Teacher's Day Special: Teaching Methodology Should Be Conversational, Experiments Like App 'Clickers' Make Students Aware

From experience in our country I have learned that the most effective tool a teacher has is to take a personal interest in the students' performance, empathize with their struggles and be helpful, friendly and respectful. With a little attention and encouragement from the teacher, the student can surprise everyone. – Jainendra Jain, Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University A fundamental challenge facing educators today is how to teach effectively to students who may not be self-motivated for a variety of social reasons. Traditionally, students are expected to listen to lectures and solve problems on their own. Lectures are certainly important but they are only the beginning. Apart from this there are many other methods. The simplest method is to give the lecture a conversational form. In it, the student can answer, ask questions or present his ideas. Sometimes the student is given some problem sheets related to the lecture, in which they work individually or in groups. Meanwhile, they can provide 'clickers' for multiple choice questions so that the teacher is tracking student activities in real time. There are many such clicker apps in smartphones. Perhaps the best method is the 'flipped classroom', in which students are asked to read before coming to class and class time is used to solve problems. When I was young, it was thought that you could learn a subject by taking a course. Now it seems that you can master a subject only by researching and imparting new knowledge in it. New Experiment: Specification Based Grading It is often not possible to get away with a bad grade in an exam. In this case 'Specification Based Grading' is introduced. In it the student has to pass the objective of education through examination. A student can take this exam as many times as he wants. The final grade is based on whether the learning objectives were met. That is, what students learn is important.

Image Credit: (Divya-Bhaskar): Images/graphics belong to (Divya-Bhaskar).