Tuesday, July 31, 2018

What's amiss with Teaching-Learning process in Schools ?


Picture source : https://www.deviantart.com/frasbob/art/Mako-Studying-532930868

Teaching-Learning is the most important cog in the wheel of Education process. The more robust the teaching-learning framework, the better the impact on the learners. Based on my understanding, the key objective of teaching-learning is to ensure accelerated learning in the learners and develop self-learner and life-long learners. Inspite of so many innovations and developments in the area of education, there's still something amiss with our teaching-learning which is clearly impacting the quality of learners that pass out from the schools.

Deciphering the teaching-learning process and we can figure out how integrated the two components are and how teaching acts as a feeder to enhance and improve learning. Improvised teaching methods, technology and integrated curriculum could only do as much as a learner's capability to grasp. As educators and teachers, our key focus is on delivering as much as possible to the learners with the hope that "more the merrier" approach will work in this case too. Additionally, with learners having an easy access to information, its not easy to handle the information overload and with the educators focusing solely focusing on providing more, it doesn't do any good to the learners. The learners struggle and juggle with grasping so much information and as a result even the bright ones fall prey to retaining little.

A little introspection by educators/ teachers and they could fill this gap between "Delivering More and Retaining Little". As educators/ teachers, all we need to ask ourselves is whether we are preparing our new generation of learners to handle so much of information that's continuously being bombarded at them from everywhere. We definitely, are, exposing them to a lot of subject specific content and even inter-disciplinary matter but pause here and ponder -

 "Are we teaching them the art of learning and/ or studying ?"

What's the point in providing information or content when the learners do not have the skills to convert that into a useful knowledge base for their life ! Haven't we seen so many young learners struggling to manage so much of information ? Haven't we seen this drawback impacting their studies, their results, their careers and ultimately their lives. Just downloading content and/or  information on them is not going to lead them anywhere in life, neither it's going to develop them into self-dependent and life-long learners.

Isn't it time to ask ourselves the following pertinent questions
  1. Aren't we supposed to prepare learners for life ? 
  2. Aren't we responsible for addressing the gap between teaching and actual learning ?
  3. Aren't we responsible for developing better learners - those who love learning and become true knowledge seeker ? 
  4. Can't we include few sessions to teach our learners the art of studying and learning ? 

As educators/ teachers, if we really want actual learning to occur, we can achieve so by contributing our through an honest and sincere attempt at equipping our young learners with the much needed skill of learning and studying.  

Let's do this real yeoman service for our young generation of "learners" !