Teaching Aptitude Test - 4

A Headmaster/principal in a school is vital to school administration. He/she is the leader for both administrative and instructional processes and manages the school. Let us discuss the position of the principal in a school and his/ her responsibilities:

• Plans and organizes school activities,
• Allocates duties to staff and non-teaching staff,
• Maintains relationship with parents, community and Government,
• Develops networking with other schools,
• Acquaints himself with recent trends in technology and information,
• Organizes social activities,
• Mobilises available resources for the development of the school,
• Visualises future of the school in the society,
• Coordinates different school activities,
• Appraises performance of the teaching staff, non-teaching staff and students, and
• Organizes staff meetings on various aspects for decision-making. 

Hence, a Principal manages the school.

Effective teaching includes teacher behavior, teacher knowledge regarding the subject matter, teacher beliefs, and teachers' dedication towards improving her students. Here effective teaching is defined as the ability to improve student achievements.

Teacher's favorable attitude towards teaching is related to the following key behaviors:

• Teacher enthusiasm is generally recognized as one of the most essential and desirable qualities and characteristics of effective teachers. It sparks the curiosity of students and jumpstarts their motivation to learn. Teacher enthusiasm can lead to better teaching evaluations, positive attitudes toward teachers, better student performance, and improved classroom behavior.
• For effective teaching, teachers put emphasis more on the teaching and learning processes rather than controlling the class. Teachers create learning tasks appropriate to the student’s level of understanding and use an integrated approach of teaching to achieve learning objectives.
• Effective teaching requires teachers to possess detailed subject matter knowledge intertwined with knowledge of pedagogy, curriculum, student behavior, learning objectives, and outcomes. Determining the goals for the course will clarify and give a larger picture to the teacher as well as to the students to learn and accomplish. But his focus should not be just completing the course.

Note- A teacher must identify the mistake and help students to rectify them. Just diagnosing the mistake might end up denting the self- confidence of the student. Hence, it is not an effective means of teaching.

Creativity: 

• Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts.
• An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new.
• From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness.
• Creativity is “the interaction among aptitude, process, and the environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context”.
• Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident", "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness, and humor. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques.
• Creativity is now considered a psychological trait. Today it is accepted that creativity is a combination of cognitive, conative, and emotional factors which interact with the environment dynamically. As all of these factors are present in human beings and all these variables affect us to a certain degree, it can be argued that a specific combination of them results in creativity.

Conclusion: The history of creativity assessment is as old as the concept itself. Researchers from various cultures and disciplines attempted to define the concept of creativity and offer a valid way to assess it. Creativity is generally defined as the ability to produce work that is novel and appropriate. Researchers in the field attempted to measure creativity from different perspectives. Historically, some intelligence test developers considered creativity to be a part of intelligence or a totally independent construct. But intelligence and creativity are either overlapping terms or disjoint terms. Psychological testing is done for different psychological traits like personality, intelligence, attitude, etc. Group testing could be done to find the trait in a group of individuals like intelligence, but creativity is related to individual ability. Hence, we can conclude that social testing will be able to measure creativeness in an individual. So, option (1) is correct.

The stage of adolescence is defined as the period of development and adjustment that occurs between the childhood and adulthood.

Key Points

• According to WHO (World Health Organization), adolescents are people aged between 10 to 19 years.
• Adolescence is a stage of life with "unique health and development requirements". It is also a time to learn new skills, regulate emotions and relationships and develop the abilities that will be helpful for the adolescent years.
• It is a critical period for cognitive development and it makes a change in the way individuals think and reason about problems and ideas.

Hence, it is clear that according to WHO 10 to 19 age group falls in adolescence.

Additional Information

Stages of human development​:

• The development process continues, even after a person has attained physical maturity. As they interact with the environment, different changes takes place in their behavior. The stages of development have been classified into different stages as shown below:
  • Infancy (0-2 years)
  • Childhood
    • Early childhood or Toy age (2-6 years)
    • Late childhood (6 to 11 years)
  • Adolescence- (10-19 years)

The most recently accepted paradigm of learning is that a learner is a constructor of knowledge.

Constructivism is a learning paradigm which suggests that:

• Learning to be an active, social enhanced method of knowledge construction
• Knowledge is not required to be transferred to the learner rather be constructed by the learner
• The learner constructs his own knowledge based on his cognitive abilities and interpretation of the subjective meaning
• Learning is obtained through the interaction of learner's prior knowledge, conditioning, ideas, and experiences
• Learning is dependent on social, cultural, and linguistic factors.

Therefore Teaching should adhere 

• Explaining the process and procedures rather than mere dictates in class
• Should use language tools to aid student's understanding in a way that language creates the subjective and explanatory meaning of the topic.

Maxims of Teaching: Maxims are nothing but simple guidelines or principles which help the teachers to make decisions and act accordingly during the teaching process. 

Important PointsTo make learning more efficient, simpler things should be told first, and then slowly the complex things should be started.

• Starting with a simple concept makes the children understand and learn the concept fast, makes the class interesting and productive.
• Because of this, they develop interest and confidence, and thus, they tend to learn complex concept easily.

 Key Points

Maxims of teaching

• Simple to complex:
  • ​It is the psychology of a child that he wants the content in simplified form.
  • Therefore the teacher must move from simple facts and then take learners towards a little more difficult state.​

Additional Information

Others Main Maxims of Teaching:  

• Known to Unknown
• Concrete to Abstract
• Direct to indirect
• Particular to general
• Analysis to Synthesis
• Empirical to Rational
• Psychological to Logical
• Whole to Part.
• Indefinite to definite
• From seen to unseen

Hence, we can conclude that "Simple or easy things should be presented to the students for the first time and gradually he should move on to complex or difficult things"  is the correct example for a maxim from simple to complex.

A teacher carries out activities for the assessment and evaluation of the performance of the student to know the progress of a student. It is essential to assess and evaluate the performance or achievement of the students. Therefore, assessment and evaluation are regarded as integral parts of the educational process & they can also play a very important role in its improvement.

A teacher needs to be familiar with the tools which are commonly used in the school. These tools help in the teaching-learning process. There are several tests used in schools including Objective type tests, Essay type tests, Short answer tests, Projective type tests, etc.

Essay Type Tests

• The essay type questions are still commonly used tools of evaluation, despite the increasingly - wider applicability of the short answer and objective type questions. There are certain outcomes of learning (e.g. organizing, summarising, integrating ideas, and expressing in one's own way) which cannot be satisfactorily measured through objective type tests. 
• The importance of essay tests lies in the measurement of such instructional outcomes. An essay type question may give full freedom to the students to write any number of pages. The required response may vary in length. A limit may be imposed by restricting the content and the length of the student's response in the statement of a question. Restricted response type items are quite useful for testing learning outcomes that require interpretation, application of outcomes that are specific and clearly defined in nature. 
• Such types of questions help to reduce subjectivity in marking, which is considered to be the major drawback of essay tests. 

Objective type tests

• Questions in this test are characterized by their objectivity in scoring as there is one and only one correct answer to them.
• They are effective in testing specific/factual knowledge, whereas the ability to express in one's own words and similar outcomes could never be tested by them.
• Objective type questions can broadly be classified into two categories:
  1. Supply type: In this form, the questions resemble short answer type, however, the document of objectivity has to be met at all cost.
  2. Selective type: In this form, students are not required to supply the answer. The answer is included in the question itself and students have to select the correct answer.
• Objective type questions can further be divided into the following forms:
  1. True False type
  2. Multiple choice type
  3. Matching type 

Short answer tests

• Short answer questions can test many aspects of learning in terms of subject matter, abilities, and skills.
• Answers to these questions are rather specific. Thus, they provide feedback to the teacher essential for effective teaching.
• Although there are many forms of short answer type questions, their common features are as follows:
  • They usually take a short time (5 minutes approximately) to read and answer.
  • They include some guidance or extent of the answer required, e.g., length of answer (number of words sentences), space or specific instruction, such as "In not more than 20 words".
  • The answer is supplied by the student. 

Projective type test: It is a personality test in which the individual gives the answer to ambiguous scenes, word, or images or in some cases even drawings. Here the interpretations and imaginations of the individuals are assessed.

Hence, The compositional skills and creativity in the presentation of students can be most effectively evaluated by essay type tests.

The classroom teacher engages in critical reflection and inquiry in order to improve knowledge and skills to effectively engage students and improve their learning.

Key Points

If a student is very ill in the class:

• First of all, the teacher should analyze his condition. If he can be treated in school then immediately give him the required first-aid.
• And if he is very crucial then the teacher must take him to the doctor.
• After seeing the doctor and after having an understanding of the illness the student has, the teacher should call parents and inform them.
• The student should be suggested to take a rest and to take regular medications.

Hint

• ​The teacher is not a doctor. He can give medicines for simple illnesses like fever or headache but if a student is seriously ill then it is advisable to take him to the doctor.
• Resting will not provide comfort to students until he has been given the required medications.
• Before calling his parents, the teacher should take him to the doctor as the student is critical and he needs to be treated immediately.

Hence, the first step for a teacher, if a student falls ill is to take him to the doctor.

Meaningful learning occurs in an environment that is free of distraction and disruption. The learning environment refers to the environment that is free of distraction and disruption. It introduces a new dimension to educational experiences.

• A positive learning environment introduces a new dimension to the educational experiences beyond the textbook, making learning more constant and enlivening.
• There are four categories of classroom environment including dysfunctional, adequate, orderly restrictive, and orderly enabling/flexible environment, in which adequate classroom environment exhibits the basic level of order for meaningful learning, but the teacher still struggles to maintain it.

4 kinds of classroom environments

• Dysfunctional – Teacher and Students struggle for control. feeling uneasy, difficult to sustain academic work.
• Adequate – Basic level of order to accomplish some academic work. Still tension, interruptions are common.
• Orderly-restrictive – Run smoothly, highly managed. Routines are tight. Limited range of instructional strategies.
• Orderly-flexible – Run smoothly, characterizes by loose (not loose) structures. Wide range of instructional strategies and classroom routines.

Hence, we conclude that in a dysfunctional classroom environment, teacher and Students struggle for control, feel uneasy and finds difficult to sustain academic work.

There are many schools of philosophy which are basically philosophical movements that determine an idea. It represents a broad view of many individual philosophers who may or may not agree. Some of the western schools of philosophy are Realism, idealism, pragmatism, naturalism, Marxism, etc.

Key Points

• Naturalism is a philosophical belief that understands nature as the entire reality. 
• It believes that there is nothing beyond or other than nature.
• Nature explains all existence of human beings.
• Naturalists believe that society is meant for the individual and not the individual for society.
• They believe that an individual is born good but is corrupted by society.
• Therefore, an individual must remain away from society if he wants to remain pure and unadulterated.
• It is most authentically understood in the slogan ‘Back to Nature’.
• It believes that education must conform to the natural processes of mental development and physical growth of a child.
• It should be a pleasurable activity.
• Spencer & Mc Dougall & Darwin, Lamarck, Rousseau, Percy Nunn are some of the proponents of naturalism.

Thus, the statement, ‘modern society can not be a source of knowledge and experience’ is favored by Naturalism.Important Points

• Marxism –
  • It is a philosophical, social, and political movement derived from the works of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
  • According to the Marxist perspective on education, the system reproduces and legitimates class inequality.
  • It works in the interests of capitalist employers.
  • Therefore, teachers should be critical of their teaching and their behavior in the classrooms.
• Pragmatism -
  • Pragmatism is an educational philosophy that believes education should be teaching students the things that are practical for life.
  • It should encourage them to grow into better people.
  • John Dewey and William James were famous pragmatists.
• Realism –
  • Realism believes that things which are known or perceived or nature which is independent of whether anyone is thinking about or perceiving them are real.
  • Realism aims to prepare learners for real and practical life.
  • It calls for teaching-learning based on the subjects and interests of the learners.