Teaching Competency of Special School Teachers in Relation to Teaching Aptitude and Their Adjustment in Haryana

Education is a process of human enlightenment and empowerment for the achievement of a better and higher quality of life. Education enables an individual to understand his responsibility to society and nation and to become ideal citizen of nation. There are the three components or poles of the teaching learning process teacher, student/learner and environment. Every component has its own importance. They are equally responsible for the success or failure of the Educational programme. Teacher is the main implementer of all education policies. He/she not only imparts knowledge to his/her students, but also acts as an agent of social change and moulds the character of students. He is the backbone of the society. The place of the teacher in the society is of vital importance. He acts as the pivot for the transmission of intellectual and technical skills from generation to generation. He/she is the destiny of the nation. In fact, future of mankind depends on him/her. Prospective teachers are young persons who plan to be a teacher and who spends part of his or her time in preliminary education undertaking teaching duties under the supervision of the head-teacher. There are a large number of instructional and related activities to be performed by the teacher inside and outside the classroom. These activities are of varied types. The effective organization of these activities would require that a teacher possesses a certain amount of knowledge and also certain attitudes and skills. This is known as teaching competence. In other words, teacher competence refers to ―the right way of conveying units of knowledge, application and skills to students‖. The right way here includes knowledge of content, processes, methods and means of conveying content. Teaching constitutes one of the major tasks of a teacher. Competency over this task of teaching is the essence of a successful education system. Contribution of teacher to pupil learning will be referred to as teacher effectiveness. Note that teacher effectiveness is not really a characteristic of the individual teacher, but something shared by the teacher and the pupil. Teacher competency is the average success of all of teacher‘s behaviour in achieving his intended efforts (Medly and Mitzel, 1963). Teacher competency is wider term including teachers‘ personality, presage, process and product variable while teaching competency is required to the teaching behaviour presented during classroom teaching and effective use of various teaching skills is called teaching competency. The effective teaching of a teacher plays an important role in making him a competent teacher. There are various methods to assess teaching competencies these are Judgment, Observation of classroom, Theoretical framework of teacher behaviour and experimental studies. Teachers are the key factors in an education system. It is a well-known fact that their subject knowledge has an influence on students‘ learning in the classroom settings. Teaching needs three qualities. Knowledge is the first, communication skill is the

motivates". Time and again we hear these proverbial sayings from various sources at different occasions. The ability of a teacher is decided in classrooms while presentation. Sitting in a good teacher's class those with aptitude, always probe whether they can teach like this and then believe they can. Students' aptitude is well influenced by the classes they sit in and the teachers who teach them in their student days from primary to college. How teachers can be identified as teachers with teacher aptitude? Good teaching looks effortless because a teacher's knowledge and experience are invisible. Teaching is a tricky blend of action, a way of contextualizing knowledge. A teacher has to be competent enough to perform all these actions in tricky way. Ha has to put one‘s knowledge, skills and attitudes to new tasks to new situations and to manage a series of task in effective way. Who is a competent teacher? Mere possession of knowledge and certified qualification gives no assurance to meet the aforesaid objectives. For this, it is obligatory for a teacher to have appropriate comprehension of human nature, its needs, and developmental principles in light of urbanization, technology advancements and industrialization locally as well as globally. Due to vast extension in roles and responsibilities, a teacher has to display high order of professionalism inside and outside the classroom. It is impossible for a teacher to possess all competencies in perfect amalgam though training and experience lead teacher towards proficiency. A competent teacher is temperamentally warm and cordial. She has clear vision of the set objectives. She executes meticulously whatever is planned. Management of affairs is done effectively by her inside and outside the classroom. Her skill of presentation of subject matter is able to seek attention of students. She is capable of motivating the back benchers. In earlier studies the term ‗Teaching Competency‘ was used to designate the researches which were aimed to identify and define teacher efficiency. Later on specific dimensions of competencies were formulated and elaborated studies were conducted, which owe its roots to earlier studies. These dimensions are such as competency in activity based teaching, competency in adopting child center practices, competency in teaching learning material and display, competency in evaluation strategies and competency in adopting novel techniques. A variety of factors seem to go along with teacher aptitude and is depended upon certain personal traits, intellectual and temperamental and these often will enable the teacher to get over even drastic constraints imposed on his performance. As well as it has been also more competent than others. Teachers grow in competence with training and experience. Teacher's competency is defined in terms of repertoire, how competent a teacher is depends upon the repertoire of competencies he or she possesses: because of the arbitrariness of the level of which individual competencies may be defined there is some flexibility in the way that a particular level of competencies may be specified. To a layman, the obvious way to evaluate a teacher is that teacher competency should be assessed on the basis of pupils learning, which makes sense only when we regard the work of the teacher as sub-professional. Various educationists have given different opinions regarding the teaching effectiveness and teaching efficiency which include the various teaching competencies of the teacher. The broader domains of teaching competency of teachers depends upon. Set induction preparing students for a lesson by clarifying its goals relating to student's prior knowledge and skills through analogies demonstrations and posting stimulating problems. Similarly motivational skills, including reinforcing student's behaviour, varying the stimulus, displaying warmth, enthusiasm and recognizing student's need's. Simultaneously, presentation and communication skills, including explaining, dramatizing, reading, using audio-visual aids closure using silence encouraging student's feedback clarity, expressiveness pacing and planned repetition. More ever questioning, convergent and divergent questions, stimulating student initiative and skills of small group works developing independent learning, counseling encouraging, cooperative activity and mutual interaction of students. Similarly, to developing students thinking such as fostering, inquiry-learning, guiding-discovery, concept formation, using simulation, role playing and gaming, to stimulate through developing student problem-solving skills encouraging student to evaluate and make judgments and developing critical thinking. Different teachers possess different personalities. The teacher should posses a balanced personality. Then he/she should integrate the skills of teaching with his/her life style. The teacher is an ideal or role model for the students, particularly at the secondary stage; students make their teacher whom they like, their hero. They begin to worship their ideal man or woman and try to model himself on him or her. Thus it is very much important for the teacher to have a balanced personality, so that integrated and balanced development of students will take place. There is close relationship between adjustment of a teacher and the competency of his teaching.

ROLE OF THE TEACHER

The source of true and holistic education is the teacher. Teacher in Indian heritage has always been given a raised platform of respect. Apart from imparting

guide and philosopher. Teachers are regarded as the most powerful agents‗ of social change. According to Swami Vivekananda, ―Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in men.‖ Education alone makes a man perfect and all round development of human personality is possible through education. The effect of poor quality teaching on student outcomes is debilitating and cumulative. The effects of quality teaching on educational outcomes are greater than those that arise from students‗ backgrounds. A reliance on curriculum standards and statewide assessment strategies without paying due attention to teacher quality appears to be insufficient to gain the improvements in student outcomes sought .The quality of teacher education and teaching appear to be more strongly related to student achievement than class sizes, overall spending levels or teacher salaries. Teachers shoulder the responsibility of shaping the future of the nation. The future of the nation depends upon the skills and efficiency of the teachers. Teachers are given the other name as creators….they are the creators of philosophers, leaders, doctors, advocates and many more. A teacher‗s job is not at all that easy and unless a high degree of professional qualities and commitment are inculcated in the teacher‗s personality, the training program would remain incomplete. Teachers work involves rigorous efforts in the classroom and outside as well as frequent interaction with parents and community members. For this purpose teacher‗s need to be well trained and competent to perform their jobs. If teachers acquire Professional competencies and commitment and if they are enabled and empowered to perform their multiple tasks in the classroom as well as in the school and community in a genuinely professional manner, then a high quality learning among increasing more students may result in cognitive, affective and psychomotor areas of human development improving teaching performance through more effective teacher preparation, therefore is an essential ingredient in solving most educational problems. Educationist all over the world have started realizing that only securing enough teachers will not do, most important is securing the right type of teachers with right type of knowledge, skills, attitudes and competence. Due to this increased stress is being laid on the qualitative aspect of the teacher education. It is being realized now that efficient and competent teacher is major factor that will contribute to educational refinement and improvement and the search is on for those factors that make the teachers competent.

The roles of teachers and schools are changing, and so are expectations about them: teachers are asked to teach in increasingly multicultural classrooms, integrate effectively, engage in evaluation and accountability processes, and involve parents in schools. Furthermore, a recent World Summit on Teaching noted that teachers need to help students acquire not only ―the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test‖ but more importantly, ways of thinking (creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning); ways of working (communication and collaboration); tools for working (including information and communications technologies); and skills around citizenship, life and career and personal and social responsibility for success in modern democracies‖ (OECD 2011). When many teachers undertook their initial education, knowledge about learning and teaching was less developed, many teaching tools were not available and the role of education and training was more narrowly conceived. For example, the increased availability of educational resources via the worldwide web, including Open Educational Resources, means that both teaching staff and learners have, potentially, a much wider range of learning materials at their disposal and teachers will increasingly need the competences to find, evaluate and deploy learning materials from a wider range of sources, and to help learners acquire these competences. So teaching staff nowadays also need the competences to constantly innovate and adapt; this includes having critical, evidence-based attitudes, enabling them to respond to students‘ outcomes, new evidence from inside and outside the classroom, and professional dialogue, in order to adapt their own practices. Teaching competences are thus complex combinations of knowledge, skills, understanding, values and attitudes, leading to effective action in situation. Since teaching is much more than a task, and involves values or assumptions concerning education, learning and society, the concept of teacher competences may resonate differently in different national contexts. The range and complexity of competences required for teaching in the 21st century is so great that any one individual is unlikely to have them all, nor to have developed them all to the same high degree. Attention must therefore be focused also on the competences or attributes of an education system or of a teaching team. The question of teachers‘ competences needs to be set in the wider context of the European Union‘s work to ensure that all citizens have the competences (knowledge, skills and attitudes) they require. The European Parliament and the European Council in 2006 adopted a Recommendation on Key

competences) stands out - in particular, the meta-competence of learning to learn (adjusting to change, managing and selecting from huge information flows). Teachers should understand, deploy and assess key competences; this entails interdisciplinary collaboration skills, as underlined in the document Assessment of Key Competences in initial education and training (European Commission, 2012); teachers should model these Key Competences as well as helping learners to acquire them. Teachers‘ continuous professional development is highly relevant both for improving educational performance and effectiveness, and for enhancing teachers‘ commitment, identity and job satisfaction. Although they are interconnected with the features and constraints of specific school contexts and national education systems (OECD, 2009), teachers‘ competences have powerful effects on student achievement: up to three quarters of school effects on student outcomes can be explained by teacher effects (Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain, 2005).

It is universally agreed upon by all persons who are concerned with social welfare and progress of a country that the teacher plays a crucial role in building of a nation and truly he is called nation builder. He is charged with an important responsibility of modifying and shaping the personality of children in accordance with national objectives of life. The responsibility of the teacher becomes more in developing nations that are engaged in exploiting their physical and human resources for the all round development of the nation. Teachers have to play their own role in the process of national development. The greatest contribution of teachers will be channelizing the energy of the youth to undertake the task of reconstruction in all walks of social life. Hence, under such lines, it can be said that it is imperative for teachers of today and particularly in India, that they should be able to demonstrate a great amount of Teacher Adjustment levels. The teacher of today not only has to focus on academic matters but also has to at all times, focus on sound psychological development of students and at the same time keep himself updated with the new proceedings in the teaching profession. For a teacher, to be able to maintain all such duties in the teacher profession class for a lot and is surely an uphill task manageable only with the prowess of a strong mind endowed with great adjustable features. Teaching has become increasingly challenging and complex under the present changing situations. One of the various challenges hurled at teachers in the recent past, is of maintaining the physical and mental health of children and youth of the nation. The teacher of today has to emphasize the harmonious development of Adjustment processes is essential under the present situations, not only on order to enable a teacher to function well but also, in order to pave the way for a better adjustment and healthy progress of students. Just an in any other profession, school, college or university work environment is not smooth with all teachers. Some of the teachers‘ mode of response to their work place is detrimental to themselves, to society or to both. It has been found at times that certain teachers may not be able to adjust themselves well and as result they appear to be indecisive, aggressive, getting into crisis situations, finding life purposeless, suffering from deep-rooted inferiority complex, finding difficulty in socialization, achieving deplorably low, indulging in avoidance of school duties and so on. It has also been seen most of the teachers‘ desires or goals are not within their reach-at times they have conflicting desires regarding their career moves lead to severe dilemmas in their minds. Some even show evidence of serious emotional problems in various other ways. In extreme cases some are out to destroy the very fabric of our way of life and try to damage the very institution. It needs hardly any emphasis that teachers with adjustment problems often prove to of no comfort to themselves. They are hard to get along with, their behavior does not seem reasonable. People around them cannot understand why they act as they do, often against their own best interests. Their conduct is irrational and lacking in common sense. Lecturing, punishment and even well meaning advice proves to be ineffective methods of dealing with adjustment problems. A worrier by being told he should not worry. A shiftless person is aided very little by preaching or threats. Such attempts make matters worse by convincing the maladjusted of his own weaknesses. The individual has an additional social thwarting to bear. It is true that every teacher is unique and every effort needs to be made for helping a teacher to save whatever talents he may have both for his own sake and for mankind.

Aptitude of any kind refers to capabilities present within an individual. These capabilities, either innate or acquired, provide a person, an extra edge in terms of putting up a good performance. The profession of teaching too calls for certain characteristic potentials which need to be present within any individual harboring the desire to teach. These potentials can be collectively termed as Teaching Aptitude. Basically, a good teacher must have a dynamic personality. He should have in him a collection of aptitudes which are needed to equip him to face the challenges in teaching and meet the requirements that a teaching job desires. However, it must be known that Teaching Aptitude and Teaching Ability are not the same. Teaching Ability signifies that an individual may be able to carry out

that a person has high chances of becoming a successful teacher if he receives proper training in teaching. Thus, Teaching aptitude can be said to be having a future reference and tries to predict the degree of attainment or success of an individual in the area of teaching. An individual may be said to be having a good Teaching Aptitude if he possesses various qualities like being articulate, being able to attract and command attention, being able to explain any topic clearly and precisely, being language proficient, being creative( so as to be able to use a variety of teaching methods to grasp students‘ attention), being sensitive and aware of students‘ needs and having a drive to remain updated about current progresses in the field of teaching and various other nuances of teaching. At present, society is undergoing a large number of changes. Such changes make it imperative that a teacher should have in him a good Teaching Aptitude. This will enable a teacher to not only teach the various subjects but also tap the problems that children face today and direst them towards positive groupsthinking and develop in a healthy and progressive manner. Also, with the passage of time, a teacher‘s duties have increased voluminously. With so many duties to perform, a teacher may get stressed and under such circumstances, presence of a good Teaching Aptitude will enable a teacher to handle all the proceedings in teaching in an apt manner. It was found that about 75% of student-teachers were below average in aptitude and intellectual ability. An insignificant difference was found in teaching aptitude ability in sex-wise and discipline-wise comparison. A positive correlation was found between teaching aptitude, intellectual level and morality of prospective teachers. Adjustment of teachers was related to their sex and not with the level of their schools. Males adjusted better than females. A study of the Adjustment of Trainees of Teachers Training Colleges in Gujarat‖ found that female trainees were more adjusted than male trainees. Socially backward trainees were more adjusted than non-backward trainees. Trainees coming from the science faculty had the lowest adjustment. No significant difference was found between rural and urban, government and non-government, male and female teachers with regard to their aptitude and effectiveness. The high-aptitude group and low-altitude group differed significantly in four behavioral components. The total adjustment was concerned effective arts teachers were significantly superior to effective science teachers. Found that teaching of education courses affected the development of Teaching Aptitude. Teaching Aptitude Test. Experienced teachers and teacher awareness exhibited a statistically superior performance over student teachers. Found that elementary teacher educators have more Teaching Aptitude as compared to secondary teacher educators (Tasleem & Hamid, 2012).

Some terms employed in the study have operational meaning for the investigator. Let us explain the terms as follows. Teaching Competency: The term teaching competency is explained in different ways by different educationists who include a host of activities like questioning, giving information, listening and other activities. A mere description of such activities does not constitute 'teaching'. The intention behind such activities of teaching is to bring about learning. Smith (1963) defines teaching as: "a system of actions intended to induce learning". The American Research Association (1967) defines teaching: "....a form of inter-personal influencing aimed at changing the behavior potential of another person".

The sample for the present study consisted of 100 secondary school teachers (50 Govt. Secondary School Teachers and 50 Private Secondary School Teachers) selected randomly from the different schools in various districts of Haryana.

Accordingly the present investigator used the following tools for the collection of the data. The data for the present study was collected with the help of General Teaching Competency Scale.

i. There is no significant difference between private and government secondary school teachers on their teaching competency.

The above table shows that the two groups Private and Government secondary school teachers differ significantly on teaching competency at 0.01 level of significance. The mean score of two groups differ significantly. Both the groups Private and Govt. secondary school teachers have not similar level of teaching competency. The Private secondary school teachers showed good teaching competency than Govt. secondary school teachers.

Teacher Education policies cannot be designed in isolation from policies on school curricula, assessment and evaluation. This text has highlighted the many different ways in which competence frameworks can be used to improve the quality of teaching and therefore the attainment of learners. It has also identified the key factors in the successful development and implementation of a competences approach to teaching. The process of bringing stakeholders together to discuss these issues can, in itself, be beneficial, especially if it leads to an increased sense of ownership of the results and a commitment to their implementation. Teacher competence frameworks, when devised and implemented in ways that are relevant to each national context and consistent with other educational policies, can be powerful tools to improve educational quality. The concept of teaching has undergone a number of changes during the last few years. Till recently teaching was equated with just instruction. Now the new dimension nemelt imparting of skills was added to the process of teaching. As the boundaries of knowledge and skills started bursting, the definition of teaching has changed. Teaching is something which facilitate others to learn, for which teaching aptitude is necessary. The teachers can do their best when they are well adjusted.

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