Evolution of teaching methods

Ancient education

About 3000 BC, with the advent of writing, education became more conscious or self-reflecting, with specialized occupations requiring particular skills and knowledge on how to be a scribe, an astronomer, etc.

Philosophy in ancient Greece led to questions of educational method entering national discourse. In his Republic, Plato describes a system of instruction that he felt would lead to an ideal state. In his Dialogues, Plato describes the Socratic method.

It has been the intent of many educators since then, such as the Roman educator Quintilian, to find specific, interesting ways to encourage students to use their intelligence and to help them to learn.

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Medieval education

Comenius, in Bohemia, wanted all boys and girls to learn. In his The World in Pictures, he gave the first vivid, illustrated textbook which contained much that children would be familiar with in everyday life, and use it to teach the academic subjects they needed to know.Rabelais described how the student Gargantua learned about the world, and what is in it.

Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Emile, presented methodology to teach children the elements of science and much more. In it, he famously eschewed books, saying the world is one's book. And so Emile was brought out into the woods without breakfast to learn the cardinal directions and the positions of the sun as he found his way home for something to eat.

There was also Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi of Switzerland, whose methodology during Napoleonic warfare enabled refugee children, of a class believed to be unteachable, to learn - and love to learn. He describes this in his account of the educational experiment at Stanz. He felt the key to have children learn is for them to be loved, but his method, though transmitted later in the school for educators he founded, has been thought "too unclear to be taught today". One result was, when he would ask, "Children, do you want to learn more or go to sleep?" they would reply, "Learn more!"

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19th century - compulsory education

Main article: Prussian education system

The Prussian education system was a system of mandatory education dating to the early 19th century. Parts of the Prussian education system have served as models for the education systems in a number of other countries, including Japan and the United States. The Prussian model had a side effect of requiring additional classroom management skills to be incorporated into the teaching process. ^[1]

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20th century

In the 20th century, the philosopher, Eli Siegel, who believed that all children are equally capable of learning regardless of ethnic background or social class, stated: "The purpose of all education is to like the world through knowing it." This is a goal which is implicit in previous educators, but in this principle, it is made conscious. With this principle at basis, teachers, predominantly in New York, have found that students learn the curriculum with the kind of eagerness that Pestalozzi describes for his students at Stanz centuries earlier.

Many current teaching philosophies are aimed at fulfilling the precepts of a curriculum based on Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE). Arguably the qualities of a SDAIE curriculum are as effective if not more so for all 'regular' classrooms.

Some critical ideas in today's education environment include:

• Instructional scaffolding
• Graphic organizers
• Standardized testing

According to Dr. Shaikh Imran, the teaching methodology in education is a new concept in the teaching learning process. New methods involved in the teaching learning process are television, radio, computer, etc.

Other educators believe that the use of technology, while facilitating learning to some degree, is not a substitute for educational method that brings out critical thinking and a desire to learn. Another modern teaching method is inquiry learning and the related inquiry-based science.

Elvis H. Bostwick recently concluded Dr. Cherry's quantitative study "The Interdisciplinary Effect of Hands On Science", a three-year study of 3920 middle school students and their Tennessee State Achievement scores in Math, Science, Reading and Social Studies. Metropolitan Nashville Public School is considered urban demographically and can be compared to many of urban schools nationally and internationally. This study divided students on the basis of whether they had hands on trained teachers over the three-year period addressed by the study.

Students who had a hands-on trained science teacher for one or more years had statistically higher standardized test scores in science, math and social studies. For each additional year of being taught by a hands-on trained teacher, the student's grades increased.dsasd