Teacher as Auteur : A Multi-Year Reflection on Teacher Motivation, Creativity, Constraints, and Collaboration

In a program with a unified curriculum, instructors teach a carefully developed and refined type of lesson in accordance with defined goals and procedures.Through continuing professional development, instructors typically become highly technically competent at teaching these lessons.However, there is a risk that once the challenge of reaching a satisfactory level of technical proficiency loses salience, instructors might begin to lose motivation and a sense of personal meaning in their teaching.To confront this issue, the author reflects on his five-year tenure teaching EDC to explore an analytical construct of the teacher similar to a film auteur, thinking through the concept of creativity and originality in the context of teaching a unified curriculum.This paper addresses the tension between constraints and creativity and discusses how this can be a highly productive tension.It then emphasizes how collaboration can also be an important source of productive constraints, creativity, and meaning.