Now, I am aware, no matter how proud I was that I could make PowerPoint presentations and give PowerPoint based lectures that captivated the attention of the audience, that this is by far NOT the best way of teaching. Teaching knowledge is like spoon feeding our students. Giving them lectures and good presentations makes them dependent on someone else teaching them. I have learned the truth that good teachers are not a givers of truth, but are guides, inspiring and motivating their students to become really curious for the right bit of truth that they need to perform their job, to become searchers of truth and subsequently finders of truth. And this is not achieved by PowerPoints. Interactive sessions are the way to achieve such much more effective goals of good teachers.
Many teachers know that interactive teaching is much better than one-way didactic teaching. So, they think they need to insert some questions in their PowerPoints that are thrown at the students either at the beginning or anywhere during the lecture. These questions tend to be not answered on a voluntary basis and the teacher gets frustrated. He feels he has to pick a student out of the crowd to give the answer and the student either can or cannot answer. If he can, it feels awkward, why did not he not volunteer the answer? If he cannot, it feels bad. He experiences a shame in front of the whole group. Interactive teaching in this way is NOT better than one-way didactic teaching.
Effective teachers ask the students to come to the teaching session prepared. Good students read about the topic before the lecture. They consider the lecture as a confirmation of what they have read and if it contradicts their reading which is almost always happening to some degree, they will ask relevant questions based on what they have read before they came to attend the teaching session.
Over the years, I have learned how to do real interactive teaching. Interactive teaching is relatively easy in small groups, of up to twenty or slightly more students. If we give PowerPoints to groups of this size, we are wasting a great opportunity to truly teach interactively.
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Please read more on teaching: link to next page:
of teaching. I have created a few pages on interactive teaching with links below.interactively teaching knowledge
teaching-skills-we-may-get-it-wrong.
interactive sessions-to-teach-skills
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