![]() ![]() However, interest in teaching goes beyond practical, educational aims. This has eluded scientists and academics so far. We take this a step further by stating that in order to know who good teachers are and what good teaching is, we need to know what teaching is. ![]() 2013, Kane and Staiger 2008, 2010, Rothstein and Mathis 2013, Konstantopoulos 2008, Rothstein 2010). 2014, Darling-Hammond 2012, Gordon et al. In that regard, an agreed-upon measure of what counts as good teaching and a good teacher is still missing (Coe et al. This gap has become untenable in the light of increasing evidence that teachers have a long-lasting impact on the socio-economic fate of their pupils (Chetty et al. 2004 Olson and Bruner 1996 Pearson 1989 Rivkin et al. 2013 Clark and Lampert 1986 Kane and Staiger 2008 Konstantopoulos 2007 Nye et al. However, although progress has been made in analyzing, say, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying learning, much less is known about those supporting teaching (Battro 2010, 2013 Battro et al. On the practical side, research in cognitive science has been valuable in inspiring better practices in education. In pursuing a better understanding of teaching, we look at both practical and theoretical aims. They are responsiveness, relevance, information-giving and motivation. They do not exhaust the list but they are central for it to happen. ![]() In this introduction, we look at four basic building blocks we believe are fundamental to teaching. But deciding what the building blocks are is a good first step to finding a definition of teaching. We also have to know how these components work and how they produce acts of teaching. That having been said, knowing what teaching’s building blocks are doesn’t mean we have a definition of what teaching is. Yet a fourth reason for their importance is that they can help us define the elusive concept of teaching. This gets at the phylogenesis of teaching. In addition, they have significance for biological evolution in that we could describe which building blocks appear in non-human animals and see which get added on as we move up the phylogenetic ladder. Second, we can determine which basic building blocks are common to teaching among humans, nonhuman animals, computers that teach and any other teaching systems. One is that once we have determined what they are, we can seek their origins in human infants’ cognition and then study their developmental trajectories. And that further enables us to reverse course to seek these building blocks’ developmental trajectories, as they eventually allow us to describe human teaching’s complexity and its fundamental functional units.Īll of that having been said, what could basic building blocks give us that is of importance? Several reasons can be offered for their significance. That complexity could serve as a map of its components that allows us to do backward engineering to get at teaching’s basic building blocks. Strauss ( 2018), without denying the importance of basic building blocks, claimed that a helpful way to come to better understand teaching is to attempt to determine its complexity. The route we chose to achieve this goal is to explore several approaches to teaching, and see how they provide insights into these basic building blocks.īut before presenting these approaches, we first justify our choice to seek basic building blocks of teaching. The main goal of this introduction to this Special Issue is to suggest what basic building blocks of teaching may be. ![]()
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