Pedagogical

How to spell pedagogical

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce pedagogical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pedagogical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to teaching, or to the methods and principles of education.

Pedagogical in a sentence

• The new curriculum reflects a clear pedagogical strategy for mixed-ability classes.

• Teachers attended a workshop on the pedagogical value of group projects.

Where does pedagogical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reaches back to the Greek paidagogos, a compound built from pais, paidos, meaning 'child', and agogos, meaning 'leader' or 'one who leads', which in turn comes from the verb agein, 'to lead'. In ancient Greece a paidagogos was not the teacher himself but the household slave who literally walked a boy to and from school and supervised his conduct, so the original sense was much closer to 'child-minder' than to 'instructor'. Latin took the word up as paedagogus, and over the centuries the meaning drifted toward the modern idea of teaching and the theory behind it. English formed the adjective pedagogical in the 1600s from the noun pedagogy, applying it to anything concerning the methods or principles of teaching. The spelling trap lives in the soft middle: the unstressed 'a' between the two 'g' sounds (ped-a-GOG) and the surprising fact that the same 'agog' element, meaning 'leading', also appears in 'demagogue' and 'synagogue'.

How the word is built

• paid- (Greek pais, paidos: child)
• agog (Greek agogos: leading, from agein: to lead)
• -ical (adjective suffix)