Insightful teaching as a students’ research-active development form

Abstract

The article offers a theoretical validation for a technique that can be used to teach the fastest way of resolving research problems to students working on their master’s theses in Intercultural Communication. Regarding the research ability as a student’s quality and a prerequisite for success in achieving scientific goals and drawing on the practical experience, the author wishes to stress the need to develop and use cognitive faculties. Being initiated by the teacher’s activity and invoked to intensify intellectual efforts processes in a student’s mind focus on forming a creative approach to inquiry-based learning and self-organization of his or her consciousness. Such self-organization is conceived as the spontaneous ordering of chaotically intermittent ideas resulting from the previous operational readiness mainly due to its being set by the teacher or through a conscious state for the realization of an immanent intentional act. Microdomain of self-organization, i.e. cognitive faculty plus rich environment, becomes a condition for an unintentional, flash finding of a solution to a research problem that permits them to generate their own ideas. This unwilled action can be described and defined as insightful learning or learning by insight. The theory of insight goes back to Gestalt psychology and is based on the study of the human psyche, mind as a sui generis structure and functional system, and the insight itself is interpreted as a phenomenon in solving a problem. Insight in our case is presented as a method and a form of developing the research faculty, and a cognitive, unpredictable way of getting rapid results in the process of solving a problem situation, however, integrally present in the consciousness as a program for finding “the missing link” of the problem as a whole conception. The faculty for insight in the educational activities may be activated full-blown by manipulating a student’s mind and by giving challenging questions and hints and demonstrating key verbal and nonverbal constructs.