The teaching can be made effective by considering the psychological perspective of teaching for children. Teachers use teacher Engagement Strategies to frame various principles while creating a positive teaching-learning environment. These strategies would always work in creating interests in the children for learning. The desire to learn makes children’s learning more effective and easier and helps them retain the subject matter in mind for a longer time.
Teachers’ engagement with students will develop a collaborative feeling in them. They will take motivation from their teachers. The teacher engagement strategy is how students develop knowledge, skills, and values from direct experiences like an internship, service-learning, research, and other creative and professional work experiences.
What is teacher engagement?
Teacher engagement is a practical application of psychological principles that guide children’s interests, attitudes, abilities and improve their overall development. Creative and recreational activities should be involved in the teaching-learning process. Immediate feedback and response help the learner to adapt things easily.
While teaching, the teacher must show caring and sympathetic behaviour, which will make the teaching-learning process quite effective. Unlike individual learning, teachers engage in collaborative learning, which capitalizes on one another’s resources and skills. Students evaluate and monitor one another’s work. Collaborative nature allows students to interact, work independently, develop listening, engagement, and empathy skills apart from academic studies.
Teacher engagement strategies to foster a collaborative culture
Early and frequent communication
Speaking with students regularly, listening to their thoughts, and getting involved in solving their problems will lead to a strong bond between them. Frequent communication with children produces results in being responsible and courageous. After assigning some tasks to the students, they need to be checked at regular intervals, and their work must be appreciated if done well in time and correctly. Active learning starts with posing questions, problems, and scenarios before students and getting them answered.
Engagement with the larger school community
Community engagement is a strategic process with the specific purpose of working with an identified group of people. It shifts the focus from the individual to the collective, with implications for inclusiveness and diversification. Larger school community engagement is a dynamic process that facilitates communication, interaction, involvement, and exchange of ideas among children.
The purpose of community engagement in education:
- To enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity.
- To enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning.
- To prepare educated and engaged citizens.
- To sensitize the students about the problems of other students.
- To strengthen democratic values and civic responsibilities.
- To eliminate barriers among students
- To enhance the quality of life
The community engagement will provide ‘service-learning’ to the students. This combines learning goals and community service in such a way that it will enhance student growth and behaviour.
Notified initiatives and processes
- Motivation – The teacher’s job is to motivate the learner by creating different interesting situations. Some problems linked with their life situation must be put forth. The student will try to be inside that problem and make all efforts to find its proper solution.
- Feedback and reinforcement – While teaching, the teacher should try to give positive reinforcement to the students. Some sort of feedback helps the students to learn things better. The teacher should always show leadership in class and try to imbibe leadership qualities in students.
- Fostering creativity- The teacher should be able to judge creativity in students, encourage and applause them.
- Co-operation- A co-operation between both strengthens the process of learning. It should flow from teacher towards students; then surely students will cooperate with teachers and themselves.
- Self-learning- The teacher should not believe in spoon-feeding and help students acquire self-learning habits. He should remain there in the background helping and guiding them wherever they need. Provide students training to senses during the process of teaching; the learner should be trained for observation, experimentation, identification, discrimination, and generalization. All these activities depend on their senses. Teachers should organize field trips, picnics, outings, and excursions to help students gain from physically experiencing things.
- Child-centeredness- Teaching should be child-centred rather than teacher-centred. The subject matter should be made meaningful for the child. The student should be made mentally prepared for their studies.
- Correlation- Effective teaching makes the students feel everything for a better life; the learner should feel as if he is being prepared for real-life situations. Education which does prepare students for life is meaningless. While teaching a subject, a teacher should also try to correlate those subjects with some other objects.
- Model presentation- The teacher’s personality, behaviour, and actions should be a good example for the students. He should reflect regularity, punctuality, honesty, and sincerity through his behaviour.
A Positive professional culture
The teacher must know certain principles that help him acquire proficiency in his profession. Some of the important principles are as follows-
- Teaching should involve skills and knowledge.
- A good teacher shall have a well-planned schedule at all times. The order and sequence of events must be clear.
- A good teacher must be suggestive rather than dictating in nature.
- He must attempt to create a democratic environment in which the rights of students are respected.
- A teacher should stimulate through teaching, a suggestion of new activities, criticism, and direct suggestion.
- He must take into account the children’s experience; it will ensure the error-free result of children and new experience will be achieved effectively.
Conclusion
The teaching-learning process is an important part of the educational process; they are interrelated. Teaching establishes a harmonious relationship between teacher, student, and subject.
Learning is a complex process. It is a modification of behaviour in adjusting to the environment and acquiring new experiences. Good teaching engagement strategies diagnose academic difficulties and are remedial as well as liberate the student from rigid teaching.
InventtEd’s psychological and personality development service enables educators and institutions to formulate engagement strategies that foster a collaborative culture within the institutions. To know more about our services, get in touch with us!
