Primary Schooling

The left-hand extreme features the sermonising strategy.  Priests and Ministers use this technique regularly during their weekly instruction, when they talk to a large group of people. A good test of its efficacy is to stand outside a church on a Sunday morning at the completion of a service, and ask members of the congregation what the sermon was about.  Sermonising  is a legitimate didactic-teaching technique nevertheless, and some are better than others at using it.  Instructional techniques at this end of the spectrum are favoured where there is a large group to be taught. On such occasions, there is little choice. It has to be a ‘jug to mug’ process of instruction. 

 It can be improved upon as a teaching technique if a chalkboard is used or an OHP or a Power-point presentation or some other appropriate teaching-aid.  Just listening has limitations, so, as one moves along the continuum, sincere learning-attention is increased as more senses become involved.  Eyes and hands join in.

In my own time as a student-teacher, we were instructed in ‘school method’ and the textbooks of the time emphasized only adult-controlled techniques.  We were obliged to practise our blackboard writing as often as possible.  We were instructed on how to write on the black-board while keeping alert for misdemeanours that might be committed behind our backs.  We also learned not to repeat the reply to our questions because children must learn to remember what we tell them.  I don’t recall learning much more than this from our lecturers.  We learned more practical useful tricks of the trade from teachers at our practising schools, but ‘teaching strategies and their application’ were never part of any academic offerings. They should be. When the study of the use of all teaching strategies  is combined with the knowledge of teaching and learning research as revealed by Dunkin  by Gage  by Biddle and others [i.e. what really happens in the teacher-pupil exchanges], the topics become ones of high academic calibre and of prolonged study.

As one describes teaching techniques, moving from left to right one can also see that teachers move off the stage and pupils start to believe that they have control over their learning.  As group practices are brought into play, pupils are allowed to talk to each other and learn from each other.  There is an enormous number of group settings [5. Learning in Small Groups] and, as we move along further, the teacher’s role starts to become one of confidence trickster.  They ‘set up’ the learning exchanges.  As we move more to the right, pupils undertake learning with greater enthusiasm because they start to believe that they have some control and they want to learn more about the issue and share personal achievements with their teacher, because the learning has become theirs.  It’s a natural thing for pupils.  As for teachers, they are teaching learnacy at the same time as they are pupilling knowledge.

As they move along the continuum of teaching strategies towards the more maieutic, the strategies become much more complex and demanding but much more effective.  The school day usually provides a healthy mix.

Consider the maieutic, keeping in mind that true learning resides in each individual. It has to emerge.  It cannot be forced without some crippling personal distortion, so its emergence through true learnacy techniques is paramount. The teacher’s  pupilling task is to draw it out and refine it.