CHARECTRISATION OF TEACHING THROUGH TEACHERS

CHARECTRISATION OF TEACHING THROUGH TEACHERS

Dr. Sekar Srinivasan UN Educationist

[Disclaimer:  These are the reflections of my lectures during my service in Education college as principal and at various resource conferences and workshops. So ideas may be from various educationist’s works.]

 The art of teaching is mainly through teachers in the domain, be it primary, secondary or university level. Let us concentrate one important functional aspect during teaching in this paper viz. Cognitive Development.

 The cognitive domain of children, which is concerned primarily with their mental abilities and functions like thinking, reasoning and concept formulation, has been an area of wide concern in educational field.  

 Issues such as how children grasp ideas, how they form concepts, how the thinking process operates in children, the meaning of intelligence, how it can be enhanced, how children reason, and many more such questions continue to be the focal points of research in this.

 Knowledge of the intellectual characteristics of children and how the cognitive process processes work in then is of considerable significance for educational planners and policy makers as well. It will help in designing the curriculum and syllabi.

 Specific instructional strategies which aim at promoting children’s intellectual development depend upon the cognitive characteristics of children.

 Apart from these, the intellectual characteristics of children influence their interaction patterns, how they cope with their emotions, the nature and development of their interest, their sense of right and wrong and their perception about the world in which they live.  This makes the study of intellectual development in children imperative.

 Skill, and pride in skill come as a consequence of cognitive maturation. The geometry of cognitive development takes time.  The environment of the child and the corresponding organization of his natural system are infinitely more detailed and complex than we can imagine.

 The questions are not just ‘what’ oriented , but ‘how’ and ‘why’ are also very prominent.  Through this procedure, the child is now accumulating a large amount of information, and Mathematics, Science, Language and Art begin to make meaningful sense to him.  As he grows older and enters the upper primary stage, the child’s concepts increase further and his thinking and reasoning powers also get enhanced.

 Word building, crosswords, antonyms, synonyms, similes etc., begin to interest him deeply.  He perceives the relevance of these in enhancing his lingual ability.  He gains an intellectual grasp of the more fundamental human relations and even begins to comprehend the moral philosophy of books.

 All through the primary stage children are busy assimilating knowledge.

 By the end of the primary school stage they comprehend time perspectives completely. They are able to understand what is good for them and also identify their interests which makes planning for the future an easier task. The child, through these verbal descriptions can form the mental images. Many concepts in science and social sciences are understood by children in this fashion.

 There is an increasing capacity for intellectual teamwork. They realize, that by exchanging ideas and views their concepts get sharpened and their understanding of phenomena enhanced.  Problem solving ability improves.  Children can now find solutions to more complex problems and could handle wider range of intellectual tasks with analytical reasoning.  There is an increased capacity for generalization.

 Classification of objects and ideas become more organized and complex.  Reasoning skills are largely inductive in nature. Deductive reasoning or that in which the direction of conceptualization is from general to specific.  The child understands the concept of reversibility. Decentration of thought in children occurs. Seriation and numeration skills develop in children.  The ability to reason from the standpoint of an abstract proposition appears towards the end of the primary school stage.  The distinction between the real and make believe clearly emerges.

 Children’s desire to understand cause effect relationships must be greatly stimulated by the school. Problem solving approaches, heuristic, learning ad discovery learning may be used for this purpose.  To stimulate the expansion of the child’s intellectual horizons, the teacher can encourage him to increase his awareness of people and take a keen interest in the happenings of the world outside his own immediate day today existence.

 Another significant characteristic of this stage is children’s potential for uninhibited creative work.  If the child is accorded freedom of expression unencumbered by adults and adult standards, he will do a great deal of creative work, stories poems and drawings may appear spontaneously.  The school, or the teacher can help by facilitating the process , but the onus of actual learning or development rests on the child. Teachers must follow a few instructional maxims when teaching primary school children-instruction should be from simple to complex, specific to general and concrete to abstract. Extensive exemplification, illustration, demonstration and manipulation of material should be undertaken to increase the effectiveness and reinforce the process of learning.  

 Methods of teaching have to be varied to cater to differing intellectual characteristics of the learners. Teachers must remember and be aware that an IQ test is inevitably a measure of the child’s performance.  It is not a measure of capacity or competence.  What it tells us is how well the child is doing at the moment of the test and under the circumstances of the test.  Readiness to learn is an important concept in the teaching – learning process.  There is more to learning than having capacity or aptitude.  

 Knowledge of creativity in cognitive style is important for the teacher because, very often she may find such children in her class.  Thus, realization of the fact that creativity is a resource to be tapped and suitably channelized in children to further their intellectual development, and not something to punish, scorn or make fun of, is o freat importance in the educational process.