Systemic Reforms in Teacher Education: Revamping the Design and Practice of Teacher Education Geared to Constructivist Approach to Pedagogy

Systemic reforms in Teacher Education- Revamping the Design and Practice of Teacher Education geared to Constructivist Approach to Pedagogy

Ms Ashima Deshmukh
Smt.Kapila Khandvala College of Education, Mumbai

The environment paradigm has a major role to play after the subject of environment education has been made a compulsory subject in formal education. The fact that there exists various forms of environment and the ecology of the systems is important to be learnt for the human existence. A paradigm is any structure of ideas, scientific and philosophical, that we take for granted in order to do research. Because we must take some such structure for granted, paradigmatic ideas tend to become invisible. We forget that they are there, and regard them as natural and always will exist The teacher education and its relatedness with the national framework of curriculum of 2005 has made us rethink. It is in this context that the constructivist approach to training future teachers so that they can handle the large amount of complex knowledge and empower their students to be able to learn more by facilitation than by mere dissemination of information. The constructivist approach can relate to pedagogy of teacher education only if its philosophy is accepted by the curriculum designers. The constructivist approach is indeed difficult to implement in the existing formal curriculum but it is feasible when the premises of teacher education are more liberating without the control of examinations and the content focus to teaching abilities. The emancipation of learning should not be compromised on assumptions like the urban rural divide or with the purpose of equal certification. The notion of equal certification and the control of the universities and boards of education restrict the implementation of the constructivism in education. We should strengthen our teachers by experiencing the breakthrough in learning abilities of individual that arise from environment. The focus in teacher education is to allow student teachers to give different types of lessons and choose related content that suits the chosen methodology. In such exercises the teacher educator is the guide and does mentoring. By continuous exposure to learning sessions the student teacher will soon realize that the learning environment is better than the present practice of delivering content oriented stressful practice teaching lessons. The goals of the education policy and the constitution are enough points of learning if the environment paradigm is embraced along with constructivism. The classroom as a learning community draws its application from social psychology and learning is based on the tasks as well as the nature of tasks. The various learning situations are the reasons why one needs to learn and arise from the environment itself. It could be problem solving or resolving some issues or understanding the working of some events that occur in our knowledge. The movement of the points of learning and repeated exercises spiral upwards to better understanding with passage of time. It builds each time over the previous knowledge and leads to inductive development of constructs. This is characterized by shift in locus of control from teacher to learner. At the same time the social learning that occurs in groups are consequence of group performance and group mind. The teachers have to be aware that the different points of learning should be appropriate to the task given because the dynamics will facilitate the learning outcomes. The different tasks are disjunctive ,conjunctive and additive. In the constructivist approach to process of learning the group performance depends on individual performance: the better the group members are, the better - on average - group performance will be, and this also implies that what makes individual members better will - again on average - also make the group better. This individual component of group performance, however, is not what is manifested generally. Instead, the group component of group performance, that is, the question of how this performance is affected by group members ' awareness that common outcomes also depend on what other group members do (social interdependence) and on their interaction with these other group members (social interaction). A conjunctive task requires all group members to be successful for the group to complete the task, and its group potential is given by the individual performance of the group 's weakest member. As a consequence, group potential decreases with increasing group size, because the larger the group gets, the more likely it is to have a very weak member in the group. Hence, it can be ineffective to have large groups for conjunctive tasks. This problem is lessened if the conjunctive task is divisible and specific subtasks can be matched to group members ' abilities. For example, a climbing party might decide that for difficult passages it would be useful to have the better members going ahead, fixing ropes and then helping the weaker members over these passages. In this case, potential group performance is higher than the individual performance of the weakest member. In disjunctive tasks the groups has a large tasks which is shared by the members of the group and the performance of the leader will be impotant to success of group Members meet to determine the best alternative for a problem or issue. There are two types of disjunctive tasks: • Judgment Task: Group members must choose one correct answer from all alternatives. • Decision-Making Task: Group members must choose the best alternative from a set of options. There is no one correct answer for a decision-making group. In Additive task all group members perform the same activity and pool their results at the end. An example of this would be gathering signatures for a petition drive and the leader’s performance is not significant and there is recognition og every member’s performance If a group gains experience with a task over time, any initial costs should decrease and the chance of process gains should increase. Of course, individuals also increase their own performance if they repeatedly perform similar tasks. That the group collaborative context can stimulate learning processes which result in improved performance on the part of both individual members and the whole group has been demonstrated by Brodbeck and Greitemeyer (2000a, b). They identified four different learning processes within group collaborative settings:

1) individual-to-individual (I-I) transfer;

2) 2) group-to-individual (G-I) transfer;

3) 3) group-to-individual-in-group (G-IG) transfer;

4) 4) group-level learning (G-G transfer).

The discussion on tasks is to clarify how the constructivist approach to pedagogy with paradigm of environment that can be made feasible with the proposed structure in the present paper.
(Paper presented in the National Seminar on National Curriculum Framework 2005 – A paradigm shift- 29th February 2008)
References:
Steiner, I.D. (1972). Group processes and productivity. New York: Academic Press.
Brodbeck and Greitemeyer (2000) :Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Vol. 3, No. 2, 159-182 (2000) DOI:10.1177/1368430200003002004 © 2000 SAGE Publications

References: Steiner, I.D. (1972). Group processes and productivity. New York: Academic Press. Brodbeck and Greitemeyer (2000) :Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, Vol. 3, No. 2, 159-182 (2000) DOI:10.1177/1368430200003002004 © 2000 SAGE Publications