In plain words
Teaching is what one person deliberately does so that another person learns. The key word is deliberately: teaching is planned, has goals and involves interaction between a teacher, a learner and some content. Learning is the intended result, a fairly permanent change in what the learner knows, feels or can do. The two are linked but not identical: a lecture can fail to teach anyone, and a student can learn alone from a book. This lesson answers four questions that NTA keeps asking. What is teaching and what is its nature? What should teaching aim at (objectives and Bloom’s taxonomy)? At what depth can teaching work (memory, understanding and reflective levels)? And what basic requirements and rules of thumb (maxims) make it effective?
Why it matters for NET
Teaching Aptitude is Unit 1 of Paper 1, and pattern analyses commonly report about five of the fifty questions from this unit. This lesson supplies the most “factual” of them: sequences of Bloom’s levels, matching levels of teaching with their proponents, matching definitions with thinkers, classifying an objective by its verb, and Assertion–Reason pairs about the nature of teaching. These questions are short but unforgiving: one misplaced level or a swapped author costs the full two marks. Because there is no negative marking, you should never leave one blank; with the elimination tricks at the end, you can usually reduce four options to two within seconds.
Concepts in depth: meaning and definitions
Classic definitions stress different sides of the same activity. Learn the key phrase of each, because NTA matches phrases with names.
| Thinker | Key phrase | What it stresses |
|---|---|---|
| H. C. Morrison | an intimate contact between a more mature personality and a less mature one, designed to further the education of the latter | relationship; maturity gap |
| N. L. Gage | a form of interpersonal influence aimed at changing the behaviour potential of another person | influence; behaviour change |
| W. H. Burton | the stimulation, guidance, direction and encouragement of learning | teacher as guide |
| B. O. Smith | a system of actions intended to induce learning | system; intention |
| Edmund Amidon | an interactive process, primarily involving classroom talk | interaction |
A useful distinction from philosophy of education: “teach” is a task word and “learn” is its achievement word, just as “search” and “find” are. So teaching is judged by its intention and reasonable method, not only by its result.
Concepts in depth: nature and characteristics
- Art and science. It is an art because good teaching is creative, personal and responsive. It is a science because it can be observed, analysed, measured and systematically improved (for example through microteaching and interaction analysis).
- Bipolar or tripolar. John Adams called it bipolar (teacher and learner). John Dewey called it tripolar (teacher, learner and the social environment, today often read as the curriculum).
- Interactive and communicative. Teaching happens through two-way communication; it is not one-way transmission.
- Goal-directed and planned. It aims at specific objectives and is organised in advance.
- Diagnostic and remedial. A teacher finds learning gaps and fixes them.
- A continuous and modifiable process. It is shaped by feedback from evaluation.
- Formal and informal. It happens in classrooms and outside them.
Phases of teaching (Philip W. Jackson, 1968). The pre-active phase is everything before class: fixing objectives, diagnosing learners’ entry behaviour, selecting content, sequencing it and choosing methods and aids. The interactive phase is the classroom itself: presenting, questioning, reinforcing and adjusting on the spot. The post-active phase comes after: evaluating achievement, giving feedback and revising the plan.
Related concepts. Instruction is the systematic delivery of knowledge (a narrower term than teaching). Training builds skills through guided practice. Conditioning shapes responses through reinforcement with little appeal to understanding. Indoctrination instils beliefs without regard to evidence and reasons. Teaching, in the full sense, respects the learner’s reason.
Concepts in depth: objectives and Bloom’s taxonomy
An aim is a broad, long-term direction (for example, “to develop scientific temper”). A general objective is narrower, and a specific or behavioural objective states what the learner will be able to do, in observable terms. Robert Mager’s approach adds the condition and the criterion: “Given a relation and its functional dependencies (condition), the student will identify the highest normal form (behaviour) correctly in four of five cases (criterion).” Vague verbs such as “know”, “understand” and “appreciate” are avoided in behavioural objectives because they cannot be observed.
Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues classified objectives into three domains: cognitive (thinking), affective (feeling) and psychomotor (doing). The cognitive handbook appeared in 1956, the affective one (Krathwohl, Bloom and Masia) in 1964. The original committee did not complete the psychomotor domain; it was developed by others.
| Original 1956 (noun) | Revised 2001 (verb) | Typical verbs |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Knowledge | Remember | recall, list, define, recognise |
| 2. Comprehension | Understand | explain, summarise, classify, compare, interpret |
| 3. Application | Apply | use, execute, implement, solve |
| 4. Analysis | Analyse | differentiate, organise, attribute, break down |
| 5. Synthesis | Evaluate | judge, critique, check, justify |
| 6. Evaluation | Create | design, construct, generate, plan, produce |
Read the table carefully: in the original, Synthesis (5) was below Evaluation (6). In the revision by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl (2001), Synthesis became Create and moved to the top, so Evaluate is now 5. The revision also added a second dimension, the knowledge dimension: factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive. Crossing 4 knowledge types with 6 processes gives a 24-cell taxonomy table in which any objective can be placed.
| Affective (Krathwohl, 1964) | Psychomotor (Dave, 1970) | Psychomotor (Simpson, 1972) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Receiving (attending) | 1 Imitation | 1 Perception |
| 2 Responding | 2 Manipulation | 2 Set |
| 3 Valuing | 3 Precision | 3 Guided response |
| 4 Organisation | 4 Articulation | 4 Mechanism |
| 5 Characterisation by a value or value complex | 5 Naturalisation | 5 Complex overt response |
| 6 Adaptation | ||
| 7 Origination |
Anita Harrow (1972) gave a third psychomotor scheme with six levels, from reflex movements to non-discursive communication. The logic of every hierarchy is the same: each level assumes the ones below it.
Concepts in depth: levels of teaching
| Feature | Memory level | Understanding level | Reflective level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proponent (model) | Herbart | H. C. Morrison | Hunt (with Bigge) |
| Aim | retain and reproduce facts | grasp meaning, relations, principles; apply them | solve problems, think critically and originally |
| Nature | “thoughtless”; rote | “thoughtful”; insight | “upper thoughtful”; problem-centred |
| Teacher’s role | dominant | active, guides | creates the problem situation, stays in the background |
| Learner’s role | passive, receptive | active (secondary to teacher) | most active; learner-centred |
| Model steps | preparation, presentation, association (comparison), generalisation, application | exploration, presentation, assimilation, organisation, recitation | recognising the problem, forming hypotheses, testing them, drawing conclusions |
| Evaluation | recall and recognition items | objective and essay items needing explanation and application | essay and open-ended problems, projects |
| Climate | formal, controlled | organised, teacher-led | open, democratic |
The levels form a ladder: understanding needs remembered facts, and reflection needs understanding. Herbart’s original formal steps were clearness, association, system and method; his followers expanded them into the familiar five steps. Morrison built a “mastery formula”: pre-test, teach, test the result, adapt the procedure, and teach and test again until actual learning is achieved. Some textbooks add a fourth, autonomous development level, in which the learner is fully self-directed; NTA options occasionally use it as a distractor.
Concepts in depth: basic requirements and maxims
Effective teaching needs: a ready and motivated learner (Thorndike’s law of readiness); a competent teacher with subject mastery, communication skill and planning ability; clear objectives; suitable methods and aids; a supportive environment; and feedback and evaluation. Teaching skills can be practised one at a time through microteaching (developed at Stanford by Dwight Allen and colleagues in the 1960s). The widely used Indian cycle is 36 minutes: teach 6, feedback 6, replan 12, reteach 6, re-feedback 6.
Maxims of teaching are rules of thumb for sequencing, many associated with Herbert Spencer and Comenius:
| Maxim | Meaning, with a computing example |
|---|---|
| Known to unknown | Start from the hostel Wi-Fi students use, then introduce IP addressing. |
| Simple to complex / easy to difficult | Linear search before binary search trees. |
| Concrete to abstract | Show a physical logic-gate chip before Boolean algebra. |
| Particular to general (induction) | Work three examples, then state the rule. |
| Whole to part | Show a complete working website, then study HTML, CSS and JavaScript separately (Gestalt view). |
| Indefinite to definite | Move from vague everyday ideas of “data” to precise definitions. |
| Empirical to rational | Observe a pattern in outputs first, then prove why it holds. |
| Analysis to synthesis | Break a problem into parts, then assemble a solution. |
| Psychological to logical | Begin from learners’ interests and experience; organise content logically afterwards. |
| Actual to representative | Real objects before pictures or models. |
| Follow nature | Respect the learner’s natural development (Rousseau). |
Worked examples
Example 1: classify objectives by level
Place each objective in the revised cognitive domain. (a) “List the ACID properties.” (b) “Explain, in your own words, why a transaction needs isolation.” (c) “Given a schedule, construct its precedence graph.” (d) “Distinguish conflict-serialisable from view-serialisable schedules in a given set.” (e) “Judge whether strict 2PL is justified for a banking app and defend your view.” (f) “Design a locking protocol for a new booking system.”
Solution. Look only at the main verb and what the learner must produce. (a) List = recall: Remember. (b) Explain = Understand. (c) Using a known procedure on a new case = Apply. (d) Distinguish/differentiate = Analyse. (e) Judge and defend against criteria = Evaluate. (f) Design something new = Create. Note that one objective uses one main verb; “explain and design” would mix two levels.
Example 2: identify the level of teaching
Classroom A: the teacher dictates definitions of the OSI layers; students copy and memorise them for a quiz next day. Classroom B: the teacher shows how each layer adds a header, asks students to explain encapsulation and to compare OSI with TCP/IP. Classroom C: the teacher reports that a campus website loads slowly only in one hostel; students propose possible causes, design tests and conclude.
Solution. A is memory level (teacher dominant, recall). B is understanding level (relationships, comparison, insight). C is reflective level (a real problem, hypotheses, testing, learner-driven). The deciding clue is who does the thinking: in C the learners form and test the hypotheses.
Example 3: from vague aim to behavioural objective
Rewrite “Students will understand SQL joins.”
Solution. “Understand” is not observable. Using Mager’s three parts: condition “given two tables and an English query”; behaviour “the student will write the SQL JOIN query”; criterion “that returns the correct rows in at least four of five queries”. The result is specific, observable and measurable, and it sits at the Apply level.
Example 4: sequencing a lesson with maxims and phases
Plan a lesson on recursion for first-year students.
Solution. Pre-active: fix objectives (trace a recursive factorial; write a recursive sum), check prerequisites (functions, loops), choose a demonstration. Interactive: start from the known (loops they have written) and something concrete (a stack of plates), trace factorial(3) as a particular case, then generalise the pattern of base case and recursive case (particular to general, empirical to rational). Post-active: give a short test, analyse errors (missing base cases are common) and revise the plan. Every maxim here runs from the learner’s side to the subject’s side, which is the direction all genuine maxims share.
Example 5: counting with taxonomies
(a) How many cells does the revised taxonomy table have? (b) How long is one Indian microteaching cycle?
Solution. (a) 4 knowledge types × 6 cognitive processes = 24 cells. (b) 6 + 6 + 12 + 6 + 6 = 36 minutes; replanning takes the longest share, 12 minutes.
Formula and fact sheet
| Item | Fact to memorise |
|---|---|
| Cognitive (revised 2001) | Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create (Anderson and Krathwohl) |
| Cognitive (original 1956) | Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation (Bloom et al.) |
| Knowledge dimension | factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive; table 4 × 6 = 24 cells |
| Affective (1964) | Receiving, Responding, Valuing, Organisation, Characterisation (Krathwohl, Bloom, Masia) |
| Psychomotor | Dave (5): Imitation → Naturalisation; Simpson (7): Perception → Origination; Harrow (6) |
| Levels of teaching | Memory (Herbart) → Understanding (Morrison) → Reflective (Hunt) |
| Herbartian steps | Preparation, Presentation, Association, Generalisation, Application |
| Morrison steps | Exploration, Presentation, Assimilation, Organisation, Recitation |
| Phases (Jackson) | Pre-active (planning), Interactive (execution), Post-active (evaluation) |
| Bipolar / tripolar | Adams / Dewey |
| Mager objective | behaviour + condition + criterion |
| Microteaching (Indian cycle) | 6 + 6 + 12 + 6 + 6 = 36 minutes |
NTA traps
- Old order in a revised question. Wrong: “Synthesis/Create is below Evaluate.” Fix: that is only the 1956 order; in the 2001 revision Create is the top level.
- Nouns in the revision. Wrong: “The revision uses Knowledge and Comprehension.” Fix: the revision uses verbs (Remember, Understand).
- Classify is not Analyse. Wrong: “classifying” sounds analytical. Fix: in the revised taxonomy classifying, summarising, comparing and explaining are processes of Understand; Analyse is differentiating, organising and attributing.
- Responding vs Valuing. Wrong: taking part equals valuing. Fix: Responding is participation (even on request); Valuing is voluntary commitment to a value and acting on it consistently.
- Swapped proponents. Wrong: Morrison with reflective level. Fix: Herbart–memory, Morrison–understanding, Hunt–reflective. Order of letters H, M, H follows the ladder.
- Reversed maxims. Wrong: “abstract to concrete”, “rational to empirical”, “part to whole”. Fix: genuine maxims always move from the learner’s experience towards the subject’s structure.
- Teaching guarantees learning. Wrong: every teaching act produces learning. Fix: teaching is intended to cause learning; the intention can fail.
- Psychomotor completed in 1956. Wrong: Bloom’s committee finished all three domains. Fix: only cognitive (1956) and affective (1964) handbooks came from that group; psychomotor schemes came from Simpson, Dave and Harrow.
How NTA asks this
Formats. (1) Sequence questions on a Bloom domain or model steps; (2) match-the-list on levels, proponents, definitions and domains; (3) “identify the level” for a verb or classroom scenario; (4) Assertion–Reason on the nature of teaching or levels; (5) “which of these are maxims or characteristics”.
Mini match example. List I: A. Organisation, B. Precision, C. Analyse, D. Guided response. List II: I. Cognitive, II. Affective, III. Psychomotor (Dave), IV. Psychomotor (Simpson). Answer: A-II, B-III, C-I, D-IV. Spot the easiest pair first (Analyse is cognitive), then eliminate every option that does not contain it.
Mini A–R example. A: Memory-level teaching is called thoughtless teaching. R: Memory-level teaching presents facts in a well-organised sequence. Both are true, but R does not explain A: it is “thoughtless” because it demands no insight, not because it is organised. Answer: option 2. Ask yourself “does R answer why A is true?” before choosing option 1.
Elimination tricks. In sequences, fix the first and last items (Remember first, Create last; Receiving first, Characterisation last) and most options fall away. In “which are maxims” questions, strike any pair that runs away from the learner (abstract first, rational first). In level questions, ask who is most active: teacher (memory), both (understanding) or learner (reflective).