Teaching can be regarded as a social action, explain.

For teaching to be regarded as a social action, it should reflect the following:
a) A Strategic Goal:
The teaching action of the teacher is expected to be strategic in the sense that it should be easily perceivable and measurable. The teacher's classroom actions should lead to the attainment of some goal.

b) Selection of means towards the attainment of goals:
For goals to be attained, the actor must select appropriate means of attaining them. These should be easily perceived by another person, so that lie/she can separate the means from the goals. A basic condition is that the means so selected must be compatible with desired goals. The teaching action, therefore, must be compatible with the specific goal desired. It is inadequate for a teacher to spend a period in a class and be satisfied that he/she has taught a lesson. He/she should be concerned with the appropriateness of his/her teaching action in relation to the desired goal.

c) The 1ffeans-Goals continuum is affected by situations:
The selection of means and the action of the actor are necessarily affected by the conditions under which the goals are to be pursued. This implies that as the teacher sets out to attain definite goals in classroom learning, he/she must provide an appropriate, teaching-learning environment. This requires skilful classroom management. Unless the teaching-learning situation is conducive to the pursuance of a desired goal, the latter may be impossible to attain.

d) The number of means to a goal:
In teaching, there are several alternatives to reaching a goal. The teacher selects what he/she considers the most appropriate. This alter-native should be the one that leads to the desired goal with the mini-mum economy of time and effort. What is essential is that the teacher does not regard the method he/she knows and uses as the only one avail-able. He should strive to find new methods which are more economical than the one lie is used to. For example, in teaching Biology or Mathematics, a teacher can improvise teaching aids by using what is easily available from the immediate environment.

e) The epistemological status of the means - end continuum:
The statement that connects the means to the ends ought to be formulated in such a way that it is empirically testable. This has to do with specifying behaviour or performance objectives. They must be stated in operational terms, so that they can lend themselves easily to measurement. As a result, curriculum designers and educational evaluation specialists insist on stating objectives using verbs like discriminate, identify demonstrate, state or execute, since these verbs lend themselves easily to measurement. This requires clarity 'in stating educational objectives. It is the objective that binds the means to the ends.

f) The character of the goal:
It is important to know whether the goal being pursued rests on the basis of normative terms or not. If it is on normative terms, what are the norms? If not, what is the acceptable level of attainment? A normative goal in education rests on the basis of the kind or level of attainment. The standard intelligence and achievement tests are constructed to yield scores which approximate the normal curve so that the teacher using them expects that up to 25% of students can pass the tests with good marks, 50% moderately well and 25% poorly.
Educational goals which rest on such base's are questioned because they lead to wastage. Goals should be stated in terms of performance rather than norms. By performance, it is meant that every student is expected to perform well in the skills being taught. In this case, the important thing is to determine the, level of performance that is considered as reasonable achievement before the goal can be declared sustained. If this is done, we will render unnecessary the assumption that only some students should be able to achieve our educational goal effectively.

g) The strategic relationship between an action and other actions:
At no point should an individual's action be seen as isolated from those of others in the social system. Individual action is part of the collective group actions, for the group tends to pursue collective goals.
Thus within the school system, the teacher should not see his/her teaching action; as separate from what others do. Instead lie/she should see them as his/her own contribution towards attaining tire school's goals under the principle of division of labor.

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francis1897 answered the question on August 22, 2022 at 07:13