Education doesn’t mean just transfer of dead knowledge. Actually it involves various ways and means of teaching, learning and assessment. The quality of education depends on how instructor enables learners to do things on its own that has just learnt either in theory or practice. This will naturally rejuvenate the learning appetite of learner to learn more. Being an interdisciplinary domain, pedagogy deals with various teaching techniques methods, strategies, learning activities, and assessment tools. In this article, I’m going to unfold the science of learning and teaching.
Explaining Teaching and learning methods
Let’s understand teaching and learning differences with meaning and examples.
Teaching: how to transfer and for what
How does an instructor or teacher organize his instructions in order to enable students to do it on their own is called teaching. Simply, how effectively teacher or instructor helps students to grasp given knowledge or skills is more valued than mere transfer of content. Hence, the techniques and strategies of teaching determine the quality of education.
Fundamentally, teaching involves a framework of lesson or lesson planning, process of transferring knowledge and skills, enabling students to retain received, empower them to apply or use, and ensure better outcomes. It is not one step process but complex web of activities. So, it needs to be achieved by various styles and methods. Let’s see some of them in short.
Teaching styles: by whom and how
There are four types of teaching styles. These are: Authoritative, demonstrator, facilitator, and delegator. Authoritative focuses on lecturing, demonstrator gives coaching, facilitator relies on activities, and delegator emphasizes on group activities or discussion.
Methods of teaching: different ways
Conventionally, there are two teaching methods that are popularly used. Student-centered and Teacher-centered teaching method. Both are designed on the basis of sources of knowledge. Teacher-cenrered method more relies on teacher for source of knowledge; while student-centered method focuses on active participation and engagement of students.
Student-centered method is more productive than the teacher-centered. Because, it usese various means and ways to enable students to learn skills and knowledge. In this method, student’s participation and engagement is important. Herein, students can explore questions, involve in group discussion, use case study methods, enjoy personlized learning, and problem solving teaching. This one is instrumental in developing critical thinking skills in student.
Learning: how to receive, retain, recall and reuse
To be honest, not all students acquire or grasp taught knowledge or skills in the same degree. Students who knows how to use mental processes will scale quickly while other who are naive laggs behind. For this to avoid, an effective learning strategies become inevitable. Different learning methods, activities, and practices will help teachers to engage all the students equally.
Learning styles: how to grasp
Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reading/writing, social, and logical learning styles. Visual learning uses diagrams, charts, and visual aids to aquire skills and knowledge. On the other hand, auditory learning relies on listening lectures, instructions, podcasts, and discussions.
Logical and reading/writing methods
Logical learner use critical thinking to learn things. It involves breaking down points, theirs analysis, finding patterns and solve problems. It is more dynamic and active form of learning style.
Reading/writing learning style is a type of conventional learning that involves repeatedly writing given instructions, making notes, reading books, papers, etc. And finally, social learning in which learner more focuses on social engagement and discussions.
Apart from these learning styles, there are various learning theories and approaches like behavioural, cognitive, constructive, experimental, etc. widely used in the process of learning worldwide. These approach explain in details the positive learning outcomes.
Though teaching and learning are different processes, theirs purpose and goal is same to enable students to use acquired skills and knowledge to deal with real life challenges.
Role of bloom’s taxonomy in teaching and learning
The renowned educational psychologists Benjamin bloom has been really revolutionized the teaching as well as learning processes with his unique tool – hierarchical framework for learning objectives. By the means of learning goals teacher can enable students to climb higher level of ladder in learning.
Blooms taxonomy is a outline of sequence of growing difficulty levels that begins with remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and ends with create. By this way, bloom aimed to develop critical thinking skills among learning community. It was paradigm shift from rote learning to logical learning.
In the process of assessment, blooms taxonomy is an effective tool or framework to assess and check student’s progress. In short, it is so useful in learning, teaching and assessment of progress as a testing tool.
Role and importance of teaching and learning methods
As I said earlier that learning and teaching styles and methods are means and ways to ensure effective teansfer of knowledge, skills, it enable students to retain, and apply in need. These are essential as the mere conventional teaching that involves mere reading books and note in front of students will not generate learning response.
By using various styles and methods, teacher can help students to experience tailor made experience insted readymade. In other words, it treat every student different ways as per the requirement.
Once the learner involves in learning, he can remember, retain, raise question, apply learned knowledge and skills, solve problems, and generate further research.
For teachers, different techniques and strategies offer convenient way to transer knowledge and skills within given time. Thereafter, it is used to test the learnt outcome of students to ensure higher application.
Last words on science of teaching and learning,
Nowadays, you know it is more important to know why and how instead what considering challenging world. Different methods offer various ways to achieve teaching objectives and learning outcomes in stipulated time. It also helps to ensure learning experience more fruitful. Finally, it helps to cultivate curious attitude among learners and foster teacher-student healthy learning relationship.