We’ve grown up with a notion that teacher is always right! I’ve gone to the extent of sometimes disagreeing with my parents if my teacher said something otherwise. I’m sure some of you must have had similar experiences. This is truly rewarding for the teachers and they’ve earned it by teaching their students everything correctly and putting in all the efforts to tell everything right to the students.
But doesn’t this leave the student with a blind faith in the teacher which could result in accepting everything that the teachers say without questioning them… This can have a long term impact on the analysis and evaluation skills in the learners and they will never ask the ‘Why?’ question to their teacher ‘coz ‘Teacher is always right!’
So it’s all good and rewarding for the teacher. But is it really beneficial for the learner? Without developing the analysis, reasoning, and questioning skills, is his learning complete? Time to wear our thinking caps again!
In my honest opinion, we need to introduce some changes to our training techniques so that the learners are completely attentive in your class, listen carefully, and analyze each and every thing you say. They should be allowed and encouraged to stop and question you at any point in time and the best part – Have the courage and liberty to tell you that you are not correct. I know some of you are nodding your heads in disagreement, but let me explain! 🙂
It’s time to do something unusual in the class to break their notion. Let’s bring in Jerk Technology here!
Jerk Technology, as proposed by Dr. D. N. Sansanwal, is a mechanism to turn your students into active learners and make learning joyful by creating a tension-free atmosphere in the class. There’s an interesting toolset for implementing Jerk Technology which includes Mirror Image Writing, Disproportionate Word Writing, Double Negative Sentences, Unusual Sentence Construction, etc. Click here to learn more about these interesting tools.
These tools help the learners stay active in the class because they are not sure when the teacher will do something unpredictable. Once they sense that the teacher is up to playing some tricks with them, they would like to be the first one in the class to let everyone know that there’s something unusual/wrong in what the teacher just said/wrote. It helps in keeping the tension out of the class and you’ll see bright and nice faces of the learners, eagerly waiting for you to come and teach them. Isn’t this more rewarding than just being right? Think! 🙂
Chime in with you thoughts here…
