I have been volunteering to teach students of a Government school in my free time. I deal with various age group of children varying from the five years old to fourteen years. I have realised after each session that I learn so much while interacting with these kids. The below paragraph expresses something, which I feel very strongly: 'Teaching is a two way process in which the pupil and the teacher both are growing somewhat in their learning curve'.
Teaching is
an art, a skill acquired by constantly working towards improvement in
delivering. One of the major bottlenecks faced by the teachers is their
inability to grab attention of all the students. However most of them fail to
understand that this lack of attention is not due to the student’s lacuna but
largely due to the failure on part of the delivery itself. Teachers have a key
responsibility to finish the course and they spend the whole semester running
towards that. Nonetheless they forget that utmost important thing is to make
students interested in learning what is being taught. To make something
interesting requires a lot of creativity. A teacher has to continue to come up
with innovative methods and a regular makeover to make students attentive. One
of the best techniques is to involve the students in what is being taught.
Involvement can be made in several ways like the use of stories, anecdotes,
role plays, demonstrations, brainstorming, debates, problems, all these and
many more lead to the active role for students. Teacher’s instructions should
be seen through the eyes of the students rather than through preferred
methodologies, mandated curricula, and student assessments and diagnoses. These
thing help break the monotony of classroom teaching.
One more
important point to understand is that teaching is a two way process, in which
both the student and teacher learn. A teacher needs to help students understand
the various perspectives of things. The education should lead to mental growth
and an enquiring mind and not the brain which tries to remember. The teacher
should work towards making students able to develop new understandings in
response to the new experiences rather than learning what it meant for others. The
school days are the building blocks of an individual’s life. It needs to be
handled with utmost care and warmth. A good teacher should be affectionate
towards the students and compassionate enough to understand the issues and
problems their age group children face. There should be a strong bonding
between the teacher and student, which should lead to having mutual trust and
confidence. A school can provide best of the physical environment for overall
development of the student, but it is in the hands of the teachers who provide
a healthy psychosocial environment for a thinking mind to evolve.
Hence it can
be concluded in a few sentences that teaching, can be thought of as the
purposeful direction and management of the learning process. Teaching is not
giving knowledge or skills to students; teaching is the process of providing
opportunities for students to develop relatively permanent change through the
engagement in experiences provided by the teacher.
