Too often is heard the trite observation that only effective teaching makes for effective learning. Without gainsaying its truth one would like to point out that effective teaching needs careful analysis and clear understanding. In a modern school teaching and learning processes are well understood and attemps ar^made to control conditions which govern effective learning. Desirable ‘objectives and curriculum organization have already been stressed -as their contribution to effective learning is not insignificant. Now some suggestions are made with regard to effective teaching procedures.
One necessary requisite for effective teaching is judicious selection of subject-matter. Our cultural heritage is a large mass of accumulated experience of previous generations in science, literature, language, mathematics, technology, social sciences and art and it is the duty of modern schools to transmit this heritage to the next generation.
Now it cannot be done all at once nor is the whole of accumulated knowledge desirable for all pupils. What portions of our cultural heritage have to be transmitted must be very carefully and intelligently selected.
The school is confronted by the question: What knowledge is most useful? The criterion for deciding this shall have to be determined by major school objectives.
If the primary aim of the school is to teach mental discipline, the subject-matter and teaching procedures will be selected to meet that purpose.
If, on the other hand, the chief aim is to provide training for useful citizenship in a secular democracy and for creative social living only those items of subject-matter will receive emphasis which make for social usefulness.
This difference is noticed in the comparison between old and new curricula. In the former the stress was on mental discipline and consequently mathematics and classical and foreign languages received greater importance.
But in the latter the accent is on science, social studies, craft and language. This shift of emphasis is the result of growing awareness that young people are to be trained for taking their place in a constantly changing social order.
This shift in emphasis has resulted in the elimination of a number of useless and irrelevant items of the curriculum. Such items as formal grammar, spelling, mathematics, etc. as are of no use in life are dropped.
But it is almost impossible and unnecessary to separate materials and methods of teaching. While teaching material and content is to be selected on considerations of social utility it should be taught in a functional manner.
The entire body of knowledge presented through textbooks and reference books should be used to promote understanding of the rich and varied environments, and encourage and help in problem solving.
Only when facts and principles are taught and learned in the context of their use and application in life that they are better understood and mastered.
Pupils taught to solve problems and meet their intellectual needs will themselves hunt for necessary information in books of reference, and such a functional approach will make learning more meaningful.
In present-day living the emphasis is on social reconstruction, economic reorganization, science, industry, democratic ways of life, international understanding and world peace and in the selection of problems and projects the teacher should keep the new trends in view.
In view of the rapidly changing social order and the urgent need of constant reconstruction of society the school must teach flexible habits, and since thinking is the only instrument of making habits flexible, the school should encourage and stimulate constructive and creative thinking.
It is not difficult if school programmes and procedures instead of offering readymade solution provide situations and conditions which are for ever challenging the intelligence of pupils.
Thinking is an adjustment process for solving problems and meeting difficulties and is the highest type of mental effort. If the teacher develops among his pupils the ability and desire to think he will be contributing to the highest type of learning.
To stimulate thinking, opportunities for discussing problems of social significance according to their level of ability and interest must be provided to pupils.
The teacher will have to go beyond merely asking questions. He will have to organize discussion groups and provide sufficient guidance without snatching initiative from the young people. Keeping himself in the background he will provide clues to sustained thinking on problems taken in hand.
There will be controversial issues. The teacher will avoid projecting his own views or any type of indoctrination, but present both sides of the issues in a dispassionate manner and leave the students to form their own judgment and views.
Again, effective teaching will take into account the one great fact recent psychology has so forcefully emphasized. In any class there is a wide range of individual differences.
Pupils differ in abilities, interest, experience, background, health, mental maturity, rate of growth and learning, and in numerous other traits and qualities. Equally important are differences within the individual. Each pupil has a pattern of unevenly developed abilities.
The profile chart showing a pupil's standing on different tests may indicate average intelligence, superior ability in music and art, below average in arithmetic, average in reading and so on.
Thus each individual is unique and teaching procedures cannot lead to effective learning till they are carefully adapted to individual differences among pupils.
But a corollary follows from the above that teaching must consider the needs and interests of pupils.
Young people are vibrating with eager curiosity, they are ever eager to know, build, construct and create and the teacher should provide them adequate opportunities for developing their active interests.
Children's needs, interests and purposes are transitory and shifting, and the modern school desirous of promoting social development through activity programmes must provide intelligent guidance, so that the child may adopt worthwhile purposes which lead to the carrying out of educative activities.
Teaching procedures and practices must be built on children's needs and interests but these must be converted through guidance into worthwhile and dominating purposes to stimulate children's activity in desirable directions and to ensure for each child maximum learning.
The importance of readiness for effective learning is being increasingly recognized. Many of the skills involved in reading, writing, arithmetic and other areas can be effectively learned only after the individual child has reached a certain stage in physical maturation and has acquired an adequate background based on many first-hand experiences.
Maturation may be defined as a process of growing up by which readiness is gradually developed.
If children are given tasks beyond their present levels of maturation and if attempts are made to force complex skills upon immature children, it results at best in verbal learning, and is likely to produce frustration, failure and all the devastating effects on personality that tend to accompany frustration.
When should reading, multiplication or simple fractions be taught? Obviously it can be done only wheir the child is ready. In a modern school the concept of readiness is widely used in grading and organizing teaching procedures and practice.
Let us consider two teaching techniques just to illustrate how educational psychology has influenced and modified them.
Questions have been used in teaching since long but only to order the child to repeat what he has learned previously, but today they are used as an important tool by which children may be challenged to think and thrash out a point.
The need of group discussions has already been emphasized and questions will form an integral part of group participation. Children should be stimulated to ask questions and the teacher should guide activity to stimulate growth.
Questions should always be addressed to the group and should be asked not to test and elicit information but to stimulate discussion.
There should be no question of taking turns at answering questions. Whoever has something to say should be encouraged to do so. Often a wrong answer is worth much more because it rouses the group and compels other children to tap their knowledge and experience.
The appraisal and judgment of answers as right or wrong should not be done by the teacher but by members of the group. Questions should not be asked haphazardly but should grow naturally out of the group discussion, and help to add to the interest and zest in group thinking.
Lecturing and “telling” is almost universally employed in secondary schools and colleges though there is nothing to prevent its use even at lower levels.
Its potential for rousing genuine interest and enthusiasm in any topic is high. Based on intimate and personal experiences and thinking it can enliven information and argument in a very marked degree but progressive educationists have begun to question its efficacy.
The method is already showing the inevitable results of a system of instruction based on the receptacle theory of mind, glorifying in the quantitative aspect of knowledge and making for mental subserviency.
Much of the intellectual indolence and lethargy of college students may lie laid at the door of the lecture method.
But if there is a definite purpose in the lecture of which both the lecturer and the listener are conscious, if both are fired by a dominating goal and set about their task of lecturing and listening with discernment and determination.
the lecture method can be effective in imparting relevant information and inspiring pupils to search for more.
Much of the school learning is grind, drill or practice but too often this drill or grind does not result in acquisition of learning because it is undertaken mechanically and listlessly, without any goal or motive, without any understanding and interest.
Mere repetition does not cut any ice unless it is fired with living interest in the subject. To ensure acquisition and retention the best thing to do is to understand and appreciate the relationship of facts, and principles, practices and skills to goals.
Practice periods also must be more rationally organized with spacings, and accuracy and speed stressed gradually. In arithmetic, typewriting, running, reading, etc. drill is essential but if instead of being blind and dull it is intelligent and purposeful it will be more effective. In short, drill should be motivated.
Promoting Healthy Emotional and Social Development
Emotional stability and poise has always been accepted as a very desirable educational objective and with the modern emphasis on healthy social and inter-personal relations due to rapidly changing patterns of social structure, social adjustment and maturity has also been included in the marks of an educated person.
The traditional school put high premium on emotional poise and stability but with its over-emphasis on cognitive and intellectual achievements it could not go farther than mere sermonizing that emotions should be bridled and restrained even as the horses of a chariot are.
The modern school has replaced this negative approach by a positive one emphasizing that emotions, the prime movers of behaviour, should not be suppressed and starved but refined and directed into healthy channels.
On the basis of a number of experimental studies most psychologists today believe that specific emotions develop psychogenetically. While emotional capacity is hereditary the child does not inherit any fixed emotional patterns nor are emotions present at birth in definite forms which can be clearly differentiated.
So there is large room for the environment to develop and change particular emotional reactions. Since this process of development starts early in life, the early childhood schools and school.
the programmes and achievements of schools. The academic standards are falling, the type of students turned out in Indian schools lack social competence, civic sense or effective habits of work, and a complete re-orientation of educational effort is being demanded. While a lot of re-thinking is being done about courses, curricula, school programmes, training and status of teachers, provision for guidance and counselling, examinations and the like, one thing is patently clear that in all efforts at reconstruction a much larger use and applications of the findings of modern educational psychology is absolutely necessary. There are wide gaps in the theory and practice of education, in our knowledge and treatment of children, in our scientific knowledge of testing and the time-honoured system of examinations, in our hit-andmiss methods and techniques and scientific procedures dictated by educational psychology, and the challenge of progressive education is that such gaps should be bridged by procedures and practices based on facts and principles of educational psychology. An attempt will be made in the following chapters of this book to indicate broadly how educational psychology can be of service to the modern school in reconstructing its objectives, methods and programmes, and how the teacher who is the pivot of the educative process can promote better teaching and learning.
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