The Effective Three Pillars of Education

May 5, 2022

By Dr. Mohamed Sobih

PhD, FHEA

Contact the author: drsobeih@gmail.com

Three of the most important elements of education are learning, teaching, and assessment. Each of them is explained and demonstrated here. Also, I present the theories behind them and reflect on my experience in higher education.

The Three Pillars of Education: Learning, Teaching, and Assessment. Image istockphoto.com

Introduction

Linguistically, according to the English Oxford Dictionaries, learn means “gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in something by studying, experiencing, or being taught,” while teaching means “impart knowledge to or instruct someone as to how to do something,” and assess means “evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of.”

From the preceding definitions, one can say that learning, teaching, and assessment are the three pillars of education, which are defined as “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university.” Human beings need education to live a good life in this world.

More importantly, the first five verses of the Holy Quran were revealed more than 14 centuries ago, encouraging us to read and certainly to educate. The English explanation of these verses, as mentioned on quran.com, is: “In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, and the Most Merciful.”

Read, O Prophet, in the Name of your Lord Who created
Created humans from a clinging clot (a piece of thick coagulated blood).
Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous,
Who taught (the writing) by the pen
Taught humanity what they knew not.” (Surah 96: Al-‘Alaq (The Clot)).

So, for anyone who goes through the education process aiming to learn something, there must be an instructor to teach them, and there must be an assessment to evaluate how much the student learns and how much the instructor teaches. Therefore, in the following sections, each pillar is discussed.

1. Learning

Learning is the instinct with which God has created human beings, beginning from the infant learning how to feed at his mother’s breast to learning how to manage the affairs of his life.

A wide range of activities are involved in learning, such as comprehension, memory, remembering information, developing, and mastering.

Although many research studies have been conducted on learning, it is still difficult to translate the results of those studies into practice. Perhaps this can be explained by how the academic staff teaches their students, since they often teach according to how they were taught and may be unaware of how their students learn.

Figure 1: Classification of learning theories.
Source: Ahmad et al., 2014.

As illustrated in Figure 1, learning theories are classified into four main categories: behaviorism, cognitivism, humanism, and constructivism.

Behaviorism learning theories claim that the human being’s mind, when born, looks like a blank slate, then starts learning by interacting with the environment, which means that one’s behavior results from the consequences they face.
Cognitivism clarifies the role of the brain in processing new information by analyzing the mental process. In addition, these theories are based on the belief that memory, motivation, and cognition play an important role in the learning process.
Humanism is to apply the available knowledge about human beings’ nature and how they learn in a systematic, conscious way.
Constructivism learning theories state that people depend on their own experiences to build and construct their understanding and knowledge of the surrounding world.

As a lecturer in manufacturing engineering, I should consider the education process a “mass production process” due to the large number of students who graduate every year. However, it should not, because of the diversity in students (gender, background, understanding level, skills, etc.), disciplines (medical science, engineering science, humanities, etc.), and the teachers themselves. That is why I see that the lecturer should not stick to only one theory or a category of theories, simply because each category complements the other.

From my point of view, the most important point in education is to make students engage in the session. This can be done in several ways. One of them is to motivate the student in a more autonomy-supportive way to engage them in studying. However, applying this method requires the teacher to learn how to support students’ autonomy, which might not be acceptable to some. Additionally, this extensively explains the link between motivation and student engagement, but does not tell us how to make students engage.

The method that can be used to engage students in the session is to start the session with the goals and outcomes that they will achieve after completing this session. Besides that, using session-intended outcomes (ILO) is a requirement for the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) | Higher Education Academy. It is of great importance for the students to know what they should learn in the session to be ready to either gain or retrieve some information, knowledge, or skills. Furthermore, the ILO helps teachers align teaching activities and assessments with those outcomes.

Among those activities that help the student engage in the session, the warm-up is asking questions to retrieve some fundamentals. This point is not only helpful for engaging students. But it’s also a good way to work around a student’s failure to retrieve some information or basics.

Another method to be used to engage students in the lecture is active learning. This method can be achieved by using group discussion, asking some students to give a presentation, questioning, letting some students draw on the whiteboard, and supporting them either by the teacher or their peers.

All of these make students comfortable in the lecture and happy to make simple or extended contributions. Additionally, it creates a positive atmosphere and good relationships between teachers and students. Another proposed action is to encourage students and support them to achieve higher academic standards by enriching the experience and academic challenge.

Teaching Classroom… Source: wikimedia.org

2. Teaching

As pointed out before, the diversity in students, along with some teacher-related aspects such as the teacher’s preparation, training, presentation style, and communication skills, represents a challenge for lecturers to achieve effective teaching. For a lecturer to be effective, they should do their best and make use of his/her skills to motivate and inspire his/her students to engage with and learn the delivered information. Effective classroom learning is highly dependent on the teacher’s ability to maintain the students’ interest that drove them to the lecture.

The lecture should be delivered in an engaging, interesting, and informative way to be unique.

Teaching methods and strategies have emerged because they are of such great importance that they can be described as a critical component of teaching. Hence, lecturers should carefully choose the proper teaching methods to achieve the session outcomes.

In engineering, as an experimental science, many teaching methods can be used, among them lectures, small group teaching, problem-based learning, and practical work.

Lecturing is teaching through giving verbal explanations of the subject to be taught. Visual aids are often used to help students visualize the subject. While small group teaching sometimes represents a difficulty, especially when the discipline is not clear to the students.

Whereas problem-based learning is distinguished by transferring the new information through the problem context. This method increases student motivation, develops their deeper understanding, and encourages autonomous and joint learning. Practical work is a process of teaching through examples or experiments; also, empirical evidence can be used to demonstrate information through a combination of visual evidence and associated logic.

In my opinion, practical identification helps to raise students’ interests and enhance information recall, as it provides connectivity between facts and applications in everyday life. Lectures, on the other hand, tend to provide more facts than to help coherence.

Lecturers can be distinguished from each other by their understanding of the students’ needs and teaching styles. As well as their willingness to acquire a good quality, teaching that is respected by the students. A good teacher should not only understand students’ expectations but also exceed these expectations. Teachers have to understand and expect that students have different levels of willingness to learn and have different levels of understanding. On the other side, students expect to add new information and skills and consider each circumstance. So, the lecturer is responsible for delivering the course material in an attractive, motivating, and engaging style that motivates and attracts students. Additionally, he should demonstrate the capabilities of the subject matter to solve real-world problems and cope with each student’s latent desire to learn.

To achieve this, there are many teaching styles and approaches, including group discussion, asking questions, practical analysis, projects, and letting some students explain some topics using their own style. It is the teacher’s role to design, plan, and control the teaching session. However, he has to be flexible to some extent and switch from one strategy to another depending on the current situation and how students respond. Moreover, he should strongly understand that he must continuously improve himself.

Students read with the help of their teacher. wikimedia.org

3. Assessment

Assessment is an important component of education, which is why William (2013) described it as the bridge between teaching and learning, as it is the approved way for teachers/lecturers to assess how their students learn. Surely, this is true to some extent. Assessment has another role beyond this point. It is used to give students feedback to correct any misunderstandings. An additional six main purposes of assessment can be considered: pedagogy, measurement, standardization, certification of the previous version, motivating students, and evaluation of the teaching method. Moreover, it is used to distinguish between students and determine which of them are worthy of the appropriate certification. That is why I consider it one of the three pillars of education, along with learning and teaching.

Here, I must point out that my understanding of the value of assessment is extracted from the British Quality Code for Higher Education (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2013).

Assessment is mainly classified into formative and summative assessments. The first one is where feedback is given to the student, aiming to increase their understanding of the subject. And no marks or grades are there. Only aims to let both students and lecturers know the points of weakness that need improvement. The second one is used to decide if the students pass or fail a certain course or program; moreover, it is used to rank them. This explains the urgency for students to replace summative assessments with formative ones.

Teachers who view assessment as an endpoint cannot improve their teaching methods. If they take it as a step forward and change their assessment method, they will also change their teaching methods and enhance the learning process.

So the selection of the appropriate method of assessment ranges from the essay, which is suitable to examine the ability of the student to construct a coherent argument, to the computer-based assessment, which enables students to practice disciplinary skills and motivates them.

Reference list

Ahmad, M., Ab. Rahim, L., & Arshd, N. I. (2014). A review of educational game design frameworks: an analysis from software engineering. In the proceedings of the International Conference on Computer and Information Sciences (ICCOINS).
Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 1-18.
Biggs, J. (1999). What the student does: teaching for enhanced learning. Journal of Higher Education Research & Development, 18, 57–75.
Biggs, J. (1999). Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press.
Morton, A. (2009). Lecturing to large groups. In: Fry, H., Ketteridge, S., & Marshall, S. (Eds.) A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice. 3^rd New York, Routledge, A Handbook of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice.pdf.
Norton, L. (2009). Assessing student learning. In: Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. & Marshall, S. (Eds.) A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice. 3^rd New York, Routledge, Handbook Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academics and Practice.pdf.
William, D. (2013). Assessment: The bridge between teaching and learning. The National Council of Teachers of English, 21, 15-20, www.ncte.org Assessment.pdf.

Long Way Education

Leave a ReplyCancel reply