Teaching-Style Choice is Imperative to Formal Education

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Formal education is of utmost importance in the modern world. Education shapes the way individuals think reason and make important decisions in their daily lives. The quality of education that learners get, right from kindergarten to the time they start their careers, is of high significance. Quality tools for teaching and learning, quality environment for teaching and learning and quality teaching are the major determinants of quality education (Lowman, 1984). Governments, learners and other stakeholders in the education sector are regularly facing various issues in the quest for quality education. One such issue is the teaching style that teachers decide to use in their classes. Dictator/authority figure (where the teacher is the center of attention and all learners must focus on him), authority model (here the teacher demonstrates some behaviors that are beneficial to the learners), student oriented (here the learners are involved in activities that enable them to develop relationships while learning the needed course material), hands off (here the students are left to study the course material on their own), and self-learning (where the teacher develops detailed lesson plans that the students read through) are some of the commonly used teaching styles in most learning institutions (Gomberg, 2000).
In the dictator teaching style, the teacher is portrayed as an authority figure. The teacher acts as a dictator and the students as his/her subordinates. On most occasions, the teacher maintains very distant and stringent relations with the students in order not to lose control. This often results in authoritarian and businesslike relations between the teacher and the students. He/she dictates what is to be done in a step by step ...

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...t between the students and the teachers, and student-student relationships. From the discussions above, it is true that dictator teaching style has both positive and negative impacts on learners and other stake-holders in the education sector. On the one hand, it improves personal discipline in the students and creates a social order in learning institutions. It also leads to efficient and straightforward decision making and, therefore, improves the performance of learners. On the other hand it is dictatorial, denies the student’s freedom of expression, discourages thinking and creates poor relationships between learners and teachers and among the learners. These result in poor performance. I believe teachers should be encouraged to adopt student-friendly teaching styles in order to improve education standards and make the learning process enjoyable.

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