Ever since I stepped into teaching at Wiztoonz, I was always curious to introduce and try out various techniques in teaching to make my classes as productive as possible. Some succeeded while a few shockingly failed. Socio-Cultural disparity in the audience is one major reason a lot of acclaimed teaching techniques might fail at having universal applicability. But that’s a topic for another day — now i want to talk about a useful teaching strategy I use and found to be effective.
Pushing and Pulling! (Wish it had a better, more serious name!)
Let’s see how this works.
Pushing is when you allow students the liberty and agility to explore a given topic, with fewer constraints and less criticism. This approach involves progressively reducing the length of project briefs over time, giving students very little direction and allowing them to freely choose a path based on their existing knowledge.
For instance, I would just say “Create a Movie Poster”, than saying “Create an A3 poster for the movie Terminator using cyberpunk design style and image manipulation techniques.”
This is going to let you understand the actual potential of the student —what is their style, what is their goal and where are they lacking.
The next step is "Pulling"! When you push a student to explore, there is a chance they may deviate from standard practices and head in the wrong direction. This is when you pull them back and closer to you! Provide them with enough guidance to anchor their approach to the fundamentals of what they are learning. Imagine holding and guiding a kite!
Thank you!
