Creative Work

Following is my article, published in "Reflections" a special issue of a News Letter (Volume 12) of M/S Sultan Chand & Sons released on 5th September 2007, to mark the birthday of S. Dr. Radha Krishnan,the second President of India, whose birthday is being celebrated as Teacher's Day in India, since he was one of the foremost scholars of comparative religion and philosophy in the 20th Centuary. He created a bridge between Eastern and Western thoughts justifying that each one is compatible with each other. He introduced Western idealism into Indian philosophy and was the first scholar of importance to provide a comprehensive exegesis of India's religious and philosophical literature to English speaking people.

DIRECT VS. INDIRECT INSTRUCTIONS

In a classroom situation, different instructional strategies are deployed by the teachers. Decision making regarding the instructional approach is taken based on curriculum, content, the prior experiences and knowledge of students, learner's interest, student's learning styles and the developmental levels of the learner. Normally, a teacher extends direct instructions or indirect instructions for teaching the children.

Direct Instructions

Teachers following this style of teaching provide the students with much of the information they need, often through lectures, explanations, examples, and problem-solving. Most direct instruction techniques only allow for minimal student-teacher interaction, and need to be supplemented by review, practice, and group discussions. This is the traditional way of teaching.

Direct instructions style of teaching is not an effective way of teaching for the children with ‘higher level of thinking’ or ‘ability to analyse’ or ‘evaluate the acquired knowledge’. It cannot be used to teach material over a long period of time or present additional details to students who have already mastered the basic concepts.

Indirect Instruction

The indirect approach to teaching presents students with instructional stimuli through materials, objects, and events, and requires students to go beyond the basic information that they are given to make their own conclusions and generalisations. Indirect instruction allows teachers to engage their students in activities which require the students to learn independently.

Students take an active role in their learning by developing ideas, testing their own conclusions, and discuss their results. This allows students to independently discover patterns and relationships in their learning and knowledge. Students go beyond the basic problems presented to them, allowing them to develop advanced levels of thinking and analysis. Indirect instruction is most effective at teaching a process or method of learning, and allows for a dynamic teaching and learning environment.

This technique of teaching may also be referred to as “Discovery Approach”. Guided Discovery approach to teaching develops an individual with an analytical brain and scientific aptitude towards learning and acquiring more and more knowledge of the world. This helps the children to apply their acquired knowledge to deal with new situations of life.

"Discovery" approach to teaching is a method that allows students to uncover their individual talents and abilities through a hands-on interactive problem-solving, exploratory, learning process. The success of this process totally depends upon the guidance accorded by the Educator.

The Discovery Approach develops the whole person and respects the individual learning styles, interests, and abilities of each student.For the success of the process, the Educator is supposed, not to teach the desired concepts directly but is to create a situation and an environment congenial for the learner to explore and discover the desired facts and principles for himself. Educator is to inspire the children to engage their head, heart and hands-on learning experiences. By actively engaging them in problem-solving activities, children are to be given the opportunity to develop a real understanding of the skills and concepts to be taught. To be clearer about the practical aspect of the ‘Guided Discovery approach of Teaching’ let us look in to the following illustration:

To make the children learn about the ‘Clock Arithmetic’ the educator may pose a problem:

“A 10 – hour count down is planned for a rocket launching. If the count down begins at 5 in the morning and there are no delays, at what time the rocket is launched.”

Questions like this, stimulate the children’s thinking and they start working on the problem to discover the solution to the problem posed to them. The success of the process depends upon the guidance to be extended by the teacher for the analysis of the solution obtained by the child and drawing of the inference, followed by the genralisation of the result obtained.

- Y.P.Verma

Retd. Dy. Director, D.A.V.College Managing Committee