REFLECTION ON TEACHING AS PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

As GN shared her personal expepriences as a teacher I found myself remembering my many years of teaching before coming to Aditi. My story was the same in a way because before coming to Aditi I taught grad and post-grad at the Univ level and had no idea what year plans, unit plans and lesson plans were!!! Believe it or not/nutz!!! I also didn't know a lot of other things. Naturally:). Pedagogy , for instance, while not exactly a closed book to me , was something I knew about more by hearsay - listening to lectures etc. My way of picking things up has always been the trial and error method. Autodidact, some hiss at such. All it means is self-taught. Not officially trained. That's not always a plus point but sometimes it is.
Anyway, to come to my story, after starting to teach in Aditi I found that many of my students were unable to follow my classes because they found time given to them for discussions completely unstructured. This confused them.Another complaint was litt. is boring and this is not easy like we thought but English was. I found all this welcome feedback because it occurred to me that my method of "cognitive dissonance," a method I had been using without knowing its pedagogical name even before i came to Aditi was something I had to tone down for them.
It was a problem of context.
The text needed explication. They wanted to surround it with little notes they had made in the margins. Nuggets of wisdom I had said. They wanted a discussion where there were clear guidelines and a road map of questions with a well defined destination.
They wanted handouts they could post like slips in their notebooks.
Being thrown on their feet suddenly and told to walk was dampening. Despite the constant remarks I wrote in the margins of their written homework like "good" and" this is fine" and "quite ok"they spoke simultaneously of things being too difficult and not challenging enough.

I understand one thing . The context has to be clarified more so that/before the content can be ingested.

First blog

One more blog. Inspiring talk by Geeta Narayanan. Content - context. Ms. Kini. Edward de Bono - lateral thinking -six thinking hats.Jayathi Ghosh. Shuchi Grover. Technology and education.Our PPSE blogs.