Online Education Blog

I have not posted here for quite sometime and my regular readers would know the reason behind it. I’m on my final few weeks of finishing all my assignments and once all of us submit our assignments, I’ll start publishing them part by part.

Today, I am just getting little bit personal and would like to let you know why I became a teacher and didn’t pursued other professions though I had little stint in the entertainment/service sector as an executive way back in 1997. So here we go…

I sometimes ask myself why I chose to be a teacher! Since kindergarten, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I was older, I always said, ¨I want to be a teacher¨. I don´t know exactly why or whether I was conscient that being a teacher is a tough job, but this idea stayed with me over the years and, step by step, became a reality.
We have all had a teacher in our lives, actually more than one. We even loved some of these, or hated them. Children are the ones who notice when a teacher does his/her job well, or when he/she has no aptitudes or capacities to teach the others. There are people designed for this career, who have teaching in their blood. Anyone can be called ¨teacher¨, but not everyone can be a ¨Teacher¨- in capitals, which means they are deserving respect and trust. And this is what I want to be, a Teacher.
I guess that my passion is caused by the fact that I realise that each of my students may become of value for this world, since they are the basic ingredients of a thriving community. This motivates me to achieve my professional goals - to send information and to hammer out personalities.
Being a teacher is much easier nowadays than it used to be. There are so many schools that offer Elementary Education degrees, that being a teacher is only one step away from you. One can even choose online degrees, and this means a lot of time is saved and, your desires are quicker to fruit. But before making a decision, you must realise that this job requires courage, confidence in a better future for your students, and being in a permanent search of new things; it requires innovation and discovery.
As far as I´m concerned, I think this is a very difficult profession, but a profession that also brings satisfaction. It´s about encouraging students´ attitude, so, if you are not handy with listening to others´opinions, your place is anywhere else apart from a school. Being a teacher means having in mind all the time that children undergo dramatic developmental changes and you are the one that has to guide them through this challenging and exciting time. The education that children receive from you can determine the outcomes they will experience as adults. So you have a big responsibility, but as hard as it is, it´s one of the most rewarding careers. Nothing calms me more than spending my time with children, being part of their lives, watching them creating, and on an endless quest for knowledge. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that I get the opportunity to develop the minds and attitudes of those who are the world´s future.

Modern psychologists deal with human behavior which is purposeful. Human behavior, unlike lower animals varies according to situations and can not be explained by a single mental aspect. So, modern psychologists have formed some inter-related concepts of human behavior. Motivation is one of such concepts.

Motivation is the tendency to perform purposeful behavior. Psychologist Swift has said that the dynamic action which always controls its behavior to fulfill various demands of the individual is called motivation. So motivation is related to needs. On the other hand, motivation is such type of mental condition which inspires man to directed behavior. So motivation is the middle stage of performing action of the individual.

There is a deep relationship between motivation and teaching-learning process. Learning is the process of changing behavior. In order to adjust, properly with the environment, man has changed his behavioral pattern on the basis of his experiment. So learning is the process of fulfilling directed behavior which needs motivation. And it is the teacher who is to motivate students to fulfill learning.

So, motivation oriented learning is very important for the whole teaching-learning process to bear fruitful results. In order to make the process more effective, motivation has been given due importance in educational psychology. There is also need of incentive to create motivation with the learner. So the duty of the teacher is to select proper incentives in order to create learning oriented motivation among students. Psychologists have suggested certain techniques out of their experiments that may be utilized in this regard:-
1) The learner should be made conscious of his purpose. Before presenting the subject matter, the teacher is to make the learners conscious of that
2) The teacher will assure the students of their success and that assurance will inspire the students
3) Students will be inspired if the teacher takes steps to inform the students of their progress at an interval of short period
4) Rewards, not punishment will be the motive for students in learning
5) Group works will be helpful to fulfill the purpose
6) Health competition among the students is surely to motivate and inspire them.

So, we see that motivation is one of the most important factors for succeeding the whole teaching-learning proce

As you might have seen, I have already posted the first and second part of it with 350  words limit for each! The last part has also been done in due time but not posting it right now due to obvious reasons.

I have also started doing the second assignment that I’ll have to submit by 2nd April as I want to clear all my assignments within April so that I can go on a tour during summer vacation ( End of April to 3rd week of May).

Here are the questions for the second assignment that deals with education psychology : -

Answer the following questions in about 1500 words.
i) What do you mean by motivation? Why is it important in the teaching-learning process?
(350 words)
ii) How do learners differ on the basis of creativity? Explain in brief. (350 words)
iii) Develop a plan to identify maladjusted children in your class and discuss the strategies you would apply to help those maladjusted children. (800 words)

I’ll of-course keep on slowly posting all my answers one by one as they might be of some reference to my fellow IGNOU students in coming years.

This is the second part of my assignment, 350 word limit ( I might have exceeded it my 20-25 words but that perfectly acceptable by the authorities) - I might have changed a few words or sentence structures here and there - but that might count only to 1% of my whole assignment. So, its quite original piece.

The aim of education is to transfer knowledge to students through mediums of instruction. In India, it is mostly done via the lecture method where a teacher delivers lecture in the classroom and students follow him. Without debating on the methodologies of instruction, we can say that a without a clear objective, the system of teaching-learning and evaluation process won’t succeed as instructional objectives are part of the whole systematic instructional process. Before organizing any activity, one must know where exactly that would lead and incase of instructional objectives where would it take students.
There are two types of objectives in educational process- i) instructional objectives and ii) behavioral objectives.
When the teacher selects the course, subject matter, materials and resources, methodology and activities that takes the teacher and students at a measurable level of achievement it is known as instructional objective. To succeed, the instructional objectives require skills and personality development through tangible, concrete ways in a classroom situation.

Importance of Instructional Objectives:

Instructional objectives are of immense significance in today’s education process. They provide organizers of the process with the opportunity to delve into learners mind and know where they are heading. Instructional objectives provide teachers the opportunity to design proper assessment procedure through tests and evaluation. Students know what they are supposed to do, use before or after a particular class. Instructional objectives also help trace the amount of change that has been brought about in a student. It gives a definite direction to the whole teaching-learning and evaluation process of a particular class in classroom situations. It also helps both the teacher as well as students in determining particular educational goals and enables them to focus their attention on specific learning activities to achieve those goals. Through instructional objectives – the organizers of educational process can determine the resources, course materials, curricular and co-curricular activities, relevant contents and references etc. which are so vital to make the process functional.

Instructional objectives also lead the teacher into discovering the best learning situations, strength and weaknesses of the prevalent learning process, level of growth and development of learners through a pre-determined evaluation process. In short, instructional objectives help in monitoring and evaluating the whole educational process in minute details.