1. Objectives of teaching: a prerogative of the teacher

If viewed in terms of the aspects of students that a teacher is supposed to attend to, the goal of any teaching process can be detected anywhere along a continuum. At one end of the continuum, the goal of teaching is highly structured and mandatory. At the other extreme, it is structure-free where the teacher’s discretionary power sets the goals and it is purely the teacher’s choice. On the mandatory and structured side there is a prescribed curriculum, explicit learning objectives and the consequent cognitive skills that will be developed in students through the act of teaching. On the unstructured side of the continuum, the teacher is expected to deal with those aspects of the students that are not prescribed in the syllabus but are indispensable for the effective assimilation and mastery of all that is prescribed on the mandatory structured side. They are known as “non-cerebral” aspects of student life. They include students’ mindset, motivation to learn, effort, goal-setting skills, their study habits, self-efficacy, etc. Whether a teacher should pay attention to these dimensions of student life is purely subject to the discretionary power of the teacher. In this sense, quality teaching is not exclusively a matter of transferring the knowledge prescribed in the curriculum. But it is closely related to the teacher’s willingness to explore non-mandatory areas in the student-teacher relationship. In the realm of the non-compulsory aspects of the teacher-student relationship, the teacher can exercise his autonomous power since no one can question the choices he makes here. He/she is free to exercise inclusion in teaching by paying attention to the emotional, social and psychological aspects of learning or to remain totally impervious to these “non-brain” aspects of student learning. But the bitter truth is that non-brain aspects of learning, such as motivation, study habits, self-efficacy, resilience, etc., play a crucial role in the proper functioning of many cognitive aspects of learning, such as word processing. information, attention, retention, reproduction or recall of what has been learned. material (memory), creative abilities, reasoning, etc. The findings of ongoing research in various branches of psychology, education, neuroscience, etc. they vouch for it

2. Evaluation of Teaching in the era of the explosion of knowledge

The real success of teaching lies in the teacher’s willingness to pay attention to the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of the student’s brain and regulate teaching accordingly. There are not many educational institutions that have systemic regulations to assess whether teaching is comprehensive. But all the institutions evaluate the teaching professionals in more objective aspects, such as finishing the subjects at the right time, the class hours that the teacher spends with the students, the timely evaluation of the tasks, the class tests carried out, etc. In many institutions, the evaluation of teachers for the quality of their teaching is limited mainly to the criterion of the percentage of students who pass the exam. Beyond that, the institutions do not inquire into issues related to the quality of teaching.

The passing rate of students can never be a reliable criterion for evaluating the quality of teaching in this age of explosion of knowledge where the teacher is one of the innumerable sources of knowledge available. Countless resources like local enrollment centers, Internet search engines, free online courses are at the fingertips of the student population. For a student in the modern world, the teacher is only a formal figure in the process of acquiring knowledge. Compared to giant digital sources like the Internet, a teacher’s repository of knowledge is limited and far inferior. Furthermore, the availability of interactive video conferences on any subject undermines the need to attend real classrooms to learn. Therefore, the pass rate is not always an exclusive product of classroom teaching, and yet it is a test of quality in teaching.

3. The classroom teaching teacher is king.

The social skills that can be developed by attending schools during the early stages is the main factor that compels parents to send their pupils to school. In this age of technology, the teaching profession is powered only by the face-to-face relationship that the classroom environment can offer the student. Therefore, the quality of classroom teaching is a matter of maintaining the quality of that one-to-one relationship. It is never a question of knowledge transfer, but rather a question of the quality with which knowledge is transferred. This quality is purely a function of inclusion with which the teacher treats the life of the student. The discretionary power of teachers determines the actual quality of teaching, since there is no law that insists that teaching be inclusive. There are no systemic regulations that insist that the teacher must attend to the social, emotional, psychological or moral aspects of the student’s life. The exhaustion of quality education in any society is due to the lack of viable strategies to guarantee that there is inclusion in education. The crucial question is whether teaching is carried out to transfer knowledge or to transform the lives of students.

No profession is as mysterious as teaching. Nobody can objectively evaluate what a teacher does in the classroom. No one can restrict a teacher’s activities in the classroom by suggesting what he should do. The quality of the classroom environment is the prerogative of a qualified teacher. The subjectivity within which the teacher-student relationship functions is so precarious that the teacher is free to personalize it. Even students’ evaluation of teachers may not have a significant impact on “how a teacher relates to her professional space.” It is not surprising that pedagogues and their research attempts do not pay much attention to the criteria for measuring and evaluating the quality of the teaching process. So far there are few valid tools to assess the effectiveness of teaching. This mysterious aura that surrounds the teacher is so captivating and the autonomy of the teacher within the classroom is so superior that no external force can stop it. Often administrative restrictions or system rules and regulations cannot penetrate the bond that develops between the teacher and her students. Because the teacher is the only authority that determines the quality or authenticity of the interpersonal relationship that is the basis of the entire teaching process.

4. Two types of teaching

The autonomy of teachers described above often appears as an insurmountable obstacle to the effective implementation of many innovations in the field of teaching. To understand how the teacher’s autonomous power in the classroom becomes an obstacle to quality teaching, one must realize how a teacher exercises her autonomy within the classroom. Generally speaking, there are only two types of teachers. First of all, there are teachers who cater solely to the cognitive requirements of their students through their subject matter. But there are teachers who attend to both the specific cognitive requirements and the non-cognitive aspects of students during the teaching-learning process. The latter group of teachers falls into those regions of the student-teacher relationship that are not explicitly prescribed in the curriculum. In the process, the human qualities of teachers are combined with subject matter expertise and the autonomous power of the teacher points to quality in teaching. Teaching becomes a creative act for these teachers where they are actively involved in discovering and channeling the potential of their students in the right direction.

5. Professional commitment – in the commercialized world

Gone are the days when the entire world made sure of quality teaching as something ingrained in the teacher’s disposition. The concern for the psychological aspects of the students was something that arose spontaneously from the teaching process. In those days no one dared to check or bother to assess whether the teacher had a holistic bent in his attitudes towards the students. Evaluating a teacher for this was considered as ridiculous as asking a surgeon if he cared about the life of the patient he lay on the operating table. But in the modern world it is not like that. Nobody can deny that, as in any field, commercialism is also affecting the teaching profession and maintaining the quality of the relationship between teacher and student is becoming more difficult than ever. The erosion of quality teaching is corroding educational systems and depriving them of their vitality and sanctity.

Remedial teaching can be a remedy for insufficiencies that occurred during knowledge transfer. But there can be no remedy if a teacher does not delve into the social, emotional, psychological factors that determine the effective assimilation of the knowledge transferred to the lives of the students. In unilateral teaching, the transferred knowledge will remain as a lifeless, undigested foreign limb within the student. The student will never be able to apply the acquired knowledge neither for the improvement of his faculties nor for her well-being. Quality education will remain a distant dream and society will suffer from a talent crisis. So the solution is to demystify teaching. That there are clear objectives and means to evaluate the quality of teaching. True reforms in education must begin within the classroom. Let education policies take a micro-level approach where every student gets what they deserve from quality education.