New Knowledge Needs New Skills

“Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills” (Tylor 2004)

We strive to be better educators and hence we get together to integrate more knowledge; improve classroom strategies for still better achievements academically as well as professionally.

Teaching today demands more than just caring about children and knowing one’s subject well. Teachers need to find out what motivates the learners, they need to learn how to diagnose the students’ strengths and weaknesses, and how to create environments in which the learners thrive. This leads us to Learning Theories and Teaching Methods which need to be researched and suitably applied in the classrooms. For this purpose Teacher Education is definitely mandatory.

A recent report by the Boyer Commission1 on undergraduate education concluded that universities have too often failed, and continue to fail, their undergraduate populations Students are graduating without some of the basic skills they need to function in the professional world, such as knowing how to think logically, write clearly, or speak coherently. Thousands of students, they note, graduate without having tasted the basics of research. The report challenges universities to rethink their traditional instructional models, to move to a model of inquiry-based learning wherein the student is involved in research from the beginning.

Everyone (faculty and student) involved in the teaching-learning experience should recognize that they are both discoverers of knowledge and learners. In the near future, in fact already the time has come when:

The skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis will become the hallmarks of a good education, just as absorption of knowledge once was.

Thus an important piece of teaching emerges to prepare our students to be critical thinkers and reflective learners, i.e., to reflect upon what they have learned, what gaps there are, i.e., what else they would like to cover in the class – we need to ask them to reflect upon the class as a whole so they can see how all the content areas of the syllabus fit together to make this whole concept as we call it as “Information literacy” To cover these aspects of modern skill based education the Professional Development of Teachers is of utmost importance. It should be stressed at all levels and opportunities should be provided so that those who are in service or those who aspire to adopt this profession should come towards it with full motivation and enthusiasm.