Tag Archives: Teachers

Semester Moments Assorted

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Phew! As I solve the eleventh hour queries of students troubled with what is gobbled up through the course of a semester, I found few challenging ones that observed my attention. Curse or thank the mediocrity of those instant guides that are popularly used every examination season; I have learnt a point or two more within my subject, not because they had better lessons, but they had problems confounded in such manner that they forced me to explore more. So, here we go with the three questions:

Question One: Why do we select the point of intersection that is closest to the horizontal axis when we solve games using graphical method?

Question Two: In a transportation problem, why do we form a circuit when we want to identify how much the allocation should be modified and where?

Question Three: If we talk of Six sigma, is it really about accommodating six standard deviations in the process or should it be about reducing the absolute standard deviation?

Goodness me, there is some talent out there.

That is not all I had this semester. There were a couple of embarrassing moments that is attributed to the efforts to try and over teach (not so desirable) and to the efforts of trying to explain the fundamentals more than required (no so needed, I find now). The first moment, I missed computing the standard deviation and got the problem wrong, and it took me a second after stepping out of the class to identify what mistake I committed. But the twenty minutes I struggled in the class remains an experience. On the second moment, I explained game theory very convincingly through out only spoiling one last procedure. I had forgotten substituting calculated values in the original equations to find out the whole range of values required.

If you think these were silly, I am assuming (actually I shouldn’t hope) the students caught more than what I had known myself committing in lectures.

If I were to mention one significant learning from this semester of teaching, I would say it, but it would not be ground-breaking. I figured out that supplying material to students prior to the class is as effective as supplying no material. The later can at least save me some time and energy.

What would I be doing next semester? I am eagerly planning things.

Teacher Communication Style – I

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Smothergill, Olson, and Moore have studied the effect of teacher communication style in the pre-school child development. Picking up from and slightly modifying the Bernstein’s linguistic codes, they initially hypothesized that teachers could be classified into two groups having distinct communication styles, elaborative and non-elaborative. They then picked a sample of teachers and observed them in their sessions for over a 10-week period. The result of this observation was a finer classification of all communication the teachers were involved in a normal classroom session; and now it included four categories namely directive, elaborative, eliciting, and non-information support.

Directive statements were those involving a minimum of information necessary for the teacher to direct the action or behaviour of the child. Elaborative statements were those which conveyed more information than was essential for completing a task. Eliciting statements consisted of verbal requests from the teacher for verbal feedback from the child. Non-information support statements included statements which were intended to show recognition to a child, to indicate hearing his statement or question, but which conveyed no added information.

Interestingly, their observation identified that all student communication could also be, with minor modifications, categorized into four groups: spontaneous, teacher-elicited, child-elicited, and ego centric in nature. The commonality among both these classifications among teacher communication style and student communication is that there can be more than one component on display at any time. Consider for an example, student communication in classroom, that can be both teacher-elicited and ego centric in nature. In statistical terms, it means these categories exhibit multicollinearity.

Later on, the research sought to verify if a specific style of teacher communication could result in improved student performance. So the researchers developed five tasks: circuit board task, maze task, similarities task, story-telling task, and a puzzle task. The idea is to have two groups of students, one group trained by teachers with elaborative communication style, and the other with the non-elaborative communication style. The scores of the students on these tasks pre and post the teaching sessions would be measured, and the difference in scores would reflect the improvement in performance. Communication style of the teacher of the group that exhibits better improvement in performance would then be concluded as being effective. Necessary care was taken to ensure the sanctity of research design.

The results of the study indicated that the group of students taught by a teacher with elaborate communication style showed better improvement, definitely. However, the difference in the improvement that they have shown over the group taught by teacher with non-elaborative communication style, was not statistically significant, on three of the five tasks developed. The two tasks where the difference was significant were the similarities task and the story-telling task. This means a lot in terms of communication style research. These are tasks which demand use of language, and it seems that elaborative communication style was more suitable to the need there.