Teaching Practice: “What it is and what it is not” in INSET Contexts

The objectives of organizing teaching practice sessions in short term INSET programmes or manifold. They are there in order to give a real context for the teachers to tryout their skills and strategies of teaching and see for themselves if the principles they follow and the issues they confront are culture and environment free or they work only in specific contexts. Further they are there to empower themselves by getting the skills they have acquired reinforced with the feedback they are likely to receive from their peers and observers or supervisors. A developing teacher will certainly make use of such opportunities for furthering his/her own learning and enhancing his/her own teaching competence besides looking at these opportunities as situations for carrying out classroom centred research which will develop in him/her the skill to reflect on his/her own practices.

Learning through teaching and empowering oneself is the sole objective of any teaching practice session, it is strongly felt will throw open questions for analysis, interpretation and discussion which are likely to provide alternatives.

Teaching practice is not and should not be a blind, mechanical adherence to classroom processes and strategies and techniques of teaching to which the teachers have got exposed to. Instead these sessions must be looked at and considered as opportunities for research and tryout of the effectiveness of individual teacher’s perceptions and beliefs about classroom teaching and transaction. (This may include teacher’s language for the class, teacher’s material production skill, task designing ability, evaluation procedures, black board use and other related issues) Teaching practice also must be looked at as opportunities in which teachers can exercise their autonomy.

In such a context, what will be the role of the observer? The observer should not be a fault-finding machine instead he or she should be an individual who should provide constructive feedback for development. He/she should take the role of a clinical supervisor who can make the practicing teacher see where he/she requires some kind of restructuring or reviewing the whole classroom practices. This means that the role of the observer is also to involve himself/herself in the process of finding alternatives by the practicing teacher.

In short Teaching Practice an INSET context is an experience – the ways of learning to teach, ways of learning to learn and ways of teaching to learn and making the whole process of teaching and learning experiential. (Teaching practice in pre-service contexts may have different objectives wherein the focus is more on giving practice in what has been taught)

S. Venkateswaran

Professor, RIESI, Bengaluru