A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF DEBATE ON DIVERGENT THINKING AMONG STUDENT TEACHERS OF COLLEGES OF EDUCATION.

Abstract

Active teaching strategies like Debates can teach students to research a topic thoroughly, analyze the information critically and construct knowledge from it.It also enables them to examine different perspectives to an issue,take a stand and find ways of defending it.While presenting their arguments before an audience,they do it logically with clarity and confidence and improve their communication skills. With these multi fold benefits if debate is used as a strategy of teaching it transforms their roles as learners, so instead of passively receiving they construct their own knowledge. Divergent thinking is essential for creativity and imagination and helps individuals address situations and problems through innovative perspectives and possibilities. A question arose in the researcher's mind, will the accelerated thinking ignited by an active strategy like academic debate in classroom teaching, impact Divergent Thinking of students? An experimental study was carried out where a module of debate was used to teach topics of the course Educational Management in the one-year B.Ed. course and the researcher made tool on Divergent Thinking was administered to the students. The pre-test and post test scores were compared to see if the debates had an impact on Divergent Thinking of the students' teachers.The post test of the experimental group showed an increase in the scores of Divergent Thinking.The researcher desires to motivate through the finding of this study faculty of B.Ed.and other higher education courses to use debate as a strategy and focus on increasing the Divergent Thinking,as in a dynamic world with ever new challenges coming up it will enable the young generation to improve the quality of their decision making.