Teaching Aptitude: Objectives and Levels of Teaching

Objectives of teaching:

·         learner’s change of attitude

·         shaping of learner’s behavior and contact

·         learner’s acquisition of knowledge

·          improving skills of the learner

·         belief formation

·         making the learner efficient member of society both for survival and living in harmony with  others

·         to make the  learner realize  his/her inherent potentiality

Levels of Teaching (Biggie, 1967): (Memory, Understanding and Reflective levels)

1.    Memory Level Teaching(least thoughtful):

·         Known as Authoritarian teaching and rote  learning

·         teacher centered and subject centered

·         teacher active, learner passive

·         based on memory and mental ability

·         cramming the facts, information and formulas for exam, without any care of understanding of their meaning and application

·         presenting pre-planned material in a sequential order

·         drills and exercises-Recall and recognition, playing vital role to strengthen the memory

·         lacking insight  and motivation

·         useful for children at lower classes

·         memory acquired so, basis for future learning and thinking but knowledge gained so, not useful in real life situations

·          intelligence and thinking, no role to play

·         Theories connected with it: The Herbartian theory of apperception  (mechanical memorization), The Thorndike’s connectionism (SR connections through memorization), The theory of conditioning (habit formation through repetition of association between SR)

2.    Understanding Level of Teaching (thoughtful):

·         known  as Democratic Teaching

·         Associated with Herbart (and his five steps of teaching: preparation, presentation, comparison, generalization and application)

·         Associated with Judd Morrison (and his Mastery and insight, not memorization of facts)  

·         Also connected  with Bruner J S.(and his theory of “finding common elements in infinite number of discriminate objects and events”)

·         though teacher centered and subject centered,  both teacher and learner, active

·         understanding level referring to seeing the total use of facts, seeing relationship and a generalized insight and  teaching, the relationship between principles and facts and how these principles can be applied

·         students making use of their thinking abilities

·         Knowledge acquired at this level,  the basis of the reflective level of teaching

·         relating new knowledge acquired to the previously acquired knowledge

·         learning by understanding the facts and information and their use and purpose -

3.    Reflective Level of Teaching (most thoughtful):

·         Associated with Laissez Faire Teaching

·         Known as introspective level

·         student centered and problem-centered teaching

·         instead of telling the facts or generalizations, making students  to discover them

·         the atmosphere of the class, permissive and not restrictive.

·         teaching by raising problems, initiating mutual discussion and interactions, welcoming critical reactions

·         thinking deeply about something - the highest level of teaching

·         suitable only for mentally matured children, college lever learners

·          enabling the students to solve the real problems of life

·         original thinking and creative-abilities develop at this level

·         study material,  neither organized nor pre-planned

·          requires more experienced and efficient teachers

Twentieth Century Dramas: Characteristics and Movements

“Desire to unsettle, to shock, even to alienate the audience is the  hallmark of modern drama.”  

Chief Characteristics:

1.    Plays from Irish playwrights to reveal the deeper emotions of Ireland (Abbey Theatre)

2.    Existential or absurd plays about the who and why of human life and existence (Absurd Plays)

3.    the themes of colonization and loss of territory

4.    Sigmund Freud  and Carl Jung, influencing playwrights to incorporate myths into their plays

5.    the empowerment of female  characters in the drama

6.    dramas dealing with political and social problems, especially in  the hands  of Bernard Shaw

7.    plays with class consciousness, especially the conflict between upper class and poor class

8.    introducing new language and experimental ideas into dramas (avant garde theatre)

9.    Plays from anti-social and anti-art movements to condemn social and artistic conventions (Dadaism movement  as a reaction to World War I)

10. Realistic plays from Ibsen and Shaw versus symbolic plays from Eugene O’Neill from America, W.B. Yeats from Ireland

11. Surrealistic plays to release creative potential of the unconscious mind

12. plays of expressionism  to express people’s feelings and emotions rather than showing events or objects in a realistic way

13. Poetic dramas mostly ending with serious  tragedy, especially in the hands of T.S.Eliot and W.B.Yeats

Important Movements in Twentieth Century Dramas:

1.  The Abbey Theatre (1899):

Ø  Also known as Irish Literary Theater started by William B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge - first opening in Dublin, on 27 December 1904

Ø   Purpose: to reveal the deeper emotions of Ireland – “a theater in which the playwright's words were the most important thing, prevailing over the actor and the audience” - focused on the portrayals of Irish peasant life

Ø  It also included: Sean O’Casey, and Edward Martyn

Ø  Mainly to use poetic realism - unpleasant themes running through them, such as lust between a son and his step-mother or the murder of a baby to “prove” love

2. Realism / Problem Plays

Ø  plays by Henrik Ibsen George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, W. Somerset Maugham, Robertson Arthur Jones and John Galsworthy

Ø  Purpose: As a reaction to Victorian dramas, making the audience socially conscious and politically alert – dealing with problems of real life in a realistic manner

Ø  Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist as the pioneer and his A Doll’s House, as a good example of problem play

Ø  Chief themes: problems of marriage, justice, women’s empowerment, strife between capital and labour, removing  wrong notions about war, upper class life

3. Existentialism(or absurd plays)

Ø  Writers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Samuel Beckett as the pillars of existentialism

Ø  Based on the theory that humans are free and responsible for their own  actins in a world without meaning – the experiences of the individual are at the centre of understanding, not any moral or scientific thought

Ø  Based on the idea that there is no meaning for anything in the world beyond the meaning we give it

Ø  made famous in Paris in 1940s and 1950s by Jean-Paul  Sartre and Albert Camus

4. Avant-garde theatre:

Ø  Purpose: to introduce  new and experimental ideas, strange and disturbing forms, a different use of language in plays which are surprising and shocking

Ø  started with with Alfred Jarry and Ubu plays opposing bourgeois theatre

Ø  the term “the avant-garde” meaning new and modern ideas in art

Ø  associated with existential and absurd plays

5. Dadaism:

Ø  the movement started as a reaction to World War I and the horrors of Capitalism and eventually resulted in absurd themes

Ø  an anti-social and anti-art movement condemning social and artistic conventions

Ø  Tzara, a Romanian Jewish writer as a pioneer  of Dadaism – his famous play “The Gas Heart”(1921), a mockery of Traditional theatre, characters named after body parts such as Mouth, Ear, Nose, Eye, etc. as reminiscent of dismemberment of soldiers in WWI

Ø  a form of artistic anarchy with disconnected plots and ideas defying the social, political and cultural values of that time

6. SYMBOLISM:

Ø  known as Aestheticism, a stylized form of drama with dreams and fantasies

Ø  Experimented by numerous playwrights such  as Yeats from Ireland, Eugene O’Neil from America, August Strindberg from Sweden and Pinter from Britain,

Ø  Started with “the Symbolist Manifesto” by French Poet Jean More in 1886

Ø  Purpose: to use symbolism and present dialogue and style of acting in a non-realistic manner against the realistic dramas of the time

7. Surrealism:

Ø  the word surrealist first used by Apollinire to describe his 1917 play “The Breasts of Tiresias”

Ø  Antonin Artaud as an early surrealist

Ø  Purpose: to link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event; to express emotions, feelings and the metaphysical not through language but through mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision closely related to the world of dreams

Ø  Purpose: to present ritualistic theatre experiments – to release creative potential of the unconscious mind by downplaying words, unexpected comparisons and juxtaposition of images

Ø  the theatre of cruelty as the subset of surrealism

Ø  Federico García Lorca’s plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935).- Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925) and Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928). Gertrude Stein's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) as popular surrealistic plays

8. Expressionism:

Ø  as a reaction against materialism and rapid mechanization

Ø  aiming at subjective emotions rather objective reality through distortion, exaggeration or jarring application of formal elements

Ø  Oskar Kokoschka's “Murderer, the Hope of Women” as  the first fully Expressionist work for the theatre, which opened in1909 in Vienna

Ø  The first full-length Expressionist play The Son by Walter Hasenclever, first performed in 1916- In the 1920s

Ø  plays by Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and The Great God Brown), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal), Lajos Egri (Rapid Transit) and Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine) as typical examples

Ø  dramatize the spiritual awakening and sufferings of their protagonists-

Ø  referred to as Stationendramen (station dramas), modeled on the episodic presentation of the suffering and death of Jesus in the Stations of the Cross

Ø  August Strindberg pioneering with his autobiographical trilogy “To Damascus” (1898-1904)

9. Poetic Plays:

Ø  As a revival of Elizabethan Dramas

Ø  W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Stephen Philips and John Drink Water as famous playwrights of poetic plays

Ø  mostly associated with seriousness of tragedy

Teaching Aptitude: Concepts of Teaching

1    1. Classical Conditioning /Pavlovian conditioning (1897): 

•          Associated with Russian physiologist Pavlov and Stimulus response theory
•          Experiments with dog, bell sound and food  
•          Unconditioned Stimulus (food) and Conditioned stimulus (bell) are paired to produce  conditioned response (saliva), that is different from unconditioned response(saliva) before association -
•          finding: learning occurs rapidity while the interval between CS and US is short.

2.    2. Operant Conditioning / Radical Behaviorism(1938): 

•          Associated with Skinner,  American psychologist,  professor at Harvard University 
•          "Walden Two",  his novel presenting his theories 
•          'operant' referring to modification of behaviour by the reinforcing or inhibiting effect of its own consequences
•        Both reinforcements increase the behaviour, both punishments decrease the behaviour
•         Positive reinforcement (adding a prospective stimulus) : rewarding increases the desired behavior (rat in Skinner box,  while pushing pedals, gets  food,) 
•        Negative Reinforcement ( removal of harmful stimulus, escape) : removal of noxious stimulus increases the desired behavior ( loud noise inside Skinner box,  stopping while lever pressed by rat 
•        Positive Punishment (adding a harmful stimulus) -  punishment decreases the unwanted behaviour in learning (e.g. beating,  spanking ) 
•       Negative Punishment (removal of a prospective stimulus) : punishment by removing a prospective stimulus to decrease the unwanted behaviour –(no increment for poor performance,  no watching TV for poor study) 
•      Extinction : no response from learner,  since stimulus is no longer present – stop food to rat,  it stops pulling the lever.

3.    Neo behaviorism (1930–1955)

• associated with Edward C. Tolman (1886–1959), Clark Hull (1884–1952), and B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)-
• more self-consciously trying to formalize the laws of behavior 
• Tolman focusing his experimental work largely on white rats learning their way through mazes
• Against isolated stimuli and responses, Tolman emphasized their integration with the environment by referring to them as "stimulating agencies" and "behavior acts." 
•  his 1932 famous Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men
• Skinner Baby box (1945) – his experiment with his own  daughter – Finding: we're capable of behaviors that we don't entirely control. –Against the belief that humans are ultimately masters of our destiny rather than products of our circumstances
• Hull -  build-up and breakdown of habit interpreted as the key to all behavior - found the fundamental law of learning or habit-formation—the law of stimulus generalization—and that this law not only underlay all behavior in animals and humans, but  a principle basic enough to unify all the social sciences.

4.    4. Gestalt Theory:

•       German term meaning 'form' or 'pattern' 
•       macroscopic view of the psychological behaviors rather than a microscopic approach understanding and perceiving the whole sum of an object rather than its components
•       based on perceiving reality in its simplest form 
•      the ways humans perceive objects: similarity, proximity, continuity 
•      Associated with productive thinking, solving problem with insight – reproductive thinking, solving problem with past experience 
•       Associated with Graf Christian von Ehrenfels
•       learning takes place as students were able to comprehend a concept in its entirety, rather than broken up into parts 
•       the experiences and perceptions of learners having a significant impact on the way that they learn
•       Learning happens best when the instruction is related to their real life experiences. The human brain has the ability to make a map of the stimuli caused by these life experiences, known as “isomorphism.”

5.    5. Cognitivism: 

•       known as information processing psychology 
•       the way people think impacting their behavior 
•       attention of the learner as the first part of cognitivism 
•       memory,  playing vital role 
•       acquisition of knowledge and growth of mental structures stressed 
•      Rooted in Gestalt psychology and the work of Jean Piaget, cognitivism has been prominent in psychology since the 1960s
•      The learner is viewed as an information processor (like a computer)
•      supporters: Marriner David Merill (1937 – ), Charles Reigeluth (1946 – ), Robert Mills Gagné (1916 – 2002), Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)and Roger Schank (1946 – ), 
•       Knowledge seen as schema or symbolic mental constructions
•       Learning defined as change in a learner’s schemata 
•        people are not “programmed animals" that merely respond to environmental stimuli but rational beings that require active participation in order to learn, and whose actions are a consequence of thinking
•      Changes in behavior being observed, but only as an indication of what is occurring in the learner’s head. 

6.    Constructivism

• learning being an active, contextualized process of constructing knowledge rather than acquiring it 
• The learner brings past experiences and cultural factors to a current situation and each person has a different interpretation and construction of the knowledge process.
• Associated with Vygotsky’s (1978) theory, one of the foundations of constructivism 
• Social interaction playing a fundamental role in the process of cognitive development 
• Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological)  -
• Learning from The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO)-anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner 
• The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) referring to the distance between a learner’s ability to perform a task under adult guidance and with peer collaboration and their ability to solve the problem independently. According to Vygotzky, learning occurs in this zone. 
• in short, his three theories mean: what the learner can do, what the learner can do with help from others, what the learner can’t do yet but will attempt to do

7.    Experiential learning

• .Associated with Kolb (1984) -a four stage model known as the experiential learning cycle - a way by which people can understand their experiences and, as a result, modify their behavior -  (without reflection, people would continue to repeat their mistakes
• Concrete experience Stage - experiencing or immersing yourself in the task given by the teacher -  doing stage.
• Observation and reflection Stage- reviewing what has been done and experienced -Your values, attitudes and beliefs can influence your thinking at this stage -This is the stage of thinking about what you have done.
• Abstract conceptualization Stage-  the stage of planning how you will do it differently.
•  Active experimentation Stage - enables you to take the new learning -This is the redoing stage based upon experience and reflection.

8.    Humanism

•  learning  as a personal act to fulfill potential within the learner 
• insisting to  study a person as a whole, particularly as they grow and develop over their lifetime 
• Associated with Rogers (1983) who developed the theory of facilitative learning and  Maslow
• based on a belief that people have a natural human eagerness to learn and that learning involves changing your own concept of yourself 
• learning to take place if the person delivering it acts as a facilitator 
• to discuss new ideas and learn from their mistakes
• learning not threatened by external factors
• considered behaviorism to be much too narrow in focus to be dealing with significant issues, such as love, values, self-actualization, choice, spirituality, awe, purpose, and meaning.

9.    Pedagogy and andragogy: 

•     Formal teaching , known as pedagogy, where the teacher directs all the learning.  -
•      informal teaching known as andragogy, where the learner is the focus, for example, via group activity and discussions
•      andragogy can include your learners’ experiences and knowledge by involving them whenever possible, and building upon what they already know and what interests them

10.  Pragmatism

• Associated  with John Dewey (1859-1952) 
• believes that learners learnt more from guided experiences than from authoritarian instruction
• learning recognised life, not just preparation for life
• Using different delivery approaches, combined with practical activities, will help reach the different learning preferences of the individuals you are teaching.

11.  Sensory theory

• Associated with Laird (1985) 
• learning occurs when the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are stimulated
• easy for a practical session, but not so for  a theoretical subject
• learning session to be full of fun and interesting, relating to all the senses, 
•  helping your learners remember the topics better through sensory approach
• two other senses suggested for teacher by this theory: a sense of humor and common sense.