In order to keep himself alive and up to date, a teacher is required to…

Concept — In professional education, a practitioner's engagement with the advancing frontier of a discipline is justified instrumentally: continuing professional development exists to serve the professional role, not to accumulate information as an end in itself. For a teacher that role is instruction, so the purpose of staying up to date is fixed by what it enables in the classroom.

Application — The stem describes a sustained, deliberate dedication — keeping oneself alive and up to date, acquiring knowledge at the frontiers of new knowledge — undertaken by a person specifically in the role of a teacher. Read functionally, the requirement asks what that dedication is for. Fresh disciplinary knowledge becomes professionally meaningful only when it is transacted, that is, converted into better planning, explanation, illustration and assessment for learners. The requirement is therefore to enhance his competence in teaching.

Cross-check

• “to enhance his knowledge” restates the action instead of its purpose: acquiring knowledge is exactly what the stem already describes the teacher doing, so offering it as the reason is circular and leaves the professional purpose unstated.

• “to develop his I.Q.” names an index of general cognitive ability that is treated as a largely stable individual trait; updating one's subject discipline is not a programme for raising it.

• “to develop his emotion” belongs to the affective domain — recognising, expressing and regulating one's own feelings — which frontier subject knowledge does not address.

Result — to enhance his competence in teaching.