TEACHERS

Teachers

Teachers are probably the most important people in the society because without them none of us will be educated. There will be no doctors, lawyers, engineers or any kind of workmanship as most of them graduated from university taught by teachers or lecturers. Many of us do not realize the importance of teachers. Now the question arises, who is a teacher? The simple answer is the person who is assigned to teach the children, adults or the learners of any age group, is a teacher.  

Skill that Required for Teaching

Certainly, teaching is not an easy task. Not anyone can be teachers only selected people with great skills and good personality can be chosen. Thus let us first examine the purpose and the aim of a teacher or lecturer. Teachers and lecturers are needed in spreading and passing on knowledge. This knowledge may be based on personal experience, gathered from books or gained in any other way. Anyway, the major purpose of a teacher or lecturer could be described as the replacement of books and other information sources. For the audience, and for most individuals, a human being will be more interesting than a dead particle like a book, for example, whatever the subject or topic being taught. A person will always be more qualified in describing or even answering questions than a written text.

Now, the problems a teacher or lecturer might be faced with in class or in front of a huge audience are various and not easy. He or she has to take care that all listeners are kept happy, e.g. they must not be or feel offended; e.g. the audience must be kept willing and able to continue listening and the standard or the level of the speech has to be appropriate. If somebody cannot understand you, because the choice of your words or expressions is too simple or, worse, far too demanding, this person will not enjoy listening and paying attention to what you say, as it will inevitably become too boring or tiring. To overcome these problems a concerned teacher or lecturer has got to possess many skills. He or she should have a certain sense and a feeling for the thoughts and opinions of the audience. Never let the topic or even the subject appear boring; try to captivate and fascinate, if possible, every single member of the audience. Anticipate how your listeners might find your opinion before you present it. Imagine yourself in place of one of them: how would you like to be addressed, be talked to, be entertained, because in the end, that is what you are really doing. Sure, the aim is to pass on as much knowledge and information as possible, but if the speech is witty and the lecturing fascinating, the response of the audience will be greater and participation will be the reward.

There are certain skills that a teacher must possess. Most important of all is patience. An ideal teacher must have great patience when teaching a child or children, especially younger children as they are young and need more concentration. Some students might be quite slow in picking up things, so the teachers must have the patience and time to find every means to educate the children and make them understand, one way or another.  Being a teacher, we do not always get good students. Once in a while a problem child will come along. A teacher must be prepared to face any difficulties which come along the way.

The teacher must understand the student's position and problems which might affect their falling grades. With today's societies, a lot of parents, usually both husband and wife are working. In these cases the teacher must be the parent as well. A teacher must be hard working, intelligent, attentive and willing to work even at odd hours or after working time. They must be fully trained and always looking for new materials and aim at different angles to educate students and bring out the best in them.

Teachers are the role models for students. Therefore teachers must always carry themselves in the right way in order to set a good example to their students, since the Students are Still growing up in between the childhood and adulthood, it is very easy for them to adopt bad behaviors as well as good.

A teacher must also be fair, always seeking for the best solution in each problem. Since teachers educate the next generation of the society, it is very important that they are conveying the right message in order to determine we have a mature and intelligent group of leaders. Lastly, teachers are the most dedicated people in the society. Without them, there will be no society. Teaching is one of the most professional jobs around. There will be no progress and no future without educated leaders. Therefore teachers must have important skills and personality to do the job.

 

 Teaching and Learning

Children, young people and adults normally meet in classrooms under guidance or direction of teachers. They assume that their learning will be enhanced by doing so, instead of depending on the informal learning that goes on at all times.

What is teaching? When is a teacher teaching? A simple but very incomplete answer might be that when those things a teacher is doing are helping someone else to learn, he is teaching. Although this statement is at least partially true, certain questions may well be raised regarding it. For example, if no one is learning anything from a teacher's activities, is it correct to say that he is teaching?

The relationship between teaching and learning is reasonably comparable to that expressed in the statement that a salesman is selling only when someone else is buying something. A travelling salesman may repeat his sales talk and demonstration to his or her prospective buyers before one of them even sign an order for his wares. Was he selling when he was talking to the buyers who did not give him an order? If one of these buyers should mail him an order a few days later, does that change what the salesman did from ‘talking’ to ‘selling’? Similarly, if a student thinks about what he and the teacher said and did today and then after a good night’s sleep ‘sees through’ and solves the problem they discussed, might it  not be fair to say that teachers had been ‘teaching’ after all-helping the student to learn?

In spite of some inadequacies in any simple concept of teaching, it is important to keep in mind that the quality of a teacher's teaching is directly related to the quality and value of the learning that is taking place in his students. A teacher's chief concern as a teacher must always be with the effects of his own activities on the learning activities and outcomes in his students. 'What is the essential nature of learning?' becomes, therefore, a fundamental question for every teacher to study very seriously.

A fruitful way to think about learning is to realize that it is essentially a natural process-a process of growing. Each newborn infant has within its system a powerful tendency to grow up to become a mature adult. In order to grow up physically, however, a child must receive from outside his system the air, food, and water his body needs and is equipped to convert into energy, bones, muscles, and other organs. Every normal child comes into the world equipped with many complex, built-in regulatory systems. For example, one of these makes him breathe more rapidly when exercise has reduced his normal supply of oxygen; another makes him feel hungry when his system needs more food; and still another makes him feel thirsty when his body needs more liquid.

If something happens to prevent an individual from getting enough of the necessary outside materials during his growing years, he may not grow as rapidly or become as tall and heavy as he might normally have become. He will grow up to be a man, however, rather than some other kind of animal. He cannot grow up to be anything other than he was potentially as an infant. Inadequate foods or diseases can prevent his body from attaining its maximum potential development, but nothing can make him grow into something different from what he was potentially as a child.

The mental and social development of a human being is equally natural and similar in many ways to his physical development. In order to develop intellectually and emotionally, each child must obtain many varied experiences with the people and objects in his environment. Each normal infant comes equipped by nature to learn from experience, with curiosity about the people and other objects around him, and with a strong tendency to interpret for his own needs and purposes the significance of everything that comes to his attention. He learns from his experiences, whether he ever has a 'teacher' or not. What he actually learns from an experience, however, is determined in large part by the nature of the interest and readiness for further learning he has at the time by the nature of the experience, and by the personal interpretations he is able to make of its relationships to his own purposes, needs and satisfactions.

Intellectual and emotional growth, like physical development, is natural processes of maturation and do not take place suddenly. One can grow only in those directions that are natural for him, but growth even in those directions requires time. Unless a child has the potentials, interests and native abilities for becoming a scientist, no amount of special teaching and experience can develop him into a great scientist. Inadequate opportunities and unfortunate experiences could, however, prevent a child who is potentially a great scientist from ever becoming any kind of scientist. Learning is natural process of growth towards maturity of the potential abilities with which has endowed the individual.

So it is not enough for a teacher to be confronted by a pupil and say 'learn'. Nor is it sufficient for the teacher to 'tell the students what he is expected to learn' and say to him 'remember'. A teacher cannot even limit his task in explaining a lesson unit or giving some instructions in the class room, asking few questions, assigning homework, taking frequent tests and finally scolding for the failure and praising for the success of the students. The teacher is first of all one who stimulates, motivates, guides directs, tests and evaluates the learning of others.

The task of the teacher makes it clear that a teacher helps people to learn. Each person learns however from his own efforts and experiences. A teacher may inspire a student to want to learn and may guide him in experiences from which he may learn some facts, attitudes or skill, but the teacher cannot learn it for him. Each individual must learn for himself. The growth and learning that occur in an individual through an experience starts from what he has previously learned and moves in directions that are determined by the needs and interests share in a particular experience, at school or elsewhere.

The growth of learning that occurs in each one is likely to differ from that which occurs in any other, for growth starts in each from a different base and proceeds in directions that are determined by the individual's own current feelings of interest and heed. A good teacher can play important roles in the learning process of an individual. He can (1) observe the individual and try to understand his present abilities, interests, and needs, (2) stimulate and encourage him to explore them further, and (3) help to provide further experiences of such a nature as he can probably use in satisfying the needs and curiosities he feels at the moment.

The effective teacher is an artist at guiding a student's experiences in ways that will satisfy, at least in part, some of the needs, he feels at that time. What a particular individual actually learns from an experience, it may be quite different from the things his teacher had expected him to learn. The new knowledge or interest gained by a person through an experience is always an outgrowth of his previous concepts and interests, rather than the particular growth that the teacher had hoped the experience might stimulate.

The most effective teachers, in high schools and colleges as well as in primary grades, are artists at recognizing, encouraging, and developing the normal desires of young person’s to understand and make intelligent use of the things that appear to concern them. An artist teacher can recognize and nourish a student's desire to develop more adequate understandings, even though the particular concern of the student at the moment may not be a part of the limited subject that the teacher was employed to teach.

 At times some teachers fail to understand how to deal with the students, moving out of the childhood. The teachers fail to understand that during the adolescent period one's power and resources needed for making decisions starts developing. They become careful of their own prestige and image in their periphery. Different kinds of ego and emotions also develop in their minds at this stage. They want to make their own decisions, but find it hard to achieve a satisfactory balance between their personal resources and the demand of their environment. So any attempt of imposing any decision on them or any suppressive measure against their fault will give out extremely negative result. On the contrary, absolute freedom may also lead them towards downfall. Motivation, love, affection, friendly behavior, proper guidance from the teacher’s side becomes necessary for them. A teacher or a counselor should guide a student of adolescent stage in such a way so that he realizes that the teacher is not imposing any decision on him rather he is helping him to utilize his own power to reach the more meaningful solution or decision. The adolescent student should be made understand that he has freedom to follow his preference as long as his behavior is acceptable to society.

There is no best way to teach. Each effective teacher develops his own ways of recognizing the needs currently felt by his students and guiding them into and through experiences, designed to result in learning that will satisfy those needs. Teaching is an art more than it is a science. What a teacher should do at a particular moment is not something that can be determined from any scientific formula. It is a result of thoughtful decision by the teacher himself, made in the light of all he knows about how people learn, what his students already know and are ready to learn, and the relative success, he himself has experienced in trying curious ways of helping students to learn similar things in comparable situations.

Successful teachers like other artists develop their own ways of getting the results they seek. What they all have in common is the desire to inspire and to guide their students in experiences that will result in effective learning. He comes to this profession with a missionary zeal and a social commitment. He comes with a desire to invest his time in something really important, in profession where he can make real contribution to the lives of people and get deeper personal satisfaction. A good teacher gains recognition and sincere respect from the people and exercises tremendous influence in his communities and nation by inspiring and guiding the development of other people rather than by sneering power and material advantages for himself.

So, for a teacher the real rewards are not in the material things he can purchase or the physical pleasures he can enjoy on his salary, but in deep satisfaction he feels in watching of themselves and of their word, in seeing them develop self-reliance, initiative, and sense of responsibility and in observing their learning that one involved in becoming constructive citizens in the modern world. A teacher nurtures the hope that his students, through the inspiration and guidance that he and other teachers are providing them, will be able later to work out improvements that will make their communities, nations, and their world a happier and more wholesome place for people to live in. 

 

Source:  The article presented about ‘Teaching and learning’ is a result of synthesis of the research papers, ‘Nature and methods of educational psychology’ by G. Lester Anderson of the University of Buffalo, ‘Teaching: The art of guiding learning experiences’ by M. R. Trabue of the  Pennysylvania State University and ‘Guidance: A new dimension of creative teaching’ by Adolph W. Alech of Mississippi State University. Considering the argent need of basic knowledge of the subject for ensuring creative teaching, the synopsis of the papers has been done and presented here.