This study was made under the assumption that the results of teaching history can vary according to teaching methods, even though the same materials are used in teaching. Through 'the ethnographic research', I tried to Provide some effective teaching ...
This study was made under the assumption that the results of teaching history can vary according to teaching methods, even though the same materials are used in teaching. Through 'the ethnographic research', I tried to Provide some effective teaching methods for hisory classes.
Eight middle school history classes were chosen in Choongnam-Do, watched and analyzed on the basis of following four criteria; the way of providing clues in teaching, the way of questions made by teachers, the responses of teachers to answers of students and the way of the explanations made by teachers. The results of this analysis were classified into following three teaching methods; lecturing, questioning and answering, and investigating. The results are as following.
1. Teaching goals are provided on the corner of chalkboard during the introduction, by which reduce the effectiveness of teaching is reduced, because it's done only for formal sake. And teaching cases giving general agenda on the chapter to be dealt was seldom observed.
2. Questions were made only to ask what students had already memorized, not to make students reason. And teachers' inadequate responses to the students' answers failed to foster the students' historical thinking.
3. Explanations were made by teachers only in the order of chapters in the textbooks, lacking sufficient comparisons and examples.
Some suggestions to solve the problems shown above or to improve teaching history are as following.
1. Teachers who teach by lecturing must utilize various teaching aids like audio visual materials, reorganize textbooks to be logically consistent and use terminology that fits to their students providing various comparisons and examples to arouse interest from students.
2. Teachers who devolop their classes by questioning and answering, especially when it's teacher centered, must ask questions that can make students reason, not the questions that only demand what they've memorized. And when students answer to their teachers and develop their theory, they must be well grounded. In student-centered classes, students must be well-prepared and ask questions about the tasks given by teachers.
3. Teachers who teach by investigating together with their students must take the level of their students into consideration when they set hypothesis and get results by investigation, rather than apply all the investigating rules. And materials must be prepared and reorganized by teachers prior to being handed out. In this way, teachers can lead the investigation to what they intended
It seems to be hard to apply these results and suggestions to all the history teachers, because personalities of teachers and the level of students differ.