What is Strategy
Before going to discuss teaching strategy, first we should know what is strategy? Strategy is borrowed term from military which actually means to utilize all of a nations forces through large scale planning and development to ensure security or victory.
According to Encyclopedia, Strategy refers to science or art of planning and directing large military movement and operations.
What is Teaching Strategy
Lawton define teaching strategy is a generalized plan for a lesson(s) which include structure desired learner behavior in terms of goals of instructions and an outline of planned tactics necessary to implement the strategy.
Mackenzie defined the terms strategy and teaching separately. For him, “Teaching refers to a system of actions involving an agent, a situation, an end-in-view and two sets of factors in the situation-one set over which the agent has no control and one set which the agent can modify with respect to the end in view.
Controlling factors constitute the means by which goals are achieved. These means are of two types.
- Material means i.e. subject matter, teaching material and teaching aids.
- Procedural means the ways of manipulation and implementation of the material means.
B.O Smith defined it as a pattern of acts that severs to attain certain outcomes and to guard against certain others. Here we can find out the uses of strategy:
- To ensure that learning will occur in as brief a time as possible.
- To induce students to engage in exchange of ideas.
- To minimize the chance of wrong responses in learning concepts, principles or facts.
- To ensure the attainment of defined instructional objectives.
There are different types of teaching strategies used by the subject teacher. He manipulates them according to the need of the students, subject matter and of course, the instructional objectives and then implements them in classroom teaching. Selection and manipulation of teaching strategies is done at pre-active phase of teaching while implementation is done at interactive phase of teaching.
