Let students be the masters of
their own choices and destiny; let teachers be the torch-bearers and
path-finders of their bright future
For long there
has been a sustained advocacy campaign going on around the world to transform
student-teacher engagement into a mentor-mentee relationship. Coronavirus pandemic
has made these voices and demands even shriller. A teacher just teaches and delivers content
whereas a mentor's role is to guide and to inspire; to give advice and to
support the mentee. A mentor can help his student improve his or her abilities
and skills through observation, continuous assessment, monitoring and counseling.
Online teaching amid lockdown has thrown enormous challenges before teachers in
terms of retaining interest and attention span of students and getting them
fully involved in the teaching-learning process in absence of a real classroom
situation that allows physical interaction and live one-to-one exchanges
between teachers and their students. It has also posed several challenges to
the online examination system in terms of bridging the trust deficit and
ensuring a credible student evaluation sans any copying or mutual consultation.
It has turned out to be truly a herculean task to ensure full presence as well
as involvement of all the students in almost six hour long online sessions on
daily basis. While initially out of sheer excitement and enthusiasm for the new
system students were quite curious to attend their classes online, with the
passage of time exhaustion and fatigue appears to have gradually set in forcing
the teachers to look for novel, innovative and creative means to sustain this
exercise and retain student interest and involvement in their classes.
David Shulman,
President of the Carnige Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching defines
good teaching as the one during which “students are visible, engaged, attentive,
involved and participating”. He further adds that “good teaching is passionate
and it induces an emotional response among the students”. Good mentorship
evokes and engages practical and analytical thinking, critical evaluation,
constructive mindset and problem‐solving skills that can be applied in a
variety of settings and perspectives. It leaves a positive impact upon
students’ values, commitments, ideals and mindsets. In times of coronavirus
pandemic when most of the conventional practices have been disrupted and age-old
stereotypes have been shaken up we need to introspect whether we have
assimilated these basic principles of good teaching and mentorship and accordingly
improvised our teaching methods or we have continued with our redundant and
obsolete methods even in our online teaching. As per Morgan and Reinhart,
“empathy is critical to good teaching, especially to teaching emotionally
disturbed/stressed/conflict-affected/behaviorally disordered students. Empathy
provides the ability to know the students’ world in the way that they live it,
to interpret that understanding back to the pupil, and then provide boundaries
of reality so that they may function more competently”. Question is do we
harness and exhibit empathy in our day-to-day teaching or does it fail to inspire
awe or for that matter even touch the hearts and minds of our students in a
manner that is essential to foster a positive change.
In the present
day context, teachers have to play an enabling role in the holistic development
of the students. This involves not only imparting knowledge and skills, but
also developing critical and innovative thinking, engaging them in research and
extension activities, furnishing instructional material with the aid of information
technology tools and above all counseling them for their personalized
educational needs. Modern day teacher has to be a friend, a philosopher, a
guide, a counselor, a mentor and
sometimes a caregiver too. Last
one might in all likelihood surprise you a bit. Teachers as caregivers can
serve as rich and powerful resources for those students who feel frustrated,
helpless, rebellious and agitated amid stressful times. As suggested by Deiro
(1996), “Students value adults who value them”. Thus, students who are living
in seemingly intolerable situations but have a pro-social adult outside their
home environs who cares about them will adjust their behavior to carefully
safeguard that relationship. Noddings (1984) articulates that student–teacher
relationships provide a rich arena in which students are transformed by an
ethic of care. Care translates into interventions that are in the best
educational, emotional and psychological interests of the students (Morgan,
1987). When students fail to receive care within their classroom, they are
often reduced to a ‘case’ or a mere ‘Roll Number.’
Martin
Heidegger says, “What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking
times is that we are still not thinking”. It is high time when we should think
how best we can reach out to our students during these stressful times of
lockdown and social distancing and provide the best possible learning solutions
to them in a very comfortable and acceptable manner. Merely completing the
formality of holding an online class and covering some portion of the
prescribed syllabus might not suffice anymore. We may have to go an extra mile
in making our online teaching experience more refreshing, motivating, inspiring
and interesting. This can be made possible by making our content as applied as
possible, by citing more and more examples from real life situations, by
involving students in an open discourse with full freedom to express their
viewpoints, by using case studies embedded with cartoons, animations,
illustrations and similar stuff to draw our point home, by keeping the
atmosphere light with a bit of decent and dignified humour, by engaging
students in lucrative and healthy mutual competitions, by bringing the best out
of non-responsive and reclusive students, by helping the students explore their
potential and by acting more like one of them than the one on top of them. By
innovative and creative thinking teachers can turn their online classes into
the most sought after hangouts for their students.
‘Thinking’
includes a set of cognitive activities that we use to process information, make
connections, solve problems, take decisions and create new ideas. It will be
prudent to take a pledge on the teachers’ day today to transform our students
into thinkers - creative and analytical thinkers. Only when they become good
thinkers, they can be creative innovators and credible nation builders. Creative
thinking refers to the ability to conceive new and innovative ideas by breaking
from established thoughts, theories, norms and procedures. It involves putting
things together in new and imaginative ways. It is often referred to as
“thinking out-of-the-box.” Analytical thinking on the other hand refers to the
ability to separate a whole into its basic parts in order to examine the parts
and their mutual relationships. It involves thinking in a logical, step-wise
manner to break down a larger system of information into its contiguous parts. By
way of analytical and creative thinking we actually need to promote critical
thinking among our students that refers to the ability to exercise careful
evaluation or judgment in order to determine the authenticity, accuracy, worth,
validity or value of something. In addition to precise, objective analysis,
critical thinking involves synthesis, evaluation, reflection, and
reconstruction. Rather than strictly breaking down the information, critical
thinking explores other elements that could have an influence on the
conclusions. Once we succeed in our mission of evoking creative, analytical and
critical thinking among our students goals of our education will be met in
their real sense. Positive, constructive, sequential, convergent as well as
divergent thinking will automatically fall into the place. At present we are
not allowing thinking of any kind, we are only spoon feeding and storing
information in their brains without allowing them to process it.
Teachers’ Day
celebration should mark the beginning of an irrevocable transformation of
student-teacher relationship into the one that encourages questioning and
critical analysis, that fosters creative thinking and helps build constructive
insights; one that dwells into different perspectives on every topic of
discussion, that explores new possibilities and evokes innovative solutions to
our intriguing problems; one that is based on empathy and compassion, care and
companionship rather than being a whip-wielding master. Let students be the
masters of their own choices and destiny. Let teachers be the torch-bearers and
path-finders of their bright and magnificent future. Let us transform students’
yearning for marks and grades into their quest for knowledge and learning. On
this day let us think about ways and means how to break the shackles of marks and certificates and make our students effective contributors of the knowledge society
who can contribute significantly towards nation building. A minor shake-up will
be of no avail, a massive restructuring is needed for the same.
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