Teaching and Learning in Engineering (TALE)

Prof. N.J. Rao

Lecture - 02
Education and Teaching

Welcome to the unit 2 of module 1 of TALE. The unit is we are trying to look at the words
education and teaching.
(Refer Slide Time: 00:43)

And what we have done in the first unit, we stated very clearly that the college or the department
offering the program needs to design and conduct its programs to meet several stated outcomes
to meet the accreditation criteria. So it is no longer designing a course purely based on a
particular disciple or a subject. It is much more than that. That is it has to plan and conduct its
activities to meet several stated outcomes. That is what we stated.

We will continue to reinforce this particular requirement. And we also realized that there are
many important characteristics of a good engineer, besides having sound knowledge of
engineering sciences and technologies. The other requirements we may broadly classify them as
professional requirements and whereas the sound knowledge of engineering sciences and
technology is the disciplinary requirements.
So both disciplinary and professional requirements are important for a graduating engineer.
(Refer Slide Time: 02:08)

Now coming to this particular unit 2, the outcome is get reintroduced to the familiar words
“education” and “teaching”. As we mentioned in the first unit, “education” and “teaching” are 2
familiar words to especially teachers because that is their profession. But, it is necessary to
formally get reintroduced to those words and that will be the major goal of this particular unit.
(Refer Slide Time: 02:45)

In its broad sense, education refers to any kind of experience or any activity an individual does
which has impact on the person’s thinking, character, or physical ability. Anything like that is
considered education. And education in this sense never ends, we are continuously interacting
with outside world, we are acting on events outside and we are observing and all of them will
have these experiences, will have some influence on us. To this extent education never really
ever ends and it runs throughout our lives.
(Refer Slide Time: 03:42)

Whereas education in its technical sense, is the process by which society deliberately transmits
its “cultural heritage”. “Cultural heritage” refers to its accumulated knowledge, values and skills
from one generation to the other. Here education in this context is concerned with what you call
intentional learning, and intentional learning happens in schools, colleges and universities. That
means whenever you enter a school or a college or enter into a specific program, there is
whoever has designed the program will say these are the things that the learner has to learn. So to
that extent it is intentional learning that happens in formal educational institutions.
Now here comes the bigger question. So if you want to educate people wisely, we must know
what we educate them to become. Who decides what is it that the students should learn? And in
this process of decision making you come across a whole bunch of questions and what we call it
as “philosophy of education”.
(Refer Slide Time: 05:05)
So to know what to educate, it becomes necessary to ask what can be the purpose of life and
what sort of life it should be? This becomes necessary to consider education philosophically. And
educational philosophy particularly which is a subject by itself involves with the application of
formal philosophy to education. The same questions that formal philosophy asks; educational
philosophy asks the same question specifically with respect to the education.
(Refer Slide Time: 05:47)

Now we are not going to deal with philosophy of education in detail. All that is necessary is that
implicitly we may be operating in under some umbrella of some education philosophy which we
may or may not be aware of. Broadly, the philosophies can be classified under, again this
classification is not the universal classification. People may disagree with that. So I call it one
convenient classification of philosophy is idealism, realism, pragmatism, existentialism, and
analysis.

We are not going to go through the details of each except to give an example of one and that
sample we call it “pragmatism”.
(Refer Slide Time: 06:41)

What does pragmatism is one school of philosophy. So under that how is, under that how does
the education philosophy look like? First of all, pragmatism, it is a practical and utilitarian
philosophy. There is no established system of ideas which will be true for all times. This is an
assumption that is made by pragmatism, with which I am sure many Indian schools of
philosophy will not agree. Pragmatists want education according to aptitudes and abilities of the
individual; individual must be respected and education planned to cater to his inclinations and
capacities.
It makes the activity as the basis of all teaching and learning. If you are operating in the school of
pragmatism, activity is the basis of all teaching and learning. That means both teachers and
student should be or should be involved in activities and not one activity like only listening or
speaking.

So this is one school of philosophy or it is for you to decide whether you agree or whether you
would like to operate under a particular school of philosophy.
(Refer Slide Time: 08:06)

Coming to higher education, we are, the aims of higher education cannot be and are not that
universal like the way it happens in school education. Because the educational philosophy is you
have wide range of schools when it comes to school education. What kind of person you want to
train for. And the at higher education level the aims are not that universal. They start becoming
very specific.

Universities, colleges offering the programs, will identify the “aims” and we are going to call
them as “program outcomes”. And in our case, some outcomes are defined by National Board of
Accreditation; some outcomes are the universities or colleges offering the program will have to
decide. In the case of professional courses, the national level accrediting agencies identify the
program outcomes with some freedom given to the department offering the programs.

In case of NAAC, when you are looking at other than professional degrees, like what we call as
general programs, NAAC really does not identify what should be the program outcomes. It is for
the university or the college offering the program will have to identify its own program
outcomes. That is the kind of freedom given under NAAC for to institutions offering the,
offering what we call as general programs, like a 3-year degree programs in sciences, humanities,
social sciences and so on.
So, at higher education level, the philosophical questions are I would not call less important but
they in some sense they are already addressed and get translated into a set of program outcomes
defined by accrediting agency.
(Refer Slide Time: 10:29)

Coming to next word “teaching”, teaching is a process of helping others to acquire knowledge,
skills and values. What knowledge, skills and values to be imparted or decided by or determined
by the particular school of philosophy of education limited or by the accrediting agency which is
overseeing the particular technical or the programs. Now teaching is a process of helping others
to acquire whatever identified knowledge, skills and values.

And further teaching is a process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings. First
attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings and then intervening so that they learn
particular things, whatever that are identified as stated by one Mr. Smith. Now what are these
interventions, what does a teacher does the teaching, what do the interventions take place? What
kind of interventions?

The interventions commonly take the form of questioning, listening, giving information or what
we call transferring information and explaining some phenomenon, demonstrating a skill or a
process, testing, understanding and capacity and facilitating learning activities such as, there is a
whole bunch of them. A few examples are note taking, discussion, assignment, writing, and
simulations.

So the interventions consist of this and the teacher chooses a subset of these to kind of transfer or
rather to facilitate students to acquire knowledge, skills and values. That is what teaching is all.
(Refer Slide Time: 12:45)

Now there are what we call models of teaching. Teaching models may help teachers to create
conducive environment for learning and they may help teachers to plan learning centered
educational experiences, may stimulate development of new and better forms and opportunities
for education. Because, even a choice of how a teacher wants to intervene with the students in a
particular context you again there are some assumptions involved in that.

So those assumptions lead to different models of teaching. Once again we are not going to get
into the details of models of teaching. That itself become a separate course or two.
(Refer Slide Time: 13:38)
There are families of teaching models, what we call information processing family. Why do we
want to call it family? Under each family again there are maybe 5, 6 sometimes 8 teaching
models available and all of them have been experimented, this subject being fairly teaching
model subject of teaching models is fairly old, there is a whole lot of literature on this. And you
have information processing family, a personal family, social family, and behavioral system
family.

So you have a bunch of teaching models and maybe different these choice of this particular
teaching model will become important more at school level. So we are not going to get into the
details of the models under each family.
(Refer Slide Time: 14:38)
But if you consider what you may call was generic model though people classify William
Glasser’s Model under behavioral family model but why we chose Glasser’s model of teaching
is, it comes pretty close to what we are going to when we talk about course design, we are
talking of ADDIE Model and this comes pretty close to that. So we present the features of
Glasser Model of Teaching.

Now it consists of 4 stages. Instructional objectives stated in behavioral terms. What are these
behavioral terms? That means what should the student be able to do at the end of a learning unit?
So that is what how you should behave. What are the things you should be able to do? So
instructional objectives are learning objectives if you want to call so are stated in terms of
behavioral terms.

And then you must be very clear about what is the entering behavior of students. I cannot teach
my course on digital electronics to a necessarily to a student of let us say 4th standard. When I
teach something, I am expecting the student entering into my course to know something, to have
the required background or required prerequisites as we call it. There is no point in stating your
outcomes in a manner which are not compatible with entering behavior of students.

And sometimes the entering behavior may be such that your course may become trivial for the,
because they already know most of it, or there may be such a gap between the instructional
objectives that you have chosen and the entering level of the students. So both are unacceptable.
So it should be very clear in planning for a course what are the entering behavior of the students.
Then from the entering behavior you want your students to attain the stated objectives and you
now identify instruction procedures that facilitate them to go towards the stated objectives.

And then having done that, that means these what you may call as the interventions of the by the
teacher or by the instructor. And then having done that you want to measure to what extent they
have been attained, the instructional objectives have been attained. If you have no way of finding
out to what extent they have been achieved or attained, we just do not know whether whatever
you have done in the classroom makes any sense or in the end student knows anything.

So there is a performance of the, there are performance assessment, that means I should be able
to assess to what extent the student has attained the stated objectives, okay. That is broadly the 4
stages. We will see these 4 stages in some maybe using different terminology will keep appearing
when we are designing actually the course. For example Module 1 will dominantly focus on how
to write Instructional Objectives in behavioral terms.

However, the success of this model depends on the competency and ability of the teacher in
terms of skills like the formulation of objectives, use of proper strategies and techniques of
evaluation. This is where what happens is all teachers are not the same. Based on their
background, they have their own preferences and all teachers are not teaching the same subject.

So there is some features of the subject that determine what kind of instructional procedures and
what kind of objectives that you can achieve. It will also depend on the context what kind of
resources that you have that are required to ensure that the instructional objectives can be
attained. So broadly I feel the Glasser’s model of teaching comes pretty close to what we are
talking about the other one called instructional model, instructional system design model what
we call ADDIE.
(Refer Slide Time: 19:40)
Now coming to the assignments of this particular unit, these assignments are planned only to
sensitize to the many features of educational teaching not really to master them at this stage. That
is not our intention in talking about these two words education and teaching. We will also be
talking about three other words that we normally use in the next module.

But regarding thess two words it will be desirable if the learner spends some amount of time
exploring the literature on that so that these two words mean something specific to you. So the
assignment is give your reasons why you should be concerned with philosophy of higher
education, okay? Give your own reasons. It could be a few statements, few sentences that are all
required and then select a model of teaching that you consider will help you to plan your
teaching the subject that you are presently concerned with.

Which model of teaching out of the many that are available, that are practiced around the world
which is the model that you would like to rather at the first stage of your interaction with this
which is the one that you would prefer. Write a justification for your choice, maximum of 250
words. And there is a huge amount of literature on the internet, so searching for literature is not
an issue.

Some material will be made available to you when you are going through this course which will
give you the kind of internet links that you can explore.
(Refer Slide Time: 21:36)

Going to the next unit, next unit will like the present unit will reintroduce the familiar words
learning, assessment, and instruction. And we also particularly emphasize the centrality of
assessment in facilitating good learning, okay? We explore these words and this concept in the
following module. Thank you very much for your attention.