed they are complementary. The challenge for a teacher comes in deciding which hat to wear, and when.

In the course of a teaching day, depending on where each class is located on the arc of learning, the educator casts herself in the role of presenter, instructor, consultant or participant. Erica McWilliam describes the teacher’s various roles as “sage on the stage”, “guide on the side”, and “meddler in the middle”.

It might be necessary to be more than one in a single lesson, and they are all likely to feature during a typical teaching day.

Outside the classroom, the same professional will be called upon to counsel, coach and cajole in the supplementary role of tutor, or when working with individuals and groups in extra-curricular activities and sports.

Interestingly, the Teacher Standards have less to say about these other roles, focused as the standards are on classroom transactions, data monitoring and reporting.

We could see this is from the perspective of planning: when constructing programmes of study, the teacher needs to be a strategist, but she is also responsible for implementation - the remit covers both design and delivery.

If education was organised along the lines of the corps of engineers, the same person would be staff officer, sergeant and sapper.

And it doesn’t end there.

The teacher’s task is to push, provoke, disrupt and, yes, meddle: in other words, to coax students out into choppy intellectual waters; but when things go wrong, she has to guide the student safely back into harbour. The teacher has to be both pilot and pirate.

In what remains of her time, the teacher has to proselytise.

Teachers of humanities and other non-core subjects work like billy-o to recruit students to their courses post-14. After GCSE, colleagues from other departments join them in the “market” that is the sixth form curriculum.

Added to which, teachers now find themselves required to be “active” promoters of fundamental British Values. Now they must be pilots, pirates and patriots.

It is difficult to think of any other profession that is quite so multi-faceted.

Comparisons confuse only when the teacher’s role is narrowly defined - as in, say, “I teach geography”. A geography teacher also tutors a set of individuals, advises on next steps, counsels those with problems: sage, guide, meddler, motivator, moderator.

Teachers occupy a unique place in the pantheon of professions. If this were not so, we would be reading articles about “My favourite lawyer”; “The accountant who influenced me most”, and “The management consultant who made me what I am today”.

Dr Kevin Stannard is the director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets as @KevinStannard1

For more columns by Kevin, visit his back catalogue

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