Explain Philosophy.For decades, the primary teaching philosophy in higher education has been pedagogy, described as the assumptions underlying teaching children. It is based on the concept of the teachers telling the students information they must absorb, then observing the student’s performance on tests or assignments to determine a grade. The goal for this method is to assign grades on a normal frequency distribution, around 75 as the mean, the traditional bell curve. If the assumptions of higher education change to andragogy, assumptions underlying adult education are adopted, then the course content is based on telling the students why they need to learn and what their benefit is, and then students are motivated to learn because of the reward achieved from the learning process. The results of these two approaches differ. In the case of the first, students are motivated to memorize information for regurgitation on an objective test, which merely shows the use of short-term memory. In the second, the student realizes the importance of acquiring the knowledge, and then activities in the course can permit students to learn through practice and application, which tends to be incorporated into long-term memory. If you are the instructor of a course, how would you structure the course and its content to incorporate the anagogical approach in a college class. Instead of traditional lectures in class, what would you suggest as learning activities that would be challenging but effective in acquiring knowledge of skills in the course?
