PL  |  NL  |  FR  |  ES  |  PT  |  IT  |  DE  |  DK  |  NO  |  SE  |  FI  |  GR  |  JP  |  CN  |  KR  |  RU  |  AE

  Report this article

More information

Commercial counseling centers offer college preparation

Online Homework Helper

Online Assignment Help: A New Concept in Education

Hwobot: the homework robot

Training Schools

Make Your Back to School List Green by Using Environmental Products

Passed the 77 600 Exam

About 70/624 exam

Sumy State University

Private Spanish Classes More Effective than Group Classes

Learn English, work and have fun in London

Education most important aspect of our lives

Art Education in America, Why Art Graduates Still Can't Draw or Paint

In clarifying what we mean by teaching, we need to attend carefully to how we employ the word in the very many forms of discourse we engage in. Quite clearly, to teach is to do certain things with a view to other people’s learning. But, so it might be observed, the people who are learning bring to this transaction a particular level of understanding. In teaching, therefore (that is, in trying to enable these students to learn), the teacher should have in mind the mental state, the level of understanding of the learners. For example, the physicist describing the minutiae of nuclear reactions to a class of five-year-olds may well be lecturing; but he could not be described as teaching. He simply ignored the thoughts, the state of mind, the cognitive development, the level of understanding of his class. They did not enter into his planning at all. On the other hand, to teach is to intend the learners to learn something. And just as one condition of teaching is that the teacher should attend to the level of understanding of the learners, so another condition is that the teacher must attend to the logical structure of that which is to be learnt. Learning physics is different from learning history; learning how to play the piano is different from learning to appreciate a symphony; learning to ride a bicycle is different from learning the laws of balance, gravity and so on.

Thus, the minimal conditions of any claims to teaching are: first, the intention that certain specifiable people will learn something; second, that the teacher, in carrying out that intention, does things which take into account the mental state and level of understanding of the learner; and, third, that what the teacher says or does should be in some way logically related to that which is to be learnt.

These purely conceptual points may not take us very far – except that they help us both to exclude certain activities, which often are wrongly associated with teaching, and to include other activities, which too often are neglected when the qualities and characteristics of ‘good teaching’ are analysed and commended.

The distinction between ‘bad teaching’ and ‘failing to teach at all’ is necessarily blurred. A teacher who fails to attend sufficiently to the level of understanding of the children and who talks ‘over their heads’ might be described as teaching badly. But there comes a point where what the teacher says or does is so out of relation to how the children think that it would be more appropriate to say that he or she is simply not teaching them. Not only is the teacher having no impact, but that lack of impact is due to total neglect of the way in which the children make sense of what is said or internalise the messages sent. Furthermore, these conceptual points about teaching remind us of the need for the teacher to have grasped and made sense of that which they are trying to teach – the ‘logical structure’ of the mathematics they want the pupils to learn, the concepts which are to organise the historical perception of the students, the distinctive mode of enquiry which is to characterise ‘doing science’. These points are well illustrated in Bruner’s The Process of Education (1960) – the need, on the one hand, to identify the key ideas which structure the ‘bodies of knowledge’ which we have inherited and, on the other hand, to represent these ideas in a way that makes sense to the learner, given his or her level of understanding. Indeed, the art and skill of the teacher is to be able to ‘live in’ these two worlds, and thereby to bridge the gap between them. This theme I shall return to later. It is crucial to our understanding of teaching – and yet sadly neglected as the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of teaching is increasingly dictated by those who inhabit neither world – neither that of the children and students, whose mode of representing reality often bears little relation to the material they are supposed to learn, nor that of the public traditions of knowledge and enquiry which alone should be the resources upon which the teacher draws to help the young people understand and make sense of experience.

These conceptual points about teaching also indicate what can and should be included in our conception of teaching. Too often teaching is associated with instruction. But one can teach by structuring experience in such a way that the pupils will learn, let us say, how to solve certain problems or how to relate with understanding to other people. One might teach by purposefully setting certain sorts of example of, say, how to perform or how to behave. One might teach by writing texts with particular learners in mind. The practice of teaching, therefore, is identified not by a distinctive set of behaviours, but by acts or activities which have certain intentions embedded within them and which are related to the kind of learning which they seek to bring about. And such a practice clearly includes many different sorts of behaviour or actions or activities.