Good ways of teaching

There are 101 ways of good teaching. The first quality of good teaching is real life connection through creating learning environments.

A teacher needs to be the owner of a very creative mind. If the teacher doesn’t have a creative mind, it is as good as cooking food without knowing whom to serve.

The guru or teacher reflects two things, the creativity of a teacher, and the freedom or the learning independence that the teacher gives to the children. If you examine the Indian epics, guru Dhrona is an example of a good teacher. He was an expert teacher on warfare. However, he never asked any of his children, the children of the Pandava family or the Kaurava family, to learn what he wished to teach them. All that he did was to talk to them and show them the various warfare. After which he asked them to select what they wanted to learn. This is the creative thinking of a teacher, to give the freedom to children.
How can children be given the choice to learn? This is the biggest challenge. And how can children find their choice?
The Pandavas and Kauravas learnt warfare. And they learnt different types of warfare and each focused into one specialty in which they were more prominent and comfortable. The learning destination was war.

Similarly, when children come to a classroom, the learning destination is the attainment of knowledge and skills along with a language to express it, a character to benefit out of it, and an ability to support a community later. This should be the goal of any classroom.

How can a teacher become a creative person in the classroom? A teacher is like a movie director who creates a movie for. These millions of people with different mind-set focusing on one story. They are taught and entertained through the movie. Just like movie directors, teachers need to convey messages to children. For which teachers need to connect to the real life.

It is from touch to the real life.

When children are able to connect to the real life, the urge to learn will be evoked in them. So how can the teacher connect to the real life? If a teacher has the experience of connecting herself to the real life, then bringing a concept of learning from a curriculum and connecting it to the real life is easy, because the teacher has experienced and experimented it. A teacher cannot teach a theory to any child because he/she has not experimented and experienced it, and has not applied it in real life.
Imagine, if you are going to teach something and if you have applied it in the real life, you are connected to the real world. Even great actors like Mohanlal or Mammotty cannot act unless they have really experimented and taken a feel of the characters in the real world.

Having said that a teacher has experimented and experienced real-world connection of a concept, how can a teacher build that real life situation in the classroom?

Real life situation can be built in a classroom through what is called an environment of learning. For instance, to learn about animals if the teacher can take the children to the zoo it would be fantastic. The child will learn more about an elephant than from what the teacher describes and from pictures. There would be no difficulty a child is asked to identify the eyes and the trunk of an elephant because in real life, the child has connected with it.

After the child has connected, it is now time for formative questioning. The child is asked:
“Why does the elephant need eyes?”
“Why does it need a trunk?”
“Is its height and inability to raise hands is compensated by its trunk to take food to its mouth?”

Finally, in the real-life exploration, the child will understand how much an animal has adapted to its life by its creator. So, rather than just learning to draw an elephant or what its weight is and what its height is, the child will learn why the elephant is created like this and how it adapts.

The learning environment has to be created or connected, otherwise the real life connection is lost and the classroom becomes a very boring place. Either take the child to a zoo if it is an animal world, or hundreds of digital platforms are available today to bring real life connection.

History is a very important subject and every child should know history and politics. And the subjects need to be taught by creating the learning environment.

Man’s life from BC to AD is history and it will show humanity has grown over the years, from the brute to the modern sophistication. By learning history one learns how the ancestors lived, the activities they carried on, and how they were known in the communities. This teaches what we can do, what we should not do, and what we should modify.

If a child doesn’t know the history of mankind, history of continents, history of countries, history of the religions of the world, how they progressed to the modern way of living, then whatever he/she learns cannot be complimented well.

Politics needs to be taught in the similar manner. Children need to be told how humanity progressed from tribes and how tribe leaders turned into the most modern governments. So, understanding an environment in the real world and connecting to nature through a digitalised world requires a teacher to be very creative.

There are hundreds of ways for creating an environment of learning. You don’t need to have the best facilities in a school because the best facility is the environment. Everything is there. Nothing comes beyond environment, nothing shall happen without environment, and everything shall end in an environment.

Connecting to a real world through an environment is the core requirement of a good learning but it also needs something more. What is that? It is current news.

How much is the teacher aware after the current news? Because of modern communication media – televisions, news channels, newspapers – every child gets updated with the world news in one way or the other. So, the teacher needs to be updated with the current affairs in order to blend it with. Such a blended learning gets children to think in a formative way. Children will have their choice to think but will reach one destination. This is exactly what guru Dhrona did. He gave the child the choice who reached the single destination of fighting.

Accordingly, an important quality of good teaching is real life connection through creating learning environments and the teacher needs to be aligned with the current affairs of the world. The blending of all these is a good starting point for an excellent teaching.