ABSTRACT
At the risk of oversimplifying a highly complex and philosophical matter, there appear to be two broadly different approaches to teaching which I shall call the transmission mode and the interpretative mode. According to the transmission mode of teaching, the teacher is seen as having, or having access to, certain knowledge and skills and as having the responsibility of transmitting these to the learner. Teaching proceeds according to objectives which, in principle at least, are predetermined by the teacher for any particular teaching period. The effectiveness of the teaching and learning can then be judged by the extent to which these objectives are met, that is, the desired knowledge and skills have been successfully transmitted. Characteristically, this mode of teaching concerns itself not so much with the processes by which children learn, but with the products of that learning, and indeed only those products which relate directly to the predetermined teaching objectives. With its emphasis upon the predetermined products of teaching, this form of learning is, on the face of it, testable. It is an approach to teaching and learning which fits well with an educational system which is concerned to sort and grade children through various levels of public examination, [however] the transmission mode of teaching offers the classroom enquirer little access into how that process takes place. If our prime concern, in evaluating our teaching, is to examine the extent to which our predetermined objectives have been met, then there is a severe danger that we shall fail to see how the children understand, especially where their understanding is not in line with those objectives. On so many occasions during this present study, I was taken aback by the way in which a child had understood a situation totally differently from how I would have expected. In such instances the child’s understanding, and my own insight into it, could
only be developed given a relative freedom from too tight a set of teaching objectives.
