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Effective Learning and Quality Teaching

Article in SSRN Electronic Journal · September 2019

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3486348

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John Sekar Jeyaraj

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Effective Learning and Quality Teaching

DR J. JOHN SEKAR, MA, MPhil, PGDTE (CIEFL), PGDHE (IGNOU), PGDCE (UH), PhD
Head & Associate Professor
Research Department of English
Dean, Academic Policies & Administration
The American College
MADURAI – 625 002
INDIA
[email protected]
9486782184

Abstract
There is a paradigm shift in the concept, purpose and delivery of education. The shift is
from teaching to learning. Learning is foregrounded and focused and teaching is expected
to be a process of facilitating learning. As a consequence, teacher is decentred but not
marginalized. At the same time, learner is placed at the centre but not deified. Learning
has also been redefined as the process of skilling students and empowering them with
knowledge and not mere information and teaching as facilitating learners in the process
of learning. Hence, this paper argues that there is an inherent causal relationship between
(quality) teaching and (effective) learning. However, it also highlights the problematic
nature of the adjectives ‘effective’ and quality’ since they are invisible and
immeasurable.
Keywords: facilitating, skilling, higher order thinking skills, constructivist, human
resource
Background of the Study
Indian society in general and academia in particular has begun to participate in the
quality discourse, of late. Parents look for educational institutions which assure them of
quality education even though different stakeholders develop and maintain discourses on
quality in education from different perspectives. Indian society has always held teachers
in high esteem and with reverence to the extent that they occupy a position next only to
mother and father. Indeed, it is a covetous position envied by gods themselves: mata, pita,
guru, deivam. Teachers are deified for the simple reason that they ‘open’ the eyes of
students to wisdom and knowledge which are always viewed as empowering tools
socially, intellectually, and occupationally. The western classification of education as
liberal education and vocational education through schooling is not part of Indian
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education. Such classification is a colonial legacy. Post-colonial educational scheme is a

replica of colonial educational system with cosmetic changes. Colonial image of the
teacher as a dispenser of information and knowledge has been unproblematically retained
in postcolonial India.
Quality Teaching
Quality teaching comprises responsive and reflective teaching. Teaching should
be responsive to student learning processes and learning styles. It should provide
scaffolding to the extent that learners would become autonomous. It should be responsive
to the prior knowledge and experiences of students. They should not be assumed to come
to classes with a blank mind. Their experiences should be valued as potential sources of
learning. Reflective teachers practice reflective teaching and they think over what and
how they teach and learn. It is their personal tool to observe and evaluate what they do or
fail to do in class. It supports development and maintenance of expertise, ability to reflect
on their own actions as a way of engaging in the process of continuous learning. Hence,
quality teachers are naturally great teachers. They are available to students and their
parents, accessible to students anytime, are warm, caring, enthusiastic, committed,
patient, energetic, communicative, and constantly updating their knowledge. They have
passion for teaching, and love students and their subjects.
Teacher’s role does not start only inside the classroom. In fact, classroom role
becomes an intermediary between pre-classroom and post-classroom roles. Basically,
teachers are curriculum planners and designers. They cannot take any meaningful
decision on what to teach and why teach what they teach in classroom. An important
aspect of curriculum planning/designing is constructive alignment. They should therefore
foresee an alignment between designing teaching through activities and expressing
learning in and through activities. Biggs (2014) says:
Constructive alignment is a design for teaching in which what it is
intended students should learn and how they should express their learning
is clearly stated before teaching takes place. Teaching is then designed to
engage students in learning activities that optimize their chances of
achieving those outcomes, and assessment tasks are designed to enable
clear judgments as to how well those outcomes have been attained. (5-6)
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Hence, teaching should lead to learning and learning means achieving the intended
outcomes through participation in activities. Learners do not get knowledge transferred
from teachers but construct it through meaningful involvement in activities. Tyler (1949)
says “learning takes place through the activity of the student: it is what he does that he
learns, not what teacher does.”
Teachers are therefore curriculum alignment experts. According to Biggs & Tang
(2007: 11)), “Good teaching is getting most students to use the level of cognitive
processes needed to achieve the intended outcomes that the more academic students use
spontaneously.” They should ensure that there is a natural and causal alignment between
designing and teaching the intended outcomes, learning them through engagement in
activities and assessing their learning experiences. In other words, the integral
components of effective teaching that starts and stops outside the classroom are
i. identifying and articulating intended outcomes to construct knowledge, skills,
and understandings,
ii. choosing the content (topics & resources) necessary to support the learning
activities,
iii. designing learning activities,
iv. getting learners engaged in them,
v. facilitating the learning process, and
vi. designing assessment tasks for measuring the learners’ attainment of the
learning outcomes.
The first teacher activity listed above is of paramount importance for it acts the basic
determinant of quality teaching and effective learning. Quality teaching cannot be viewed
independent of effective learning. In this sense, teachers as well as students can be
determinants of quality teaching and effective learning respectively.
Teachers should first spell out objectives of teaching and learning. For students to
know the objectives of teaching, teachers should
1. clearly state what the intended outcomes of their teaching the individual courses
of a programme with programme specific objectives as well;
2. actively engage the students in learning activities that promote the intended
outcomes being achieved; and
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3. objectively assess how well the outcomes are achieved through formative and
summative tests.
It is not uncommon for teachers to expect students to be academically committed,
intellectually curious and questioning, cognitively brilliant, avowedly interested, clearly
career-minded, scholastically disciplined, philosophically reflective, and humanistically
helping, and not appreciate students with no driving curiosity about learning, no burning
ambition to excel in any particular profession, with limited goal of obtaining degree for a
decent job, less committed, academically dull or average, and attending classes with no
background knowledge of the course/course units with fewer questions. In fact, classes
with the second type of students are more challenging and fulfilling in the sense that they
need motivation and attention. The former group can learn on their own with little
scaffolding from teachers. To say that students are unmotivated is true but not helpful to
both students and teachers. Clear statement of objectives of a course and its alignment
with learning activities and assessment tasks would not only motivate the unmotivated
and but also provide learner autonomy so that students would become responsible for
their learning.
Teachers’ cognition about teaching affects their classroom and its learning
environment they create. It is important for teachers to be implicitly aware of the theories
of teaching and learning even though most of them may not explicitly articulate them.
These theories can be related to three phenomena: who students are, what teachers do,
and what students do. Teachers categorise students into good and poor on the basis of
their bio-profile and learning styles and strategies. They assume that it is students’
responsibility to know the content well and explain it clearly and carefully in writing on
exams. They take it for granted that students are first supposed to listen lectures carefully
and take down notes meticulously, to read what is not only prescribed and but also
recommended. They equally believe that teaching means transmitting information
through lecturing because teachers see themselves as knowledge(able) experts and
students are supposed to absorb the information and report it back as accurately as
possible. They also complain that students lack study skills and motivation. Hence, it is
sometimes called a ‘blaming theory.’ Some enlightened teachers believe that transmitting
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concepts and understandings and not just information is the purpose of teaching.
Learning therefore is understood as an effect or function of teaching.
Great teachers are those who have teaching competencies. They believe in what
learners are doing. They therefore call for learner-centered classroom in the place of
teacher-fronted one. On the other hand, conventional approaches focus on what teachers
do and prescription to get across information more effectively. In fact, teachers should
not do anything to signal for silence on the part of students. Though classroom
management is absolutely essential, classroom should be a learning centre with plenty of
learning activities. The use of handouts and other modes of knowledge exchange should
be encouraged. It is needless to say that chaos should be avoided in the case of large
classes. Teachers are agents/midwivies/catalysits/facilitators/co-learners/co-constructors
of knowledge.
The third theory is about teachers’ perspectives on students. Teachers teach but
students do not learn. Great teachers believe that teaching supports learning and teaching
is useless if it does not support learning. They believe that teaching is not just transaction
of facts and concepts but students’ understanding the contents in the manner it is
programmed in the intended outcomes and the learning activities that are necessary for
achieving the outcomes. Learners’ perspective is a determinant of what is learnt and their
perspective on what they learn, why they learn what they learn, and how their attainment
is monitored. Teaching changes learners’ perspective and how they see the world.
Traditional teaching in the form of lectures does not suit the purpose of modern
education in the twenty first century. Education is considered a conduit for bringing about
cognitive changes in learners through engagement and involvement. It has several
limitations even though it might appear to be a powerful means in large classes. Some of
them are
1. Lecturing is not a demonstration of teachers’ knowledge.
2. It does not motivate or inspire students to learn for the future.
3. It is ineffective for stimulating higher order thinking skills.
4. It does not engage in learner activities.
5. Students rely on memory rather than understanding and applying.
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However, traditional teaching/learning activities can be contrasted with intended

learning outcomes (ILOs) as follows:
1. Teachers start thinking about teaching only after clarifying the intended learning
outcomes
1) Major activity is not giving a lecture!
2) Lectures are situation which teaching/learning activities can take place.
3) They should start thinking about the teaching/learning activities that one
can most appropriately use.
2. Teachers shift the focus from what they do to what students can best do
1) Teaching is a service activity. Teachers teach so that students can learn,
and learning depends on how they go about learning.
2) Teaching is only about what teachers do; but it is like balance sheet: what
the teacher is doing and learners are doing.
3. Teachers stop assuming that learning is possible only in teacher-directed
classroom
1) Students should be lifelong learners
Traditional class scenario leads to an ILO which is simply the act of explaining. For
instance,
Teacher activity Student activity
Introduce Listen
Explain Take notes
Elaborate Understand
Show some PPTs Watch, note points
Questions on slides Write answers
Wind up Possibly ask questions

Effective Learning
Learning was traditionally understood (undermined) as a passive process of
knowledge acquisition with predictable and measurable outcomes. It was by and large a
memory-based recycling process where new knowledge was not constructed. Moreover,
it was controlled and monitored by the teacher. Learners were dependent on teachers and
therefore they were rightly called students. Now, this old idea of learning has changed
paving the way for a new concept of a process which is influenced by the use to which
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learning is ultimately put into. In other words, learning informs actions in future
situations. Effective learning is not what learners know knowledge and but what that
knowledge would enable learners to do in life later. It is now understood as equivalence
of creating and critically thinking. Effective learners are not passive consumers of
knowledge but accept responsibility for their learning. To do this, they should first
exercise learner autonomy. They should be willing to work independently and
collaboratively. They acquire the problem-solving skills, skills to work with others, and
critical and creative thinking skills.
Learners cannot be expected to be homogenous in terms of background, grasping
capacity, levels of engagement in relation to the levels of learning activities that are
required for achieving the intended outcomes, written/oral communicative competency,
interest, and academic orientation of students. Type 1 students would work at a higher
level of engagement. For instance, their learning activities and skills can be relating,
analyzing, applying and theorizing. The second type of learners may be quite contended
with taking notes and memorizing. They are passive learners in the sense that they listen
to standard, passive teaching, take notes, memorize, and recall the same on exams. On the
other hand, the other group consists of active learners who engage in problem-based
learning. It requires active teaching in the sense that it requires students to question, to
reflect, and to generate solutions. Active teaching requires a teaching environment that, in
turn, requires students to go through learning activities that are aligned to the intended
outcomes. Hence, problem-based learning is an example of constructive aligned teaching
with the following components: the intended outcomes that students solve professional
problems, teachers creating learning activities for students to engage in, and teachers
assessing how well the problems are solved.
Learners construct knowledge in and through activities on the basis of schemata.
Teaching is all about engaging students in active learning and not transmitting
information or knowledge. Effective learning changes the way they see the world. Mere
acquisition of information does not bring about any change at all. In fact, it brings about
conceptual change. Effective learners are active and strategic, extend cooperation,
conversation, and construction of knowledge with co-learners, develop ability to achieve
goals and plans, finally monitor their own learning in all contexts.
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Conclusions
There is a perfect correlation between effective learning and quality teaching.
Effective learning is a process in which learners relate new experience to present
experience and assimilate new ideas. Effective learning can be achieved through four
learning styles: learning by being shown, by being told, by constructing meaning, and be
joining a knowledge-generating community. It all depends on quality teaching. When
quality teaching is in the form of instruction, students are dependent; in the form of
guidance, learners become interested; in the form of facilitation, learners become
involved; and in the form of consultation, learners start self-direct their own learning.
Learners should ultimately become life-long learners or self-determined learners
independent of those who provide scaffolding.
References
Biggs, J. (2014). Constructive alignment in university teaching. HERDSA Review of
Higher Education, 1, 5-22.
Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student
does. London: McGraw-Hill.
Tyler, R.W. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

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