Giorgi Kuparadze

Associate Professor
English Philology Department
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
Georgia

What is Teaching?

There are many reasons why teaching is an increasingly popular choice of career for a wide range
of skilled and talented people. Teaching is a rewarding profession in more ways than one, offering
fantastic career prospects and development opportunities in addition to competitive financial
benefits.
Some say that teaching is a science. These people stress the scientific aspects of teaching and
focus on ways to systematize the communication between teacher and student. They believe that it
is possible, through careful selection and pacing of materials, to regulate interactions among the
student, the teacher, and materials to be learned, thus reducing the possibility that learning occurs
by chance. They believe that enough is now known about how people learn to develop a technology
of teaching. As B.F. Skinner points out: “teachers can be trained to employ educational
technology or to use "fool-proof" materials that do the teaching.”
Others say that teaching is an art. These people believe that above mentioned approach force
students to perform and bureaucratizes learning. Besides, they argue, that actual teaching involves
great amounts of intuition, improvisation, and expressiveness, and effective teaching depends on
high levels of creativity, sound judgment, and insight.
Actually, Teaching is a profession that offers great rewards.The range of professional duties
performed by teachers is wide and extensive. At the heart of a teacher's role is the promotion of
learning for all students. Once David Milliband (the Secretary of State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs) commented, “Every child helped to develop their potential, helped to fill
their minds and open their eyes, is a tribute to their teachers. That sense of purpose is what
motivates people to go into teaching”. Teachers need to:
1. know how to employ the most effective teaching and learning strategies to enable listeners
to make progress
2. be able to assess what their students know, understand and can do, and then use this
assessment to plan future teaching and learning activities
3. have high expectations for all their pupils, of whatever class, race, gender or ability
4.know how to motivate their disciples - to do this, they need to be effective role models for
those who they teach.

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 Teachers need to have frequent and sustained opportunities for developing their knowledge and
skills within the classroom. Common practices and procedures are laid down for the ways in which
teachers should be supported and inducted into their professional role as teachers. Gaining the
experience, they should start their teaching career with confidence and competence. James R.
Davis defines the notion of teaching as: “the interaction of a student and a teacher over a subject."
he continues: “there may be one student or several in a class. The students can be young or old,
bright or below average intelligence, "normal" or physically challenged, highly motivated or
"turned off," rich or poor, male or female. The subject can be easy and straightforward or difficult
and complex. The teacher may not be physically present, as with televised or computer-assisted
instruction. But in most situations, the model holds up. A teacher, a student, and a subject. And
where is the log?”
Teaching takes place somewhere, in some specific context. The climate for learning may be
favourable or destructive, supportive or frustrating. The setting makes a difference. Teaching
involves a teacher trying to teach someone something somewhere. A great amount of learning goes
on without teachers; but the activity is called learning, not teaching. There must be a medium, a
subject, about which there can be structured and sustained dialogue. Teaching involves a teacher
and a student interacting over a subject in a setting.
Teaching involves complex judgments that unfold during the course of instruction. Teachers
must deal creatively with the unexpected. There are no fail-safe routines and prescriptions.
Furthermore, the most important goals of teaching are those events that occur during the process.
The outcomes are often embedded in the learning process itself. To support this viewpoint, we
should recall Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives (1950). This is the wittily
categorized and ordered thinking skills and objectives so badly needed in the process analyzed
above. He draws our attention to the fact that nobody can understand a concept if he/she does not
first remember it, similarly no one can apply knowledge and concepts if they do not understand
them. As B. Bloom argues: “It is a continuum from Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) to higher
Thinking Order Skills (HOTS).”

Higher Order Thinking Skills

Evaluation
Synthesis
Analysis
Application
Comprehension
Knowledge

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 Lower Order Thinking Skills

The controversy about teaching should not be cast as an either-or debate. In an ideal world, students
would come to us, teachers, as self-initiating, skilled learners. If they did, we could easily help them
acquire an education. In fact, if students came to educational institution as self-initiating, skilled
learners, we would only need a good library and some advice on how best to study and learn. They
would impose assignments on themselves and do the work required to muster the subjects they were
individually studying. But it is not so.Unfortunately, most students arrive with a relatively low level
of motivation to learn. What is more, they have few of the skills essential to the process of learning.
Most have a predictable set of deficiencies that it does well to recognize from the outset so that one
can take them into account in the design and conduct of instruction. On this basis, perhaps it would
be more accurate to say that teaching involves artistic judgments that depend on science. As N.L.
Gage notes: “there is a "scientific basis for the art of teaching." For teachers, this scientific base is
found chiefly in the social sciences. The "knowledge" produced by the social sciences is growing
and ever-changing, subject to correction and open to new findings. But a knowledge base exists and
is there to be known and understood by teachers. The best way to think about teaching is to call it
what it should be called, not an art, not a science, but a profession. Teaching involves professional
judgment.
In conclusion, it should be admitted that there are certain things that we need to be able to see in
our classrooms; and to see them, we need to know what to look for. Teachers need perspective.
Thomas Good and Jere Brophy put the matter succinctly: "If you don't know how to look, you
don't see very much." Teachers and administrators know they have no control over the academic
preparedness of students when they begin their teaching careers, they realize they are expected to
educate the students to an increasingly higher level of scoring. For many educators placed in this
high-stakes position, the only recourse is to teach for the test. In other words, the only material
taught is that which has appeared on the similar tests in the past.

References:
Jack Kaufhold, (1998): What is wrong with teaching for the test? American Association of School
Administrators.
Davis, James R., (1997): Better Teaching, More Learning. (Phoenix: American Council on
Education, Oryx Press Series on Higher Education.