General Principles and Theories of Teaching

             It is said in the theories of teaching that the process of teaching has to focus on the perceptive processes of the mind and this is called the Gestalt theory. The word gestalt can be roughly translated into English as placed, put together or formed or shaped. The theories of Gestalt say that the whole is always greater than the parts, and this means that the total item like a picture or a car has a totally different meaning than the parts that went into making it and those may have been paint, canvas, brush for one and tire paint or metal for the other. Thus when the entire group is put together, the mind also jumps from thinking of the separate parts to the total item. The groupings of different items take place due to their proximity to each other, in similarity when the products bear some resemblance to each other, closure if the items together convey a meaning and simplicity when the group can be seen as simple figures due to symmetry or regularity or smoothness. These are the processes involved in teaching and the different factors that have been talked about are called the laws of organization. (Gestalt and Instructional Design) .

             These factors lead the expert human teachers to use these principles to form teaching actions and use them in the course of their teaching. In certain cases this method of recognition enable the teachers to get students to do all the work with questions like "explain this to me", "solve this problem", or write an essay comparing", etc. In other cases of teaching the teacher has to take a more direct role and say things like "this is how it is done" or think of it in this manner", etc. In between the teacher also can a take a route with an educational group where there is an educational setting and that enables a group of students to work together. (Modeling Human Teaching Tactics and Strategies for Tutoring Systems).

             Thus when a group of students meet in an educational encounter, it leads to a situation where the teachers are able to take benefit from the context, modality, interaction and content of communication between human beings.

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