Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed :
There are factors and principles for enhancing effectiveness. Evaluating teaching is a prime factor for teaching effectiveness. Each year faculty members in institutions of higher education take on the task of teaching others. For most of these people, this is a recurring task. In fact, for the majority, this is the central task of life-long career. Assuming that on one is perfect and therefore everyone has room for improvement, evaluation is the means by which we try to identify which aspects of our teaching argued and which need to be changed. The question then arises as to who should take responsibility for doing this evaluation. My belief is that evaluation is an inherent part of good teaching. Therefore, it is the teacher himself or herself who should take primary responsibility for doing the evaluation. Doing good evaluation is like doing good research. In both cases teachers are trying to answer some important question and about an important topic. The key to doing both activities well is identifying the right question to ask and figuring out how to answer them. Regardless of how good or how poor we are as teachers, we all have the potential to get better overtime. Yet some teachers continually improved and approach their potential while others experience a modest improvement early in their career and then seem to level of in quality or sometimes even declined. A second reason to evaluate is to document the quality of one’s teaching for others. All career professionals have other people who need to know about the quality of their teaching. It may be the persons current department or institution had, or it may be a potential employer. But one’s people teach, they have a track record, and others need and want to know how well they taught. The only way a teacher can provide them with that information is to gather it, and that means evaluation. Teaching portfolios are becoming a common way of communicating this information to others. As if turns out, putting a portfolio together also helps the teacher understand his or her own teaching better.
Third, there is a very personal and human need to evaluate. This is for our own mental and psychological satisfaction. It is one thing to do a good job and thing that it went well; it is quite another, and a far more enjoyable experience, to have solid information and thereby know we did a good job. That knowledge, that certainty, is possible only if we do a thorough job of evaluation.
Seize the moment is the prime principle of teaching effectiveness. Teaching is most effective when it occurs in quick response to a need the learner feels. So even though teachers are elbow deep in something else, they should make every effort to teach the student when he or she asks. The student is ready to learn. The second principle is to involve the student in planning. And the next is to begin with what the student knows. There are other principle which need to be followed by teacher. They move from simple to complex and accommodate the student’s preferred learning style. Again teachers must sort goals by learning domains. Learning behaviors fall in three domain; cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. The cognitive domain deals with intellectual abilities. The psychomotor domain includes physical or motor skills. The affective domain involves expression of feeling about attitudes, interests, and values. Most learning involves all three domains. The teachers must make material meaningful and allow immediate application of knowledge. They must plan for periodic rests and tell their student how they are progressing. The teacher must ensure reward desired learning with praise. The teacher must also be careful about improving non-verbal communications. It is not only what a teacher says in the class room, but it is how a teacher says it that can make the difference to students. Non-verbal messages are an essential component of communication in the teaching process. Another principle is eye contact. Teachers who make eye contact open the flow of communication and convey interest, concerned, warmth and credibility. Gestures, postures and body orientation are also the notable features for teaching effectiveness. The other factor proximity is also very important. Cultural norms dictate a comfortable distance for interaction with students. A teacher should look for signals of discomfort caused by invading students’ space. Some of these are rocking, leg swinging, taping, gaze aversion etc. Typically, in large college classes space invasion is not a problem. In fact, there is usually too much distance. To counteract this, a teacher must move around the classroom to increase interaction with students. Increasing proximity enables a teacher to make better eye contact and increases the opportunities for students to speak. The paralinguistic is the another principle which is required for a teacher to enhance his effectiveness. This facet of non-verbal communication includes such vocal elements as: tone, pitch, rhythm, timbre, loudness, inflection. For maximum teaching effectiveness, learn to vary these six elements of voice. One of the major criticism is of instructors who speak in a monotone. Listeners perceive these instructors as boring and dull. Students report that they learn less and lose interest more quickly when listening to teachers who have not learned to modulate their voices.
Finally, humor is often overlooked as a teaching tool. and it is too often not encouraged in college classrooms. Laughter releases stress and tension for both instructor and student. A teacher should develop the ability to laugh and encourage students to do the same. It fosters a friendly classroom environment that facilitates learning.
There are ideas, which are a product of a faculty seminar. There are as many as sixty-three ideas which are presented for faculty use in dealing with retention/attrition. They may be subdivided into four general categories.The faculty student interaction category contains elements directly related to the affective domain of student growth brought about by faculty/student interaction. Psych, ego, individual worth are all intricately bound within this framework. General classroom management category focuses literally on the day-to-day operations of our classes.
The items as group emphasizes planning, orderliness, and general good sense. Student initiated activities section is based on the premise that peer influence can play a substantial role in student success. Age differences, personality differences and skill differences can be utilized to produce positive results if a teacher can get the students to work with one another. Finally, the faculty initiated activities category presents the greatest challenge to the ability and creativity of each faculty member.
A teacher must take the initiative to implement this suggestions, to test them to device them. A teacher must be skilled educational executive to understand clearly the mission and purpose of the organization he serve and to develop himself the personal quality to enhance those mission and purpose. Educational executives must be good performers and managers. More over educational executive must adapt to requirements of the job. Again educational executive need more quality and must learn the new art of teaching and leadership. For ensuring teaching effectiveness, the executives and teachers must focus to the values.
The most challenging task of an executive and a teacher is to plan appropriately before starting the work. Besides, they must be practical and at the same time creative. Moreover, they must develop self-image and career balance and earn credibility by creating good environment and managing the process of work. As a manger or a teacher builds the foundation for a full-filling career, they will enjoy a higher privilege-to inspire a love of learning.
