Teaching Aptitude

All About Teaching

"Teaching is more than imparting knowledge; it is inspiring change. Learning is more than absorbing facts; it is acquiring understanding."—William Arthur Ward

MEANING OF TEACHING

Teaching is a sub-social process affected by polity, culture, philosophy, social values, etc. Due to this reason, it is tough to define teaching in a definite term. There are three elements in this process, teacher, students, and the subject matter. When the subject matter reaches the pupils with their full participation of them and complete interaction is seen between a teacher and pupils, it is called teaching. When the only teacher is active in the class and pupils are mere passive listeners, it is known as instruction not teaching. Teaching requires activity from teachers and students both.

Teaching can be of three kinds, authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire. In authoritarian teaching, the teacher teaches his pupils by making his behavior very rigid and autocratic. They are not given any freedom in class. The teacher inserts the knowledge into the minds of learners from outside without caring about their inherent potential. He considers himself mature and the students as soft clay. We can call this teaching instruction.

Teachers and pupils both are equally active in democratic teaching. Complete interaction is seen between them here. Both of them are influenced by each other's behavior to the extent that they are restricted by each other's limitations.

In laissez-faire teaching, students are more active than the teacher. The teacher works in the class only as a guide and the rest of the work is done by students. The task of the teacher in the class is not to teach but to create suitable learning. Thus, the teacher is most influenced by his students' behavior to such an extent that everything is thought and done in the interest of pupils all the time. This very type of teaching is recommended in modern schools and its purpose is to bring about positive desirable changes in the behavior of learners. This is technically called learning. Thus, we see that teaching is a process and learning is output, and content and learning strategies work as media to reach from teaching to learning.