Teaching method
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History
There is a long history to teaching methods and to the question, "What is the purpose of education?"
For much of human history, educational method was largely unconscious and consisted of children imitating their elders. ex: learning through observation and play, how to make meals, set places for the family, hunt small living creatures for food, pick berries, and how to play-fight the enemy and return home with little trophies for the "wife."
At puberty, the renowned rites of passage prepared young men and women for their more mature future life. This was more conscious education and included sex education as well as learning many prohibitions and religious secrets to encourage their relation to larger matters and the tribe (or extended family) as a whole. A young person's knowing he or she would now be entering adulthood was a great incentive to learn.
In some tribal environments, such as that of the Maori of Polynesia (now New Zealand), lengthy periods of religious education were also the rule among the aristocracy. Young people could study as long as 12 years in a graduate school of religion, learning about, and reasoning as to the Supreme Being and the many transformations of godhead, were taught.
With the advent of writing, about 3000 BC, education for more specialized occupations became a conscious matter. How to be a scribe; how to be an astronomer; and more.
With the beginning of conscious philosophy in ancient Greece, questions of educational method became part of the national discourse. In his [[Republic]] Plato describes a system of instruction that he felt would lead to an ideal state. Meanwhile in his Dialogues Plato also describes the Socratic method--the questions and answers of the great Socrates--who was able to show even an uneducated slave boy how the logic leading to the Pythagorean Theorem was within him. This was an outstanding instance of that Greek invention, democracy, at work.
It has been the intent of the largest-minded among educators since then--such as the Roman educator Quintilian--to find specific, interesting ways to bring out of children the possibilities of intelligence and to encourage them to learn.
The most noted educators of the last 2000 years were also the most democratic. Comenius, in what would become Czechoslavakia, wanted all boys and girls to learn. In his famous [[The World in Pictures]] he gave the first vivid, illustrated text book which contained much that children would be familiar with in everyday life and use it to teach the academics subjects they needed to know. Rabelais described how the student Gargantua learned about the world and what is in it.
Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Emile, presented methodology to teach children the elements of science and much more. In this he famously eschewed books, saying the world is one's book. And so Emile was brought out into the woods without breakfast to learn the cardinal directions and the positions of the sun as he found his way home for something to eat.
Then there is Heinreich Pestalozzi of Switzerland, whose methodology during Napoleonic warfare enabled refugee children, of a class believed to be unteachable, to learn--and love to learn. He describes this in his account of the educational experiment at Stanz. He felt the key to have children learn is for them to be loved. But his method, though transmitted later in the school for educators he founded, has been thought too unclear to be taught today. One result was, when he would ask, "Children, do you want to learn more or go to sleep?" they would reply, "Learn more!"
In the 20th century the philosopher Eli Siegel, who believed that all children are equally capable of learning regardless of ethnic background or social class, stated: "The purpose of all education is to like the world through knowing it." This is a goal which is implicit in previous educators but in this principle is made conscious. With this principle at basis, teachers, predominantly in New York, have found that students learn the curriculum with the kind of eagerness that [[Pestalozzi[[ describes for his students at Stanz centuries earlier.
Many current teaching philosophies are aimed at fulfillng the precepts of a curriculum based on Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE). Arguably the qualities of a SDAIE curriculum are as effective if not more so for all 'regular' classroom.
Some critical ideas in today's education evironment include:
According to Dr. Shaikh Imran, the teaching methodology in Education is a new concept in the teaching learning process. New methods involved in the teaching learning process are television, radio, computer, etc.
Other educators believe that the use of technology, while facilitating learning to some degree, is not a substitute for educational method that brings out critical thinking and a desire to learn.
See also:
Instructional theory, Instructional design.Some resources include:
- Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, Norton, 1926.
- Paul Monroe, A Text-Book in the History of Education, Macmillan, 1915.
- Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, Knopf, 1950.
- The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method.