ABSTRACT
This chapter describes approaches to teaching by Fenstermacher and Soltis (1986) back in the mid-1980s, and re-stated by them in 2009. They argued that there are three basic approaches to teaching, namely executive approach, therapist approach and liberationist approach. Contemporary educators have used these three different perspectives to conceive of the activities of teaching in ways they think will help teachers to teach better. Contemporary research on the effects of teaching and learning is very important to advocates of the executive approach. In the therapist approach, the purpose of teaching is to enable the learner to become a person capable of accepting responsibility for what he or she is and to be able to make choices that define oneself as one wish to be defined. The technical skills of teaching that have been proven effective for producing gains in specified knowledge are deemed most appropriate for use in the classroom or lecture hall.
