An insight into student's psychology & devising aids/methods to address them.
Our main task as
classroom teachers who seek to understand what we do and improve at, it is thus
twofold.
1.
First,
we should identify our unique niche—the educational elements that most
effectively be delivered by a teacher in the classroom.
2.
Second,
we should create a classroom experience that will facilitate the delivery of
those elements.
The classroom is
unique in that it offers them a safe, up-close, real-time glimpse of the workings
of a trained mind, the mind of an expert—a teacher’s mind.
The students watch
as you dissect an issue to reveal its internal processes. They observe and
offer comments and suggestions as you respond to a question by approaching it
critically: separating the trivial from the essential, evaluating various
logical possibilities, and weighing several lines of evidence. They cannot
readily get that from TV or the Internet.
Teacher in the
classroom may offer students not only expert process, but also direct
give-and-take and focused, personal attention. Other learning situations in the
students’ lives either lack expertise or attentive interaction, or both. The
Internet, for example, provides a pale imitation of reciprocity—you type in a
question and get a list of (usually many) Web sites that contain your search
term—but this process is a weak substitute for real, live interaction, partly
because the Internet is a passive entity (it doesn’t initiate dialogue) and
partly because it lacks the attentive component: it doesn’t look you in the
eye, it doesn’t smile at you with encouragement or appreciation, and it doesn’t
respond to non-verbal nuance. You can’t get attention from a search engine, or
even a book. You can get
attention from a teacher in the classroom. As the students engage in the
problem-solving process with you, learning in the classroom becomes uniquely
interactive: it is a reciprocal, live dialogue in which you and your students
continuously negotiate the material as well as each other’s abilities, needs,
demands, and goals.
The classroom
experience is further distinguished from other teaching media—such as the
traditional apprenticeship, for example—in that it affords not only direct
access to the expert’s(the teacher’s) processes but also immersion in
fundamental group processes:
communication, debate and negotiation, cooperation. The classroom offers students
a safe, face-to-face, and academically productive group experience. Other
learning experiences may combine one or two of these qualities, but not all
three. For example, the Internet may be safe and academically productive, but
it lacks the interactive aspect.
Acknowledging
that student interaction is a unique feature of the classroom experience
inevitably calls into question our reliance on the traditional lecture.
The classroom is
unique in its ability to provide direct access to both expert and group
processes, rather than merely delivering content.
People who own
the CD/Notes still want to catch the live show since it contains a promise of
immediacy, intimacy, surprise, and an opportunity to not only hear, but also be with the artist and the
material.
As teachers, we
are often preoccupied with the question “Will I be able to cover all the
material?” Instead, we would do well to spend some class time receiving material from students. For
the class to be alive, it needs to incorporate the students’ stories, their
concerns, and their culture. This is important because students respond to
course material best when they see that it is applicable to their lives.
Inviting
students to share their stories nurtures the social aspect of the classroom—the
sense of community—and facilitates students’ level of comfort with each other.
These
observations and suggestions are by no means comprehensive or definitive.
Underlying them is a more general and urgent call for us to identify the
worthwhile features of the classroom experience and to learn how to deliver
these features to students.
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