The best teachers find ways to make learning interesting and fun. Students look forward to going to their classes. These highly successful teachers are often remarkably intuitive about the learning process, while others make a conscious effort to enhance learning by reading research and adapting what works, and tossing out what doesn’t.
To be an effective educator, you need to understand different classroom teaching strategies and how to apply them in your teaching. It includes help with writing paper, reading and comprehending learning material. This article will discuss a few common teaching strategies and provide examples of how to use them in your instruction. By understanding and using these strategies, you can create a more engaging and effective learning environment for your students.
Teachers can Learn Much from the Business Model
Knowing what works and what doesn’t is enough. Teachers must have or acquire traits that allow them to evaluate and implement strategies. Successful business people and successful teachers share some common traits. Among these are:
- Self-confidence: They have a strong belief in their ability to succeed.
- Problem-solving: They are adept at problem analysis and finding solutions.
- Leadership: They exhibit confidence that is contagious and are assertive; they manage time and materials well.
- Job satisfaction: They like what they do; daily annoyances do not become permanent barriers.
- People skills: They understand why people behave as they do and possess empathy.
- Flexibility: Successful people can change when circumstances demand it.
Successful strategies are often original ideas that spring from these and other traits.
Good Teaching Strategies Are Best Defined by How One Teaches
Teachers too often look for tricks, tips, and activities, and those are available in large numbers. However, teachers must evaluate how they do what they do in the daily routine of teaching. Students respond best to teachers they respect and like. They appreciate a sense of humor and a stable, predictable demeanor.
Consequently, good teaching strategies are perceived as good or bad based largely on how teachers present them. The following attributes help determine the effectiveness of teaching strategies:
- Vary teaching techniques. Notes are a necessary part of teaching, but notes every day get tedious. Variety helps keep student alert and interested. Some teachers discover that students will copy notes obediently and quietly, but copying isn’t learning and students may be copying notes simply to avoid boredom.
- Don’t get stuck with whole-class methods – break students into groups as needed.
- Learn to be a storyteller. Every course has opportunities to relate interesting information about people and events. Learning to present little vignettes with humor, drama, or intrigue is far better than a fatigued, monotonous drone.
- Be a good speaker. Use an age-appropriate vocabulary, speak, gesture, and move. Don’t teach from a chair behind a desk. Walk around the room and teach all parts of the room.
- Use visuals. Students like to see things. Science teachers have a huge variety of lab equipment or simple demonstrations available. Other visuals might include appropriate videos, photographs, globes, drawings, etc.
- Minimize discussion of grades. Try to focus on the value of learning and the rewards that knowledge brings.
- Be cautious of depending on extrinsic rewards. They lose their effectiveness and divert student attention away from the inherent value of the course.
- Make learning relevant. Have examples ready that help students connect new learning to important features of their lives.
Good Teaching Strategies Should Result in Observable Learning
Many so-called teacher strategies have evolved and are used because they are popular or seem to make sense – often for no particular pedagogical reason.
Teachers must keep order in class but do so without being viewed by students as unfair or punitive. It refers to teaching future essay writers, art masters, and other creative students. Disciplinary techniques must make sense and teachers must be able to project a calm demeanor when students become uncooperative. Disciplinary techniques that are invented out of desperation are likely to fail as are those that are intended “as payback.”
Teaching strategies like the following should be reworked or dropped:
- Excessive use of instructional games – the game may become a substitute for learning.
- Extra credit. Students should not come to believe that grades can be pulled up by substituting a task that does little to enforce learning standards.
- Threats. Threatening students about the consequences of bad behavior or bad grades is usually counterproductive. Encouragement and individual attention and a kind heart are better.
- Quid pro quo instruction – commonly called bribes – should be avoided. Teachers should not make deals with the class. Some students will not cooperate and frustration will prevail.
- Punishing the whole class for the failures of a few. Such “strategies” tend to turn peers against each other and they are not good examples of how justice is supposed to work.
- Don’t grade formative assessments.
In summary, there are many good teaching strategies, but they are not tricks and tips. Teachers need to understand leadership styles and how to evaluate various strategies. Most effective teaching strategies are founded on knowledge of how learning works.
Variety is always appropriate to avoid boredom, but patience and flexibility are essential. Teachers should be able to prove that the strategies that they use work to improve learning.
