essay on methods of teaching

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Essay on Teaching Methods for Effective Learning Today

In what way are/were you taught and how will you teach? Teaching methods are vital for everyone – we all go or went to a school where teachers try to involve each student in the learning process. Namely, this learning process is identified as effective or ineffective by means of effective or ineffective methods of teaching accordingly. Methods of teaching are one of the primary topics any student undergoing pedagogic training has to deal with. It is no wonder that the majority of questions arising in this field are in this or that way connected with misconceptions or wrong assumptions concerning this topic. That is exactly what explains why a student willing to master knowledge or skills should pay special attention to grasping at least the basic theory of teaching methods and doing a lot of practice: for example, writing an essay about it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to write an essay on the topic “Teaching Methods”. Besides, you are given the list of references you can consult additionally. Make progress in essay writing right now!

3 ‘Teaching Methods’ Issues to Address in an Essay

You as a person who is receiving education don’t think about methods employed in this process. Education is something that just happens to you, and you don’t give extra thought to how it all is organized. Right? It is a common perception among students but the task to write an essay about teaching methods can’t remain unaddressed as it will influence your academic performance that is expressed in marks. You can do your best to get high marks for writing this particular essay. First and foremost, address the key points of the topic. Here you are:

1. Groups of Teaching Methods Differ in Outcomes, But All Are Aimed at Teaching

In reality, teaching methods are a complicated and multi-lateral issue, with many opposing schools of thought. When all’s said and done, however, most teaching methods can be roughly subdivided into two groups: teacher-centric and student-centric.

• Teacher-centric learning approach is also often referred to as the traditional educational model because it is basically what we are all used to associate with teaching and studying. In this model, students are considered to be de-facto “empty vessels”, passive receivers of knowledge and skills. It is a teacher’s job to provide instructions and guidance for them, “filling up” these empty vessels in the process, and students are supposed to learn by listening to lectures, observing and copying the teacher’s actions and in general subjecting themselves to the teacher’s ultimate authority.
• Student-centric learning approach to learning is a much more recent development, placing emphasis on students’ participation in the educational process. This approach considers students to be not just objects but subjects of education as well, and the teacher’s role is viewed as not as that of the instructor but facilitator and delegator. To simplify it a bit, a teacher doesn’t provide one or another method of doing things that are already set in stone but offers guidance and support so that students are capable to figure things out on their own, thus making them active participants of the process.
• Another subtype of student-centric approach, the so-called cooperative learning, emphasizes teamwork: students are encouraged to work in groups and engage in reciprocal teaching. The teacher is not eliminated from the equation altogether, but his role, again, is that of facilitator and delegator rather than that of the one and only authority on every question. This method is based on the assumption that students learn best when they work and communicate with their peers.

It is important to understand that there are no good or bad methods of teaching. One can easily assume that a teacher-centric approach is outdated, anachronistic and generally “bad”, while the student-centric one is progressive and modern. However, they both have their areas of application. For example, teacher-centric methods far outpace student-centric ones in teaching fundamental skills. In other words, both groups of teaching methods have their areas of application and can be used to great effect – if used appropriately.

2. The Areas of Teaching Methods Application Differ as Well

If we start speaking about different areas of using specific teaching methods, it is logical to name them. Don’t omit this point in your essay as well. Today, the educational process differs from that existing several decades ago. Modern teachers have to not only explain a topic and provide the knowledge to students and mentor them, but also to:

• Facilitate learning for students in a classroom encouraging active learning,
• Develop mutual cooperation among students,
• Give prompt feedback to guide students in the right direction to the progress,
• Motivate students to learn new materials and develop essential skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, etc.

In general, a teacher is supposed to prepare a student to deal with the real world. It is possible only when a person is equipped with the relevant theory and practical skills necessary for successful communication in modern society and personal, professional development. Only this gives a competitive advantage in life. For each aim of teaching, there are particular methods. If a teacher needs to simply present the information, he or she uses a lecture method. It is true that sometimes it is boring to listen to a lecturer. For that reason, this way of teaching is extended by the others, for example, interactive and participative methods. It is important to encourage students’ participation and develop discussions that result in gaining hands-on experience.

3. The Effectiveness of Teaching Methods

More and more instructors develop their teaching approach depending on students’ learning needs . They are far from simply going to school, college or university to get knowledge. Unfortunately, the understanding of learning needs differently can cause various learning challenges and pitfalls and problems in the educational system. The result is that it reflects on the professional development of graduating students negatively. What is a doctor whose learning needs aren’t met at university? The medical system is impaired. So the assessment of learning needs should become part of government policy in relation to the continuing professional development of all professionals. Let’s observe what learning needs determine the appropriate use of teaching methods:

• Know about phenomena occurring to various areas of study;
• Finding answers to different questions;
• Define problems that need to be solved;
• Develop and use original ideas;
• Plan and carry out systematic investigations;
• Analyze and interpret data, a lot of data (due to the information overload);
• Use critical thinking;
• Construct solid explanations and design optimal solutions and many more.

All these needs, exactly their fulfillment, influence the effectiveness of using one or another teaching method. The most critical condition applicable to effective teaching in the 21st century is that all the teaching practices need to create personal and social relevance for students. They need to be intellectually and emotionally engaged in their own active learning, in other words, motivated to learn this world and solve some problems. In fact, teaching for success while taking a test is insufficient today. The current education policies that give priority to assessment need to be severely curtailed.

This idea and many other ideas can be mentioned in your essay about teaching methods. However, it is important to always back up all the research ideas. Look at the following references you can also use in your essay:

7 References to Use in the Essay about Teaching Methods

• Arnold, J. (1998). Towards more humanistic English teaching. ELT Journal, 52(3), pp.235-242.
• Bligh, D. (2000). What’s the use of lectures?. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Cullen, R. (1998). Teacher talk and the classroom context. ELT Journal, 52(3), pp.179-187.
• Dörnyei, Z. (2001). Motivational strategies in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gibbons, M. (2002). The self-directed learning handbook. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.
• Legge, K. and Harari, P. (2000). Psychology and education. Oxford: Heinemann.
• Wiseman, A. and Anderson, E. (n.d.). Annual review of comparative and international education 2014.
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Teaching Methods and Strategies: The Complete Guide

You’ve completed your coursework. Student teaching has ended. You’ve donned the cap and gown, crossed the stage, smiled with your diploma and went home to fill out application after application.

Suddenly you are standing in what will be your classroom for the next year and after the excitement of decorating it wears off and you begin lesson planning, you start to notice all of your lessons are executed the same way, just with different material. But that is what you know and what you’ve been taught, so you go with it.

After a while, your students are bored, and so are you. There must be something wrong because this isn’t what you envisioned teaching to be like. There is.

Figuring out the best ways you can deliver information to students can sometimes be even harder than what students go through in discovering how they learn best. The reason is because every single teacher needs a variety of different teaching methods in their theoretical teaching bag to pull from depending on the lesson, the students, and things as seemingly minute as the time the class is and the subject.

Using these different teaching methods, which are rooted in theory of different teaching styles, will not only help teachers reach their full potential, but more importantly engage, motivate and reach the students in their classes, whether in person or online.

Teaching Methods

Teaching methods, or methodology, is a narrower topic because it’s founded in theories and educational psychology. If you have a degree in teaching, you most likely have heard of names like Skinner, Vygotsky , Gardner, Piaget , and Bloom . If their names don’t ring a bell, you should definitely recognize their theories that have become teaching methods. The following are the most common teaching theories.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the theory that every learner is essentially a “clean slate” to start off and shaped by emotions. People react to stimuli, reactions as well as positive and negative reinforcement, the site states.

Learning Theories names the most popular theorists who ascribed to this theory were Ivan Pavlov, who many people may know with his experiments with dogs. He performed an experiment with dogs that when he rang a bell, the dogs responded to the stimuli; then he applied the idea to humans.

Other popular educational theorists who were part of behaviorism was B.F. Skinner and Albert Bandura .

Social Cognitive Theory

Social Cognitive Theory is typically spoken about at the early childhood level because it has to do with critical thinking with the biggest concept being the idea of play, according to Edwin Peel writing for Encyclopedia Britannica . Though Bandura and Lev Vygotsky also contributed to cognitive theory, according to Dr. Norman Herr with California State University , the most popular and first theorist of cognitivism is Piaget.

There are four stages to Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development that he created in 1918. Each stage correlates with a child’s development from infancy to their teenage years.

The first stage is called the Sensorimotor Stage which occurs from birth to 18 months. The reason this is considered cognitive development is because the brain is literally growing through exploration, like squeaking horns, discovering themselves in mirrors or spinning things that click on their floor mats or walkers; creating habits like sleeping with a certain blanket; having reflexes like rubbing their eyes when tired or thumb sucking; and beginning to decipher vocal tones.

The second stage, or the Preoperational Stage, occurs from ages 2 to 7 when toddlers begin to understand and correlate symbols around them, ask a lot of questions, and start forming sentences and conversations, but they haven’t developed perspective yet so empathy does not quite exist yet, the website states. This is the stage when children tend to blurt out honest statements, usually embarrassing their parents, because they don’t understand censoring themselves either.

From ages 7 to 11, children are beginning to problem solve, can have conversations about things they are interested in, are more aware of logic and develop empathy during the Concrete Operational Stage.

The final stage, called the Formal Operational Stage, though by definition ends at age 16, can continue beyond. It involves deeper thinking and abstract thoughts as well as questioning not only what things are but why the way they are is popular, the site states. Many times people entering new stages of their lives like high school, college, or even marriage go through elements of Piaget’s theory, which is why the strategies that come from this method are applicable across all levels of education.

The Multiple Intelligences Theory

The Multiple Intelligences Theory states that people don’t need to be smart in every single discipline to be considered intelligent on paper tests, but that people excel in various disciplines, making them exceptional.

Created in 1983, the former principal in the Scranton School District in Scranton, PA, created eight different intelligences, though since then two others have been debated of whether to be added but have not yet officially, according to the site.

The original eight are musical, spatial, linguistic, mathematical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic and most people have a predominant intelligence followed by others. For those who are musically-inclined either via instruments, vocals, has perfect pitch, can read sheet music or can easily create music has Musical Intelligence.

Being able to see something and rearrange it or imagine it differently is Spatial Intelligence, while being talented with language, writing or avid readers have Linguistic Intelligence. Kinesthetic Intelligence refers to understanding how the body works either anatomically or athletically and Naturalistic Intelligence is having an understanding of nature and elements of the ecosystem.

The final intelligences have to do with personal interactions. Intrapersonal Intelligence is a matter of knowing oneself, one’s limits, and their inner selves while Interpersonal Intelligence is knowing how to handle a variety of other people without conflict or knowing how to resolve it, the site states. There is still an elementary school in Scranton, PA named after their once-principal.

Constructivism

Constructivism is another theory created by Piaget which is used as a foundation for many other educational theories and strategies because constructivism is focused on how people learn. Piaget states in this theory that people learn from their experiences. They learn best through active learning , connect it to their prior knowledge and then digest this information their own way. This theory has created the ideas of student-centered learning in education versus teacher-centered learning.

Universal Design for Learning

The final method is the Universal Design for Learning which has redefined the educational community since its inception in the mid-1980s by David H. Rose. This theory focuses on how teachers need to design their curriculum for their students. This theory really gained traction in the United States in 2004 when it was presented at an international conference and he explained that this theory is based on neuroscience and how the brain processes information, perform tasks and get excited about education.

The theory, known as UDL, advocates for presenting information in multiple ways to enable a variety of learners to understand the information; presenting multiple assessments for students to show what they have learned; and learn and utilize a student’s own interests to motivate them to learn, the site states. This theory also discussed incorporating technology in the classroom and ways to educate students in the digital age.

Teaching Styles

From each of the educational theories, teachers extract and develop a plethora of different teaching styles, or strategies. Instructors must have a large and varied arsenal of strategies to use weekly and even daily in order to build rapport, keep students engaged and even keep instructors from getting bored with their own material. These can be applicable to all teaching levels, but adaptations must be made based on the student’s age and level of development.

Differentiated instruction is one of the most popular teaching strategies, which means that teachers adjust the curriculum for a lesson, unit or even entire term in a way that engages all learners in various ways, according to Chapter 2 of the book Instructional Process and Concepts in Theory and Practice by Celal Akdeniz . This means changing one’s teaching styles constantly to fit not only the material but more importantly, the students based on their learning styles.

Learning styles are the ways in which students learn best. The most popular types are visual, audio, kinesthetic and read/write , though others include global as another type of learner, according to Akdeniz . For some, they may seem self-explanatory. Visual learners learn best by watching the instruction or a demonstration; audio learners need to hear a lesson; kinesthetic learners learn by doing, or are hands-on learners; read/write learners to best by reading textbooks and writing notes; and global learners need material to be applied to their real lives, according to The Library of Congress .

There are many activities available to instructors that enable their students to find out what kind of learner they are. Typically students have a main style with a close runner-up, which enables them to learn best a certain way but they can also learn material in an additional way.

When an instructor knows their students and what types of learners are in their classroom, instructors are able to then differentiate their instruction and assignments to those learning types, according to Akdeniz and The Library of Congress. Learn more about different learning styles.

When teaching new material to any type of learner, is it important to utilize a strategy called scaffolding . Scaffolding is based on a student’s prior knowledge and building a lesson, unit or course from the most foundational pieces and with each step make the information more complicated, according to an article by Jerry Webster .

To scaffold well, a teacher must take a personal interest in their students to learn not only what their prior knowledge is but their strengths as well. This will enable an instructor to base new information around their strengths and use positive reinforcement when mistakes are made with the new material.

There is an unfortunate concept in teaching called “teach to the middle” where instructors target their lessons to the average ability of the students in their classroom, leaving slower students frustrated and confused, and above average students frustrated and bored. This often results in the lower- and higher-level students scoring poorly and a teacher with no idea why.

The remedy for this is a strategy called blended learning where differentiated instruction is occurring simultaneously in the classroom to target all learners, according to author and educator Juliana Finegan . In order to be successful at blended learning, teachers once again need to know their students, how they learn and their strengths and weaknesses, according to Finegan.

Blended learning can include combining several learning styles into one lesson like lecturing from a PowerPoint – not reading the information on the slides — that includes cartoons and music associations while the students have the print-outs. The lecture can include real-life examples and stories of what the instructor encountered and what the students may encounter. That example incorporates four learning styles and misses kinesthetic, but the activity afterwards can be solely kinesthetic.

A huge component of blended learning is technology. Technology enables students to set their own pace and access the resources they want and need based on their level of understanding, according to The Library of Congress . It can be used three different ways in education which include face-to-face, synchronously or asynchronously . Technology used with the student in the classroom where the teacher can answer questions while being in the student’s physical presence is known as face-to-face.

Synchronous learning is when students are learning information online and have a teacher live with them online at the same time, but through a live chat or video conferencing program, like Skype, or Zoom, according to The Library of Congress.

Finally, asynchronous learning is when students take a course or element of a course online, like a test or assignment, as it fits into their own schedule, but a teacher is not online with them at the time they are completing or submitting the work. Teachers are still accessible through asynchronous learning but typically via email or a scheduled chat meeting, states the Library of Congress.

The final strategy to be discussed actually incorporates a few teaching strategies, so it’s almost like blended teaching. It starts with a concept that has numerous labels such as student-centered learning, learner-centered pedagogy, and teacher-as-tutor but all mean that an instructor revolves lessons around the students and ensures that students take a participatory role in the learning process, known as active learning, according to the Learning Portal .

In this model, a teacher is just a facilitator, meaning that they have created the lesson as well as the structure for learning, but the students themselves become the teachers or create their own knowledge, the Learning Portal says. As this is occurring, the instructor is circulating the room working as a one-on-one resource, tutor or guide, according to author Sara Sanchez Alonso from Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning. For this to work well and instructors be successful one-on-one and planning these lessons, it’s essential that they have taken the time to know their students’ history and prior knowledge, otherwise it can end up to be an exercise in futility, Alonso said.

Some activities teachers can use are by putting students in groups and assigning each student a role within the group, creating reading buddies or literature circles, making games out of the material with individual white boards, create different stations within the classroom for different skill levels or interest in a lesson or find ways to get students to get up out of their seats and moving, offers Fortheteachers.org .

There are so many different methodologies and strategies that go into becoming an effective instructor. A consistent theme throughout all of these is for a teacher to take the time to know their students because they care, not because they have to. When an instructor knows the stories behind the students, they are able to design lessons that are more fun, more meaningful, and more effective because they were designed with the students’ best interests in mind.

There are plenty of pre-made lessons, activities and tests available online and from textbook publishers that any teacher could use. But you need to decide if you want to be the original teacher who makes a significant impact on your students, or a pre-made teacher a student needs to get through.

Read Also: – Blended Learning Guide – Collaborative Learning Guide – Flipped Classroom Guide – Game Based Learning Guide – Gamification in Education Guide – Holistic Education Guide – Maker Education Guide – Personalized Learning Guide – Place-Based Education Guide – Project-Based Learning Guide – Scaffolding in Education Guide – Social-Emotional Learning Guide

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• Discover Your Learning Style – Comprehensive Guide on Different Learning Styles
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The Complete List of Teaching Methods

Teaching Methods: Not as Simple as ABC

Teaching methods [teacher-centered], teaching methods [student-centered], what about blended learning and udl, teaching methods: a to z, for the love of teaching.

Whether you’re a longtime educator, preparing to start your first teaching job or mapping out your dream of a career in the classroom, the topic of teaching methods is one that means many different things to different people.

Your individual approaches and strategies to imparting knowledge to your students and inspiring them to learn are probably built on your academic education as well as your instincts and intuition.

Whether you come by your preferred teaching methods organically or by actively studying educational theory and pedagogy, it can be helpful to have a comprehensive working knowledge of the various teaching methods at your disposal.

[Download] Get the Complete List of Teaching Methods PDF Now >>

The teacher-centered approach vs. the student-centered approach. High-tech vs. low-tech approaches to learning. Flipped classrooms, differentiated instruction, inquiry-based learning, personalized learning and more.

Not only are there dozens of teaching methods to explore, it is also important to have a sense for how they often overlap or interrelate. One extremely helpful look at this question is offered by the teacher-focused education website Teach.com.

“Teaching theories can be organized into four categories based on two major parameters: a teacher-centered approach versus a student-centered approach, and high-tech material use versus low-tech material use,” according to the informative Teach.com article , which breaks down a variety of influential teaching methods as follows:

Teacher-Centered Approach to Learning Teachers serve as instructor/authority figures who deliver knowledge to their students through lectures and direct instruction, and aim to measure the results through testing and assessment. This method is sometimes referred to as “sage on the stage.”

Student-Centered Approach to Learning Teachers still serve as an authority figure, but may function more as a facilitator or “guide on the side,” as students assume a much more active role in the learning process. In this method, students learn from and are continually assessed on such activities as group projects, student portfolios and class participation.

High-Tech Approach to Learning From devices like laptops and tablets to using the internet to connect students with information and people from around the world, technology plays an ever-greater role in many of today’s classrooms. In the high-tech approach to learning, teachers utilize many different types of technology to aid students in their classroom learning.

Low-Tech Approach to Learning Technology obviously comes with pros and cons, and many teachers believe that a low-tech approach better enables them to tailor the educational experience to different types of learners. Additionally, while computer skills are undeniably necessary today, this must be balanced against potential downsides; for example, some would argue that over-reliance on spell check and autocorrect features can inhibit rather than strengthen student spelling and writing skills.

Diving further into the overlap between different types of teaching methods, here is a closer look at three teacher-centered methods of instruction and five popular student-centered approaches.

Direct Instruction (Low Tech) Under the direct instruction model — sometimes described as the “traditional” approach to teaching — teachers convey knowledge to their students primarily through lectures and scripted lesson plans, without factoring in student preferences or opportunities for hands-on or other types of learning. This method is also customarily low-tech since it relies on texts and workbooks rather than computers or mobile devices.

Flipped Classrooms (High Tech) What if students did the “classroom” portion of their learning at home and their “homework” in the classroom? That’s an oversimplified description of the flipped classroom approach, in which students watch or read their lessons on computers at home and then complete assignments and do problem-solving exercises in class.

Kinesthetic Learning (Low Tech) In the kinesthetic learning model, students perform hands-on physical activities rather than listening to lectures or watching demonstrations. Kinesthetic learning, which values movement and creativity over technological skills, is most commonly used to augment traditional types of instruction — the theory being that requiring students to do, make or create something exercises different learning muscles.

Differentiated Instruction (Low Tech) Inspired by the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), enacted to ensure equal access to public education for all children, differentiated instruction is the practice of developing an understanding of how each student learns best, and then tailoring instruction to meet students’ individual needs.

In some instances, this means Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with special needs, but today teachers use differentiated instruction to connect with all types of learners by offering options on how students access content, the types of activities they do to master a concept, how student learning is assessed and even how the classroom is set up.

Inquiry-Based Learning (High Tech) Rather than function as a sole authority figure, in inquiry-based learning teachers offer support and guidance as students work on projects that depend on them taking on a more active and participatory role in their own learning. Different students might participate in different projects, developing their own questions and then conducting research — often using online resources — and then demonstrate the results of their work through self-made videos, web pages or formal presentations.

Expeditionary Learning (Low Tech) Expeditionary learning is based on the idea that there is considerable educational value in getting students out of the classroom and into the real world. Examples include trips to City Hall or Washington, D.C., to learn about the workings of government, or out into nature to engage in specific study related to the environment. Technology can be used to augment such expeditions, but the primary focus is on getting out into the community for real-world learning experiences.

Personalized Learning (High Tech) In personalized learning, teachers encourage students to follow personalized, self-directed learning plans that are inspired by their specific interests and skills. Since assessment is also tailored to the individual, students can advance at their own pace, moving forward or spending extra time as needed. Teachers offer some traditional instruction as well as online material, while also continually reviewing student progress and meeting with students to make any needed changes to their learning plans.

Game-Based Learning (High Tech) Students love games, and considerable progress has been made in the field of game-based learning, which requires students to be problem solvers as they work on quests to accomplish a specific goal. For students, this approach blends targeted learning objectives with the fun of earning points or badges, much like they would in a video game. For teachers, planning this type of activity requires additional time and effort, so many rely on software like Classcraft or 3DGameLab to help students maximize the educational value they receive from within the gamified learning environment.

Blended Learning Blended learning  is another strategy for teachers looking to introduce flexibility into their classroom. This method relies heavily on technology, with part of the instruction taking place online and part in the classroom via a more traditional approach, often leveraging elements of the flipped classroom approach detailed above. At the heart of blended learning is a philosophy of taking the time to understand each student’s learning style and develop strategies to teach to every learner, by building flexibility and choice into your curriculum.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) UDL incorporates both student-centered learning and the “multiple intelligences theory,” which holds that different learners are wired to learn most effectively in different ways (examples of these “intelligences” include visual-spatial, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, musical, etc.). In practice, this could mean that some students might be working on a writing project while others would be more engaged if they created a play or a movie. UDL emphasizes the idea of teaching to every student, special needs students included, in the general education classroom, creating community and building knowledge through multiple means.

In addition to the many philosophical and pedagogical approaches to teaching, classroom educators today employ diverse and sometimes highly creative methods involving specific strategies, prompts and tools that require little explanation. These include:

• Appointments with students
• Art-based projects
• Audio tutorials
• Author’s chair
• Book reports
• Bulletin boards
• Brainstorming
• Case studies
• Chalkboard instruction
• Class projects
• Classroom discussion
• Classroom video diary
• Collaborative learning spaces
• Creating murals and montages
• Current events quizzes
• Designated quiet space
• Discussion groups
• DIY activities
• Dramatization (plays, skits, etc.)
• Educational games
• Educational podcasts
• Essays (Descriptive)
• Essays (Expository)
• Essays (Narrative)
• Essays (Persuasive)
• Exhibits and displays
• Explore different cultures
• Field trips
• Flash cards
• Flexible seating
• Gamified learning plans
• Genius hour
• Group discussion
• Guest speakers
• Hands-on activities
• Individual projects
• Interviewing
• Laboratory experiments
• Learning contracts
• Learning stations
• Literature circles
• Making posters
• Mock conventions
• Motivational posters
• Music from other countries/cultures
• Oral reports
• Panel discussions
• Peer partner learning
• Photography
• Problem solving activities
• Reading aloud
• Readers’ theater
• Reflective discussion
• Research projects
• Rewards & recognition
• Role playing
• School newspapers
• Science fairs
• Sister city programs
• Spelling bees
• Storytelling
• Student podcasts
• Student portfolios
• Student presentations
• Student-conceived projects
• Supplemental reading assignments
• Team-building exercises
• Term papers
• Textbook assignments
• Think-tac-toe
• Time capsules
• Use of community or local resources
• Video creation
• Video lessons
• Vocabulary lists

So, is the teacher the center of the educational universe or the student? Does strong reliance on the wonders of technology offer a more productive educational experience or is a more traditional, lower-tech approach the best way to help students thrive?

Questions such as these are food for thought for educators everywhere, in part because they inspire ongoing reflection on how to make a meaningful difference in the lives of one’s students.

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Teaching Methods

Choosing optimal methods to support learning outcomes.

On this page:

The importance of teaching methods.

Teaching methods are the broader techniques used to help students achieve learning outcomes, while activities are the different ways of implementing these methods. Teaching methods help students:

• master the content of the course
• learn how to apply the content in particular contexts

Instructors should identify which teaching methods will properly support a particular learning outcome. Its effectiveness depends on this alignment. To make the most appropriate choice, an instructor should consider learning outcomes, student needs and the learning environment.

Consider the following example:

• Learning outcome: Solve a complex math equation.
• Learning environment: An in person, upper-level math course with 20 students.
• Teaching method: Guided instruction. First, the instructor facilitates learning by modeling and scaffolding. Students take time to  ask questions and receive clarifications. Next, students practice applying these skills together and then independently. The instructor uses formative assessment to check for understanding.

This example demonstrates alignment of what the instructor wants students to do, and how they are supported in these tasks. If the instructor choses a different teaching method, such as a traditional lecture, students would need to process the lecture’s content and apply principles simultaneously. This is very difficult to do and would lead to less successful outcomes.

Choosing the appropriate teaching method brings instruction to life while encouraging students to actively engage with content and develop their knowledge and skills.

The chart below provides a number of teaching methods to choose from. Teaching methods vary in their approach, some are more student-centered while others are more instructor centered, and you will see this reflected in the chart. Choose methods that will best guide your students to achieve the learning outcomes you’ve set and remember that your teaching approach, teaching methods and activities all work together.

Table adapted from: Nilson (2016)

Choose Your Methods

Using the Course Design Template   explore the aspects that will likely affect your course.

• Step 1: Review your learning outcomes.
• Step 2: Identify the teaching methods that best align to these learning outcomes and fill in the appropriate column.
• Step 3: Consider possible activities which will next be examined in further detail.

Now that you’ve reviewed a variety of teaching methods and considered which ones align with your learning outcomes, the next step is to consider activities.

• Nilson, L. B. (2016). Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors (Fourth). John Wiley & Sons.

ChatGPT for Teachers

Trauma-informed practices in schools, teacher well-being, cultivating diversity, equity, & inclusion, integrating technology in the classroom, social-emotional development, covid-19 resources, invest in resilience: summer toolkit, civics & resilience, all toolkits, degree programs, trauma-informed professional development, teacher licensure & certification, how to become - career information, classroom management, instructional design, lifestyle & self-care, online higher ed teaching, current events, what is your teaching style 5 effective teaching methods for your classroom.

Every teacher has her or his own style of teaching. And as traditional teaching styles evolve with the advent of differentiated instruction, more and more teachers are adjusting their approach depending on their students’ learning needs.

But there are a few fundamental teaching styles most educators tend to use. Which one is yours?

You’ve Got Style

These teaching styles highlight the five main strategies teachers use in the classroom, as well as the benefits and potential pitfalls of each.

The Authority, or lecture style

The authority model is teacher-centered and frequently entails lengthy lecture sessions or one-way presentations. Students are expected to take notes or absorb information.

• Pros : This style is acceptable for certain higher-education disciplines and auditorium settings with large groups of students. The pure lecture style is most suitable for subjects like history, which necessitate memorization of key facts, dates, names, etc.
• Cons : It’s a questionable model for teaching children because there is little or no interaction with the teacher. Plus it can get a little snooze-y. That’s why it’s a better approach for older, more mature students.

The Demonstrator, or coach style

The demonstrator retains the formal authority role by showing students what they need to know. The demonstrator is a lot like the lecturer, but their lessons include multimedia presentations, activities, and demonstrations. (Think: Math. Science. Music.)

• Pros : This style gives teachers opportunities to incorporate a variety of formats including lectures and multimedia presentations.
• Cons : Although it’s well-suited for teaching mathematics, music, physical education, or arts and crafts, it is difficult to accommodate students’ individual needs in larger classrooms.

The Facilitator, or activity style

Facilitators promote self-learning and help students develop critical thinking skills and retain knowledge that leads to self-actualization.

• Pros : This style trains students to ask questions and helps develop skills to find answers and solutions through exploration; it is ideal for teaching science and similar subjects.
• Cons : Challenges teacher to interact with students and prompt them toward discovery rather than lecturing facts and testing knowledge through memorization. So it’s a bit harder to measure success in tangible terms.

The Delegator, or group style

The delegator style is best suited for curricula that require lab activities, such as chemistry and biology, or subjects that warrant peer feedback, like debate and creative writing.

• Pros : Guided discovery and inquiry-based learning place the teacher in an observer role that inspires students by working in tandem toward common goals.
• Cons : Considered a modern style of teaching, it is sometimes criticized as eroding teacher authority. As a delegator, the teacher acts more as a consultant rather than the traditional authority figure.

The Hybrid, or blended style

Hybrid, or blended style, follows an integrated approach to teaching that blends the teacher’s personality and interests with students’ needs and curriculum-appropriate methods.

• Pros : Inclusive! And it enables teachers to tailor their styles to student needs and appropriate subject matter.
• Cons : Hybrid style runs the risk of trying to be too many things to all students, prompting teachers to spread themselves too thin and dilute learning.

Because teachers have styles that reflect their distinct personalities and curriculum—from math and science to English and history—it’s crucial that they remain focused on their teaching objectives and avoid trying to be all things to all students.

What you need to know about your teaching style

Although it is not the teacher’s job to entertain students, it is vital to engage them in the learning process. Selecting a style that addresses the needs of diverse students at different learning levels begins with a personal inventory—a self-evaluation—of the teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. As they develop their teaching styles and integrate them with effective classroom management skills, teachers will learn what works best for their personalities and curriculum.

Our guide encapsulates today’s different teaching styles and helps teachers identify the style that’s right for them and their students. Browse through the article or use these links to jump to your desired destination.

• What is a teaching style inventory, and how have teaching styles evolved?
• What teaching method is best for today’s students?

How does classroom diversity influence teachers?

Emergence of the teaching style inventory.

How have teaching styles evolved? This is a question teachers are asked, and frequently ask themselves, as they embark on their careers, and occasionally pause along the way to reflect on job performance. To understand the differences in teaching styles, it’s helpful to know where the modern concept of classifying teaching methods originated.

The late Anthony F. Grasha, a noted professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati, is credited with developing the classic five teaching styles. A follower of psychiatrist Carl Jung, Grasha began studying the dynamics of the relationship between teachers and learning in college classrooms. His groundbreaking book, Teaching with Style , was written both as a guide for teachers and as a tool to help colleagues, administrators and students systematically evaluate an instructor’s effectiveness in the classroom.

Grasha understood that schools must use a consistent, formal approach in evaluating a teacher’s classroom performance. He recognized that any system designed to help teachers improve their instructional skills requires a simple classification system. He developed a teaching style inventory that has since been adopted and modified by followers.

• Expert : Similar to a coach, experts share knowledge, demonstrate their expertise, advise students, and provide feedback to improve understanding and promote learning.
• Formal authority : Authoritative teachers incorporate the traditional lecture format and share many of the same characteristics as experts, but with less student interaction.
• Personal model : Incorporates blended teaching styles that match the best techniques with the appropriate learning scenarios and students in an adaptive format.
• Facilitator : Designs participatory learning activities and manages classroom projects while providing information and offering feedback to facilitate critical thinking.
• Delegator : Organizes group learning, observes students, provides consultation, and promotes interaction between groups and among individuals to achieve learning objectives.

Although he developed specific teaching styles, Grasha warned against boxing teachers into a single category. Instead, he advocated that teachers play multiple roles in the classroom. He believed most teachers possess some combination of all or most of the classic teaching styles.

How does differentiated instruction affect teaching styles?

Carol Ann Tomlinson, a professor at the University of Virginia, is an early advocate of differentiated instruction and a pioneer in the development of learning-based teaching styles. If Grasha laid the groundwork for 20th-century teachers to adopt styles tailored to match their personalities and strengths, Tomlinson has advanced this theme into the 21st century by focusing on differentiated instruction.

In the simplest terms, differentiated instruction means keeping all students in mind when developing lesson plans and workbook exercises, lectures, and interactive learning. These student-focused differences necessitate instructional styles that embrace diverse classrooms for students at all learning levels and from various backgrounds without compromising the teacher’s strengths.

What teaching style is best for today’s students?

Whether you’re a first-year teacher eager to put into practice all of the pedagogical techniques you learned in college, or a classroom veteran examining differentiated instruction and new learning methodologies, consider that not all students respond well to one particular style. Although teaching styles have been categorized into five groups, today’s ideal teaching style is not an either/or proposition but more of a hybrid approach that blends the best of everything a teacher has to offer.

The traditional advice that teachers not overreach with a cluster of all-encompassing teaching styles might seem to conflict with today’s emphasis on student-centered classrooms. Theoretically, the more teachers emphasize student-centric learning, the harder it is to develop a well-focused style based on their personal attributes, strengths, and goals.

In short, modern methods of teaching require different types of teachers—from the analyst/organizer to the negotiator/consultant. Here are some other factors to consider as teachers determine the best teaching method for their students.

Empty vessel : Critics of the “sage on the stage” lecture style point to the “empty vessel” theory, which assumes a student’s mind is essentially empty and needs to be filled by the “expert” teacher. Critics of this traditional approach to teaching insist this teaching style is outmoded and needs to be updated for the diverse 21st-century classroom.

Active vs. passive : Proponents of the traditional lecture approach believe that an overemphasis on group-oriented participatory teaching styles, like facilitator and delegator, favor gifted and competitive students over passive children with varied learning abilities, thereby exacerbating the challenges of meeting the needs of all learners.

Knowledge vs. information : Knowledge implies a complete understanding, or full comprehension, of a particular subject. A blend of teaching styles that incorporate facilitator, delegator, demonstrator, and lecturer techniques helps the broadest range of students acquire in-depth knowledge and mastery of a given subject. This stands in contrast to passive learning, which typically entails memorizing facts, or information, with the short-term objective of scoring well on tests.

Interactive classrooms : Laptops and tablets, video conferencing, and podcasts in classrooms play a vital role in today’s teaching styles. With technology in mind, it is imperative that teachers assess their students’ knowledge while they are learning. The alternative is to wait for test results, only to discover knowledge gaps that should have been detected during the active learning phase.

Constructivist teaching methods : Contemporary teaching styles tend to be group-focused and inquiry-driven. Constructivist teaching methods embrace subsets of alternative teaching styles, including modeling, coaching, and test preparation through rubrics scaffolding. All of these are designed to promote student participation and necessitate a hybrid approach to teaching. One criticism of the constructivist approach is that it caters to extroverted, group-oriented students, who tend to dominate and benefit from these teaching methods more than introverts; however, this assumes introverts aren’t learning by observing.

Student-centric learning does not have to come at the expense of an instructor’s preferred teaching method. However, differentiated instruction demands that teachers finesse their style to accommodate the diverse needs of 21st-century classrooms.

The ‘sage on the stage’ meets the ‘tiger mom’

The objective of blending teaching styles to leverage the teacher’s strengths while meeting the demands of diverse students has become increasingly difficult, as parents take a decidedly proactive role in child-learning techniques.

The traditional authoritative/expert, or “sage on the stage” lecture style, has come under attack by some parents—and contemporary educational leaders—who emphasize that a more diverse approach to teaching is necessary to engage students. This is compounded by the rise of “tiger moms,” a term made popular by parents devoted to improving the quality of education with laser-precision focus on A-list schools and a highly competitive job market.

Age of the proactive parent

Regardless of what style a teacher adopts, it’s important for teachers to develop positive attitudes, set goals, and establish high expectations for students.

“Assume students can excel!” education authors Harry and Rosemary Wong declare. As former teachers with a combined 80-plus years of educational experience, the Wongs emphasize in their best-selling book, The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher and their more recent, The Classroom Management Book that successful teachers share three common characteristics:

• effective classroom management skills
• lesson mastery
• positive expectations

All instructors, when developing their teaching styles, should keep in mind these three goals, as well as the primary objective of education: student learning.

It is abundantly clear that today’s teachers are responsible for students with a diverse range of learning abilities. The 21st-century teacher does not have the luxury of “picking the low-hanging fruit” and then leaving the rest of the tree for experts who specialize in children with behavioral issues or learning disorders.

Today’s teachers must develop instructional styles that work well in diverse classrooms. Effective teaching methods engage gifted students, as well as slow-learning children and those with attention deficit tendencies. This is where differentiated instruction and a balanced mix of teaching styles can help reach all students in a given classroom—not just the few who respond well to one particular style of teaching.

The wonderment of teaching, what author/educator Dr. Harry Wong refers to as “that a-ha moment” when a child “gets it,” is one of the most rewarding and seemingly elusive benefits of becoming a teacher. This transfer of knowledge from expert to student is an art form and a skill. Fortunately, both can be learned and perfected.

Knowing how to engage students begins with selecting the teaching style that’s right for you. And remember, even though you may prefer one teaching style over another, you must find the style that works best for your students! Try different styles to meet different objectives, and always challenge yourself to find ways to reach each student.

You may also like to read

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Center for Teaching

Teaching statements.

Print Version

• What is a teaching statement?
• What purposes does the teaching statement serve?
• What does a teaching statement include?

General Guidelines

• Reflection questions to help get you started
• Exercises to help get you started
• Evaluating your teaching statement
• Further resources

What is a Teaching Statement?

A Teaching Statement is a purposeful and reflective essay about the author’s teaching beliefs and practices. It is an individual narrative that includes not only one’s beliefs about the teaching and learning process, but also concrete examples of the ways in which he or she enacts these beliefs in the classroom. At its best, a Teaching Statement gives a clear and unique portrait of the author as a teacher, avoiding generic or empty philosophical statements about teaching.

What Purposes does the Teaching Statement Serve?

The Teaching Statement can be used for personal, professional, or pedagogical purposes. While Teaching Statements are becoming an increasingly important part of the hiring and tenure processes, they are also effective exercises in helping one clearly and coherently conceptualize his or her approaches to and experiences of teaching and learning. As Nancy Van Note Chism, Professor Emerita of Education at IUPUI observes, “The act of taking time to consider one’s goals, actions, and vision provides an opportunity for development that can be personally and professionally enriching. Reviewing and revising former statements of teaching philosophy can help teachers to reflect on their growth and renew their dedication to the goals and values that they hold.”

What does a Teaching Statement Include?

A Teaching Statement can address any or all of the following:

• Your conception of how learning occurs
• A description of how your teaching facilitates student learning
• A reflection of why you teach the way you do
• The goals you have for yourself and for your students
• How your teaching enacts your beliefs and goals
• What, for you , constitutes evidence of student learning
• The ways in which you create an inclusive learning environment
• Your interests in new techniques, activities, and types of learning

“If at all possible, your statement should enable the reader to imagine you in the classroom, teaching. You want to include sufficient information for picturing not only you in the process of teaching, but also your class in the process of learning.” – Helen G. Grundman, Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement

• Make your Teaching Statement brief and well written . While Teaching Statements are probably longer at the tenure level (i.e. 3-5 pages or more), for hiring purposes they are typically 1-2 pages in length.
• Use narrative , first-person approach. This allows the Teaching Statement to be both personal and reflective.
• Be sincere and unique. Avoid clichés, especially ones about how much passion you have for teaching.
• Make it specific rather than abstract. Ground your ideas in 1-2 concrete examples , whether experienced or anticipated. This will help the reader to better visualize you in the classroom.
• Be discipline specific . Do not ignore your research. Explain how you advance your field through teaching.
• Avoid jargon and technical terms, as they can be off-putting to some readers. Try not to simply repeat what is in your CV. Teaching Statements are not exhaustive documents and should be used to complement other materials for the hiring or tenure processes.
• Be humble . Mention students in an enthusiastic, not condescending way, and illustrate your willingness to learn from your students and colleagues.
• Revise . Teaching is an evolving, reflective process, and Teaching Statements can be adapted and changed as necessary.

Reflection Questions To Help You Get You Started:*

• Why do you teach the way you do?
• What should students expect of you as a teacher?
• What is a method of teaching you rely on frequently? Why don’t you use a different method?
• What do you want students to learn? How do you know your goals for students are being met?
• What should your students be able to know or do as a result of taking your class?
• How can your teaching facilitate student learning?
• How do you as a teacher create an engaging or enriching learning environment?
• What specific activities or exercises do you use to engage your students? What do you want your students to learn from these activities?
• How has your thinking about teaching changed over time? Why?

* These questions and exercises are meant to be tools to help you begin reflecting on your beliefs and ideas as a teacher. No single Teaching Statement can contain the answers to all or most of these inquiries and activities.

Exercises to Help You Get You Started:*

• The Teaching Portfolio , including a section on teaching statements, Duquesne University Center for Teaching Excellence. This website includes five effective exercises to help you begin the writing process
• Teaching Goals Inventory , by Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross and their book Classroom Assessment Techniques . This “quiz” helps you to identify or create your teaching and learning goals.

Evaluating Your Teaching Statement

Writing A Statement Of Teaching Philosophy For The Academic Job Search (opens as a PDF), The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan.

This report includes a useful rubric for evaluating teaching philosophy statements. The design of the rubric was informed by experience with hundreds of teaching philosophies, as well as surveys of search committees on what they considered successful and unsuccessful components of job applicants’ teaching philosophies.

Further Resources:

General information on and guidelines for writing teaching statements.

• Writing a Philosophy of Teaching Statement , Faculty and TA Development at The Ohio State University. This site provides an in-depth guide to teaching statements, including the definition of and purposes for a teaching statement, general formatting suggestions, and a self-reflective guide to writing a teaching statement.
• Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement , Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Iowa State University. This document looks at four major components of a teaching statement, which have been divided into questions—specifically, to what end? By what means? To what degree? And why? Each question is sufficiently elaborated, offering a sort of scaffolding for preparing one’s own teaching statement.
• Writing a Meaningful Statement of Teaching Philosophy , McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. This website offers strategies for preparing and formatting your teaching statement.

Articles about Teaching Statements

• Grundman, Helen (2006). Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement (opens as a PDF), Notices of the AMS , Vol. 53, No. 11, p. 1329.
• Montell, Gabriela (2003). How to Write a Statement of Teaching Philosophy , from the Chronicle Manage Your Career section of the Chronicle of Higher Education .
• Montell, Gabriela (2003). What’s Your Philosophy on Teaching, and Does it Matter? , from the Chronicle Manage Your Career section of the Chronicle of Higher Education .

Teaching Guides

• Online Course Development Resources
• Principles & Frameworks
• Pedagogies & Strategies
• Reflecting & Assessing
• Challenges & Opportunities
• Populations & Contexts

Quick Links

• Services for Departments and Schools
• Examples of Online Instructional Modules

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000)

Chapter: 7 effective teaching: examples in history, mathematics, and science, 7 effective teaching: examples in history, mathematics, and science.

The preceding chapter explored implications of research on learning for general issues relevant to the design of effective learning environments. We now move to a more detailed exploration of teaching and learning in three disciplines: history, mathematics, and science. We chose these three areas in order to focus on the similarities and differences of disciplines that use different methods of inquiry and analysis. A major goal of our discussion is to explore the knowledge required to teach effectively in a diversity of disciplines.

We noted in Chapter 2 that expertise in particular areas involves more than a set of general problem-solving skills; it also requires well-organized knowledge of concepts and inquiry procedures. Different disciplines are organized differently and have different approaches to inquiry. For example, the evidence needed to support a set of historical claims is different from the evidence needed to prove a mathematical conjecture, and both of these differ from the evidence needed to test a scientific theory. Discussion in Chapter 2 also differentiated between expertise in a discipline and the ability to help others learn about that discipline. To use Shulman’s (1987) language, effective teachers need pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge about how to teach in particular disciplines) rather than only knowledge of a particular subject matter.

Pedagogical content knowledge is different from knowledge of general teaching methods. Expert teachers know the structure of their disciplines, and this knowledge provides them with cognitive roadmaps that guide the assignments they give students, the assessments they use to gauge students’ progress, and the questions they ask in the give and take of classroom life. In short, their knowledge of the discipline and their knowledge of pedagogy interact. But knowledge of the discipline structure does not in itself guide the teacher. For example, expert teachers are sensitive to those aspects of the discipline that are especially hard or easy for new students to master.

This means that new teachers must develop the ability to “understand in a pedagogically reflective way; they must not only know their own way around a discipline, but must know the ‘conceptual barriers’ likely to hinder others” (McDonald and Naso, 1986:8). These conceptual barriers differ from discipline to discipline.

An emphasis on interactions between disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical knowledge directly contradicts common misconceptions about what teachers need to know in order to design effective learning environments for their students. The misconceptions are that teaching consists only of a set of general methods, that a good teacher can teach any subject, or that content knowledge alone is sufficient.

Some teachers are able to teach in ways that involve a variety of disciplines. However, their ability to do so requires more than a set of general teaching skills. Consider the case of Barb Johnson, who has been a sixth-grade teacher for 12 years at Monroe Middle School. By conventional standards Monroe is a good school. Standardized test scores are about average, class size is small, the building facilities are well maintained, the administrator is a strong instructional leader, and there is little faculty and staff turnover. However, every year parents sending their fifth-grade students from the local elementary schools to Monroe jockey to get their children assigned to Barb Johnson’s classes. What happens in her classroom that gives it the reputation of being the best of the best?

During the first week of school Barb Johnson asks her sixth graders two questions: “What questions do you have about yourself?” and “What questions do you have about the world?” The students begin enumerating their questions, “Can they be about silly, little things?” asks one student. “If they’re your questions that you really want answered, they’re neither silly nor little,” replies the teacher. After the students list their individual questions, Barb organizes the students into small groups where they share lists and search for questions they have in common. After much discussion each group comes up with a priority list of questions, rank-ordering the questions about themselves and those about the world.

Back together in a whole group session, Barb Johnson solicits the groups’ priorities and works toward consensus for the class’s combined lists of questions. These questions become the basis for guiding the curriculum in Barb’s class. One question, “Will I live to be 100 years old?” spawned educational investigations into genetics, family and oral history, actuarial science, statistics and probability, heart disease, cancer, and hypertension. The students had the opportunity to seek out information from family members, friends, experts in various fields, on-line computer services, and books, as well as from the teacher. She describes what they had to do as becoming part of a “learning community.” According to Barb Johnson, “We decide what are the most compelling intellectual issues, devise ways to investigate those issues

and start off on a learning journey. Sometimes we fall short of our goal. Sometimes we reach our goal, but most times we exceed these goals—we learn more than we initially expected” (personal communication).

At the end of an investigation, Barb Johnson works with the students to help them see how their investigations relate to conventional subject-matter areas. They create a chart on which they tally experiences in language and literacy, mathematics, science, social studies and history, music, and art. Students often are surprised at how much and how varied their learning is. Says one student, “I just thought we were having fun. I didn’t realize we were learning, too!”

Barb Johnson’s teaching is extraordinary. It requires a wide range of disciplinary knowledge because she begins with students’ questions rather than with a fixed curriculum. Because of her extensive knowledge, she can map students’ questions onto important principles of relevant disciplines. It would not work to simply arm new teachers with general strategies that mirror how she teaches and encourage them to use this approach in their classrooms. Unless they have the relevant disciplinary knowledge, the teachers and the classes would quickly become lost. At the same time, disciplinary knowledge without knowledge about how students learn (i.e., principles consistent with developmental and learning psychology) and how to lead the processes of learning (i.e., pedagogical knowledge) would not yield the kind of learning seen in Barb Johnson’s classes (Anderson and Smith, 1987).

In the remainder of this chapter, we present illustrations and discussions of exemplary teaching in history, mathematics, and science. The three examples of history, mathematics, and science are designed to convey a sense of the pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) that underlie expert teaching. They should help to clarify why effective teaching requires much more than a set of “general teaching skills.”

Most people have had quite similar experiences with history courses: they learned the facts and dates that the teacher and the text deemed relevant. This view of history is radically different from the way that historians see their work. Students who think that history is about facts and dates miss exciting opportunities to understand how history is a discipline that is guided by particular rules of evidence and how particular analytical skills can be relevant for understanding events in their lives (see Ravitch and Finn, 1987). Unfortunately, many teachers do not present an exciting approach to history, perhaps because they, too, were taught in the dates-facts method.

Beyond Facts

In Chapter 2 , we discussed a study of experts in the field of history and learned that they regard the available evidence as more than lists of facts (Wineburg, 1991). The study contrasted a group of gifted high school seniors with a group of working historians. Both groups were given a test of facts about the American Revolution taken from the chapter review section of a popular United States history textbook. The historians who had backgrounds in American history knew most of the items, while historians whose specialties lay elsewhere knew only a third of the test facts. Several students scored higher than some historians on the factual pretest. In addition to the test of facts, however, the historians and students were presented with a set of historical documents and asked to sort out competing claims and to formulate reasoned interpretations. The historians excelled at this task. Most students, on the other hand, were stymied. Despite the volume of historical information the students possessed, they had little sense of how to use it productively for forming interpretations of events or for reaching conclusions.

Different Views of History by Different Teachers

Different views of history affect how teachers teach history. For example, Wilson and Wineburg (1993) asked two teachers of American history to read a set of student essays on the causes of the American Revolution not as an unbiased or complete and definitive accounts of people and events, but to develop plans for the students’ “remediation or enrichment.” Teachers were provided with a set of essays on the question, “Evaluate the causes of the American Revolution,” written by eleventh-graders for a timed, 45-minute test. Consider the different types of feedback that Mr. Barnes and Ms. Kelsey gave a student paper; see Box 7.1 .

Mr. Barnes’ comments on the actual content of the essays concentrated on the factual level. Ms. Kelsey’s comments addressed broader images of the nature of the domain, without neglecting important errors of fact. Overall, Mr. Barnes saw the papers as an indication of the bell-shaped distribution of abilities; Ms. Kelsey saw them as representing the misconception that history is about memorizing a mass of information and recounting a series of facts. These two teachers had very different ideas about the nature of learning history. Those ideas affected how they taught and what they wanted their students to achieve.

Studies of Outstanding History Teachers

For expert history teachers, their knowledge of the discipline and beliefs about its structure interact with their teaching strategies. Rather than simply introduce students to sets of facts to be learned, these teachers help people to understand the problematic nature of historical interpretation and analysis and to appreciate the relevance of history for their everyday lives.

One example of outstanding history teaching comes from the classroom of Bob Bain, a public school teacher in Beechwood, Ohio. Historians, he notes, are cursed with an abundance of data—the traces of the past threaten to overwhelm them unless they find some way of separating what is important from what is peripheral. The assumptions that historians hold about significance shape how they write their histories, the data they select, and the narrative they compose, as well as the larger schemes they bring to organize and periodize the past. Often these assumptions about historical significance remain unarticulated in the classroom. This contributes to students’ beliefs that their textbooks are the history rather than a history.

Bob Bain begins his ninth-grade high school class by having all the students create a time capsule of what they think are the most important artifacts from the past. The students’ task, then, is to put down on paper why they chose the items they did. In this way, the students explicitly articulate their underlying assumptions of what constitutes historical significance. Students’ responses are pooled, and he writes them on a large poster that he hangs on the classroom wall. This poster, which Bob Bain calls “Rules for Determining Historical Significance,” becomes a lightening rod for class discussions throughout the year, undergoing revisions and elaborations as students become better able to articulate their ideas.

At first, students apply the rules rigidly and algorithmically, with little understanding that just as they made the rules, they can also change them. But as students become more practiced in plying their judgments of significance, they come to see the rules as tools for assaying the arguments of different historians, which allows them to begin to understand why historians disagree. In this instance, the students’ growing ability to understand the interpretative nature of history is aided by their teacher’s deep understanding of a fundamental principle of the discipline.

Leinhardt and Greeno (1991, 1994) spent 2 years studying a highly accomplished teacher of advanced placement history in an urban high school in Pittsburgh. The teacher, Ms. Sterling, a veteran of over 20 years, began her school year by having her students ponder the meaning of the statement, “Every true history is contemporary history.” In the first week of the semester, Sterling thrust her students into the kinds of epistemological issues that one might find in a graduate seminar: “What is history?” “How do we know the past?” “What is the difference between someone who sits down to

‘write history’ and the artifacts that are produced as part of ordinary experience?” The goal of this extended exercise is to help students understand history as an evidentiary form of knowledge, not as clusters of fixed names and dates.

One might wonder about the advisability of spending 5 days “defining history” in a curriculum with so much to cover. But it is precisely Sterling’s framework of subject-matter knowledge—her overarching understanding of the discipline as a whole—that permits students entry into the advanced world of historical sense-making. By the end of the course, students moved from being passive spectators of the past to enfranchised agents who could participate in the forms of thinking, reasoning, and engagement that are the hallmark of skilled historical cognition. For example, early in the school year, Ms. Sterling asked her students a question about the Constitutional Convention and “what were men able to do.” Paul took the question literally: “Uh, I think one of the biggest things that they did, that we talked about yesterday, was the establishment of the first settlements in the Northwest

area states.” But after 2 months of educating students into a way of thinking about history, Paul began to catch on. By January his responses to questions about the fall of the cotton-based economy in the South were linked to British trade policy and colonial ventures in Asia, as well as to the failure of Southern leaders to read public opinion accurately in Great Britain. Ms. Sterling’s own understanding of history allowed her to create a classroom in which students not only mastered concepts and facts, but also used them in authentic ways to craft historical explanations.

Debating the Evidence

Elizabeth Jensen prepares her group of eleventh graders to debate the following resolution:

Resolved: The British government possesses the legitimate authority to tax the American colonies.

As her students enter the classroom they arrange their desks into three groups—on the left of the room a group of “rebels,” on the right, a group of “loyalists,” and in the front, a group of “judges.” Off to the side with a spiral notebook on her lap sits Jensen, a short woman in her late 30s with a booming voice. But today that voice is silent as her students take up the question of the legitimacy of British taxation in the American colonies.

The rebels’ first speaker, a 16-year-old girl with a Grateful Dead T-shirt and one dangling earring, takes a paper from her notebook and begins:

England says she keeps troops here for our own protection. On face value, this seems reasonable enough, but there is really no substance to their claims. First of all, who do they think they are protecting us from? The French? Quoting from our friend Mr. Bailey on page 54, ‘By the settlement in Paris in 1763, French power was thrown completely off the continent of North America.’ Clearly not the French then. Maybe they need to protect us from the Spanish? Yet the same war also subdued the Spanish, so they are no real worry either. In fact, the only threat to our order is the Indians…but…we have a decent militia of our own…. So why are they putting troops here? The only possible reason is to keep us in line. With more and more troops coming over, soon every freedom we hold dear will be stripped away. The great irony is that Britain expects us to pay for these vicious troops, these British squelchers of colonial justice.

A loyalist responds:

We moved here, we are paying less taxes than we did for two generations in England, and you complain? Let’s look at why we are being taxed— the main reason is probably because England has a debt of £140,000,000. …This sounds a little greedy, I mean what right do they have to take our money simply because they have the power over us. But did you know that over one-half of their war debt was caused by defending us in the French and Indian War…. Taxation without representation isn’t fair. Indeed, it’s tyranny. Yet virtual representation makes this whining of yours an untruth. Every British citizen, whether he had a right to vote or not, is represented in Parliament. Why does this representation not extend to America?

A rebel questions the loyalist about this:

Rebel: What benefits do we get out of paying taxes to the crown?

Loyalist: We benefit from the protection.

Rebel: (cutting in) Is that the only benefit you claim, protection?

Loyalist: Yes—and all the rights of an Englishman.

Rebel: Okay, then what about the Intolerable Acts…denying us rights of British subjects. What about the rights we are denied?

Loyalist: The Sons of Liberty tarred and feather people, pillaged homes— they were definitely deserving of some sort of punishment.

Rebel: So should all the colonies be punished for the acts of a few colonies?

For a moment, the room is a cacophony of charges and countercharges. “It’s the same as in Birmingham,” shouts a loyalist. A rebel snorts disparagingly, “Virtual representation is bull.” Thirty-two students seem to be talking at once, while the presiding judge, a wiry student with horn-rimmed glasses, bangs his gavel to no avail. The teacher, still in the corner, still with spiral notebook in lap, issues her only command of the day. “Hold still!” she thunders. Order is restored and the loyalists continue their opening argument (from Wineburg and Wilson, 1991).

Another example of Elizabeth Jensen’s teaching involves her efforts to help her high school students understand the debates between Federalists and anti-Federalists. She knows that her 15- and 16-year-olds cannot begin to grasp the complexities of the debates without first understanding that these disagreements were rooted in fundamentally different conceptions of human nature—a point glossed over in two paragraphs in her history textbook. Rather than beginning the year with a unit on European discovery and exploration, as her text dictates, she begins with a conference on the nature of man. Students in her eleventh-grade history class read excerpts from the writings of philosophers (Hume, Locke, Plato, and Aristotle), leaders of state and revolutionaries (Jefferson, Lenin, Gandhi), and tyrants (Hitler, Mussolini), presenting and advocating these views before their classmates. Six weeks later, when it is time to study the ratification of the Constitution, these now-familiar figures—Plato, Aristotle, and others—are reconvened to be courted by impassioned groups of Federalists and anti-Federalists. It is Elizabeth Jensen’s understanding of what she wants to teach and what adolescents already know that allows her to craft an activity that helps students get a feel for the domain that awaits them: decisions about rebellion, the Constitution, federalism, slavery, and the nature of a government.

These examples provide glimpses of outstanding teaching in the discipline of history. The examples do not come from “gifted teachers” who know how to teach anything: they demonstrate, instead, that expert teachers have a deep understanding of the structure and epistemologies of their disciplines, combined with knowledge of the kinds of teaching activities that will help students come to understand the discipline for themselves. As we previously noted, this point sharply contradicts one of the popular—and dangerous—myths about teaching: teaching is a generic skill and a good teacher can teach any subject. Numerous studies demonstrate that any curriculum—including a textbook—is mediated by a teacher’s understanding of the subject domain (for history, see Wineburg and Wilson, 1988; for math, see Ball, 1993; for English, see Grossman et al., 1989). The uniqueness of the content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge necessary to teach his-

tory becomes clearer as one explores outstanding teaching in other disciplines.

MATHEMATICS

As is the case in history, most people believe that they know what mathematics is about—computation. Most people are familiar with only the computational aspects of mathematics and so are likely to argue for its place in the school curriculum and for traditional methods of instructing children in computation. In contrast, mathematicians see computation as merely a tool in the real stuff of mathematics, which includes problem solving, and characterizing and understanding structure and patterns. The current debate concerning what students should learn in mathematics seems to set proponents of teaching computational skills against the advocates of fostering conceptual understanding and reflects the wide range of beliefs about what aspects of mathematics are important to know. A growing body of research provides convincing evidence that what teachers know and believe about mathematics is closely linked to their instructional decisions and actions (Brown, 1985; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989; Wilson, 1990a, b; Brophy, 1990; Thompson, 1992).

Teachers’ ideas about mathematics, mathematics teaching, and mathematics learning directly influence their notions about what to teach and how to teach it—an interdependence of beliefs and knowledge about pedagogy and subject matter (e.g., Gamoran, 1994; Stein et al., 1990). It shows that teachers’ goals for instruction are, to a large extent, a reflection of what they think is important in mathematics and how they think students best learn it. Thus, as we examine mathematics instruction, we need to pay attention to the subject-matter knowledge of teachers, their pedagogical knowledge (general and content specific), and their knowledge of children as learners of mathematics. Paying attention to these domains of knowledge also leads us to examine teachers’ goals for instruction.

If students in mathematics classes are to learn mathematics with understanding—a goal that is accepted by almost everyone in the current debate over the role of computational skills in mathematics classrooms—then it is important to examine examples of teaching for understanding and to analyze the roles of the teacher and the knowledge that underlies the teacher’s enactments of those roles. In this section, we examine three cases of mathematics instruction that are viewed as being close to the current vision of exemplary instruction and discuss the knowledge base on which the teacher is drawing, as well as the beliefs and goals which guide his or her instructional decisions.

Multiplication with Meaning

For teaching multidigit multiplication, teacher-researcher Magdelene Lampert created a series of lessons in which she taught a heterogeneous group of 28 fourth-grade students. The students ranged in computational skill from beginning to learn the single-digit multiplication facts to being able to accurately solve n-digit by n-digit multiplications. The lessons were intended to give children experiences in which the important mathematical principles of additive and multiplicative composition, associativity, commutativity, and the distributive property of multiplication over addition were all evident in the steps of the procedures used to arrive at an answer (Lampert, 1986:316). It is clear from her description of her instruction that both her deep understanding of multiplicative structures and her knowledge of a wide range of representations and problem situations related to multiplication were brought to bear as she planned and taught these lessons. It is also clear that her goals for the lessons included not only those related to students’ understanding of mathematics, but also those related to students’ development as independent, thoughtful problem solvers. Lampert (1986:339) described her role as follows:

My role was to bring students’ ideas about how to solve or analyze problems into the public forum of the classroom, to referee arguments about whether those ideas were reasonable, and to sanction students’ intuitive use of mathematical principles as legitimate. I also taught new information in the form of symbolic structures and emphasized the connection between symbols and operations on quantities, but I made it a classroom requirement that students use their own ways of deciding whether something was mathematically reasonable in doing the work. If one conceives of the teacher’s role in this way, it is difficult to separate instruction in mathematics content from building a culture of sense-making in the classroom, wherein teacher and students have a view of themselves as responsible for ascertaining the legitimacy of procedures by reference to known mathematical principles. On the part of the teacher, the principles might be known as a more formal abstract system, whereas on the part of the learners, they are known in relation to familiar experiential contexts. But what seems most important is that teachers and students together are disposed toward a particular way of viewing and doing mathematics in the classroom.

Magdelene Lampert set out to connect what students already knew about multidigit multiplication with principled conceptual knowledge. She did so in three sets of lessons. The first set used coin problems, such as “Using only two kinds of coins, make $1.00 using 19 coins,” which encouraged children to draw on their familiarity with coins and mathematical principles that coin trading requires. Another set of lessons used simple stories and drawings to illustrate the ways in which large quantities could be grouped

for easier counting. Finally, the third set of lessons used only numbers and arithmetic symbols to represent problems. Throughout the lessons, students were challenged to explain their answers and to rely on their arguments, rather than to rely on the teacher or book for verification of correctness. An example serves to highlight this approach; see Box 7.2 .

Lampert (1986:337) concludes:

…students used principled knowledge that was tied to the language of groups to explain what they were seeing. They were able to talk meaningfully about place value and order of operations to give legitimacy to procedures and to reason about their outcomes, even though they did not use technical terms to do so. I took their experimentations and arguments as evidence that they had come to see mathematics as more than a set of procedures for finding answers.

Clearly, her own deep understanding of mathematics comes into play as she teaches these lessons. It is worth noting that her goal of helping students see what is mathematically legitimate shapes the way in which she designs lessons to develop students’ understanding of two-digit multiplication.

Understanding Negative Numbers

Helping third-grade students extend their understanding of numbers from the natural numbers to the integers is a challenge undertaken by another teacher-researcher. Deborah Ball’s work provides another snapshot of teaching that draws on extensive subject content and pedagogical content knowledge. Her goals in instruction include “developing a practice that respects the integrity both of mathematics as a discipline and of children as mathematical thinkers” (Ball, 1993). That is, she not only takes into account what the important mathematical ideas are, but also how children think about the particular area of mathematics on which she is focusing. She draws on both her understanding of the integers as mathematical entities (subject-matter knowledge) and her extensive pedagogical content knowledge specifically about integers. Like Lampert, Ball’s goals go beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered mathematics and include developing a culture in which students conjecture, experiment, build arguments, and frame and solve problems—the work of mathematicians.

Deborah Ball’s description of work highlights the importance and difficulty of figuring out powerful and effective ways to represent key mathematical ideas to children (see Ball, 1993). A wealth of possible models for negative numbers exists and she reviewed a number of them—magic peanuts, money, game scoring, a frog on a number line, buildings with floors above and below ground. She decided to use the building model first and money later: she was acutely aware of the strengths and limitations of each

model as a way for representing the key properties of numbers, particularly those of magnitude and direction. Reading Deborah Ball’s description of her deliberations, one is struck by the complexity of selecting appropriate models for particular mathematical ideas and processes. She hoped that the positional aspects of the building model would help children recognize that negative numbers were not equivalent to zero, a common misconception. She was aware that the building model would be difficult to use for modeling subtraction of negative numbers.

Deborah Ball begins her work with the students, using the building model by labeling its floors. Students readily labeled the underground floors and accepted them as “below zero.” They then explored what happened as little paper people entered an elevator at some floor and rode to another floor. This was used to introduce the conventions of writing addition and subtraction problems involving integers 4−6=−2 and −2+5=3. Students were presented with increasingly difficult problems. For example, “How many ways are there for a person to get to the second floor?” Working with the building model allowed students to generate a number of observations. For example, one student noticed that “any number below zero plus that same number above zero equals zero” (Ball, 1993:381). However, the model failed to allow for explorations for such problems 5+(−6) and Ball was concerned that students were not developing a sense that −5 was less than −2—it was lower, but not necessarily less. Ball then used a model of money as a second representational context for exploring negative numbers, noting that it, too, has limitations.

Clearly, Deborah Ball’s knowledge of the possible representations of integers (pedagogical content knowledge) and her understanding of the important mathematical properties of integers were foundational to her planning and her instruction. Again, her goals related to developing students’ mathematical authority, and a sense of community also came into play. Like Lampert, Ball wanted her students to accept the responsibility of deciding when a solution is reasonable and likely to be correct, rather than depending on text or teacher for confirmation of correctness.

Guided Discussion

The work of Lampert and Ball highlights the role of a teacher’s knowledge of content and pedagogical content knowledge in planning and teaching mathematics lessons. It also suggests the importance of the teacher’s understanding of children as learners. The concept of cognitively guided instruction helps illustrate another important characteristic of effective mathematics instruction: that teachers not only need knowledge of a particular topic within mathematics and knowledge of how learners think about the particular topic, but also need to develop knowledge about how the indi-

vidual children in their classrooms think about the topic (Carpenter and Fennema, 1992; Carpenter et al., 1996; Fennema et al., 1996). Teachers, it is claimed, will use their knowledge to make appropriate instructional decisions to assist students to construct their mathematical knowledge. In this approach, the idea of domains of knowledge for teaching (Shulman, 1986) is extended to include teachers’ knowledge of individual learners in their classrooms.

Cognitively guided instruction is used by Annie Keith, who teaches a combination first- and second-grade class in an elementary school in Madison Wisconsin (Hiebert et al., 1997). Her instructional practices are an example of what is possible when a teacher understands children’s thinking and uses that understanding to guide her teaching. A portrait of Ms. Keith’s classroom reveals also how her knowledge of mathematics and pedagogy influence her instructional decisions.

Word problems form the basis for almost all instruction in Annie Keith’s classroom. Students spend a great deal of time discussing alternative strategies with each other, in groups, and as a whole class. The teacher often participates in these discussions but almost never demonstrates the solution to problems. Important ideas in mathematics are developed as students explore solutions to problems, rather than being a focus of instruction per se. For example, place-value concepts are developed as students use base-10 materials, such as base-10 blocks and counting frames, to solve word problems involving multidigit numbers.

Mathematics instruction in Annie Keith’s class takes place in a number of different settings. Everyday first-grade and second-grade activities, such as sharing snacks, lunch count, and attendance, regularly serve as contexts for problem-solving tasks. Mathematics lessons frequently make use of math centers in which the students do a variety of activities. On any given day, children at one center may solve word problems presented by the teacher while at another center children write word problems to present to the class later or play a math game.

She continually challenges her students to think and to try to make sense of what they are doing in math. She uses the activities as opportunities for her to learn what individual students know and understand about mathematics. As students work in groups to solve problems, she observes the various solutions and mentally makes notes about which students should present their work: she wants a variety of solutions presented so that students will have an opportunity to learn from each other. Her knowledge of the important ideas in mathematics serves as one framework for the selection process, but her understanding of how children think about the mathematical ideas they are using also affects her decisions about who should present. She might select a solution that is actually incorrect to be presented so that she can initiate a discussion of a common misconception. Or she

may select a solution that is more sophisticated than most students have used in order to provide an opportunity for students to see the benefits of such a strategy. Both the presentations of solutions and the class discussions that follow provide her with information about what her students know and what problems she should use with them next.

Annie Keith’s strong belief that children need to construct their understanding of mathematical ideas by building on what they already know guides her instructional decisions. She forms hypotheses about what her students understand and selects instructional activities based on these hypotheses. She modifies her instruction as she gathers additional information about her students and compares it with the mathematics she wants them to learn. Her instructional decisions give her clear diagnoses of individual students’ current state of understanding. Her approach is not a free-for-all without teacher guidance: rather, it is instruction that builds on students’ understandings and is carefully orchestrated by the teacher, who is aware of what is mathematically important and also what is important to the learner’s progress.

Model-Based Reasoning

Some attempts to revitalize mathematics instruction have emphasized the importance of modeling phenomena. Work on modeling can be done from kindergarten through twelth grade (K–12). Modeling involves cycles of model construction, model evaluation, and model revision. It is central to professional practice in many disciplines, such as mathematics and science, but it is largely missing from school instruction. Modeling practices are ubiquitous and diverse, ranging from the construction of physical models, such as a planetarium or a model of the human vascular system, to the development of abstract symbol systems, exemplified by the mathematics of algebra, geometry, and calculus. The ubiquity and diversity of models in these disciplines suggest that modeling can help students develop understanding about a wide range of important ideas. Modeling practices can and should be fostered at every age and grade level (Clement, 1989; Hestenes, 1992; Lehrer and Romberg, 1996a, b; Schauble et al., 1995; see Box 7.3 ).

Taking a model-based approach to a problem entails inventing (or selecting) a model, exploring the qualities of the model, and then applying the model to answer a question of interest. For example, the geometry of triangles has an internal logic and also has predictive power for phenomena ranging from optics to wayfinding (as in navigational systems) to laying floor tile. Modeling emphasizes a need for forms of mathematics that are typically underrepresented in the standard curriculum, such as spatial visualization and geometry, data structure, measurement, and uncertainty. For example, the scientific study of animal behavior, like bird foraging, is se-

verely limited unless one also has access to such mathematical concepts as variability and uncertainty. Hence, the practice of modeling introduces the further explorations of important “big ideas” in disciplines.

Increasingly, approaches to early mathematics teaching incorporate the premises that all learning involves extending understanding to new situations, that young children come to school with many ideas about mathematics, that knowledge relevant to a new setting is not always accessed spontaneously, and that learning can be enhanced by respecting and encouraging

children to try out the ideas and strategies that they bring to school-based learning in classrooms. Rather than beginning mathematics instruction by focusing solely on computational algorithms, such as addition and subtraction, students are encouraged to invent their own strategies for solving problems and to discuss why those strategies work. Teachers may also explicitly prompt students to think about aspects of their everyday life that are potentially relevant for further learning. For example, everyday experiences of walking and related ideas about position and direction can serve as a springboard for developing corresponding mathematics about the structure of large-scale space, position, and direction (Lehrer and Romberg, 1996b).

As research continues to provide good examples of instruction that help children learn important mathematics, there will be better understanding of the roles that teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, and goals play in their instructional thinking and actions. The examples we have provided here make it clear that the selection of tasks and the guidance of students’ thinking as they work through tasks is highly dependent on teachers’ knowledge of mathematics, pedagogical content knowledge, and knowledge of students in general.

Two recent examples in physics illustrate how research findings can be used to design instructional strategies that promote the sort of problem-solving behavior observed in experts. Undergraduates who had finished an introductory physics course were asked to spend a total of 10 hours, spread over several weeks, solving physics problems using a computer-based tool that constrained them to perform a conceptual analysis of the problems based on a hierarchy of principles and procedures that could be applied to solve them (Dufresne et al., 1992). This approach was motivated by research on expertise (discussed in Chapter 2 ). The reader will recall that, when asked to state an approach to solving a problem, physicists generally discuss principles and procedures. Novices, in contrast, tend to discuss specific equations that could be used to manipulate variables given in the problem (Chi et al., 1981). When compared with a group of students who solved the same problems on their own, the students who used the computer to carry out the hierarchical analyses performed noticeably better in subsequent measures of expertise. For example, in problem solving, those who performed the hierarchical analyses outperformed those who did not, whether measured in terms of overall problem-solving performance, ability to arrive at the correct answer, or ability to apply appropriate principles to solve the problems; see Figure 7.1 . Furthermore, similar differences emerged in problem categorization: students who performed the hierarchical analyses considered principles (as opposed to surface features) more often in

deciding whether or not two problems would be solved similarly; see Figure 7.2 . (See Chapter 6 for an example of the type of item used in the categorization task of Figure 7.2 .) It is also worth noting that both Figures 7.1 and 7.2 illustrate two other issues that we have discussed in this volume, namely that time on task is a major indicator for learning and that deliberate practice is an efficient way to promote expertise. In both cases, the control group made significant improvements simply as a result of practice (time on task), but the experimental group showed more improvements for the same amount of training time (deliberate practice).

Introductory physics courses have also been taught successfully with an approach for problem solving that begins with a qualitative hierarchical analysis of the problems (Leonard et al., 1996). Undergraduate engineering students were instructed to write qualitative strategies for solving problems before attempting to solve them (based on Chi et al., 1981). The strategies consisted of a coherent verbal description of how a problem could be solved and contained three components: the major principle to be applied; the justification for why the principle was applicable; and the procedures for applying the principle. That is, the what, why, and how of solving the problem were explicitly delineated; see Box 7.4 . Compared with students who took a traditional course, students in the strategy-based course performed significantly better in their ability to categorize problems according to the relevant principles that could be applied to solve them; see Figure 7.3 .

Hierarchical structures are useful strategies for helping novices both recall knowledge and solve problems. For example, physics novices who had completed and received good grades in an introductory college physics course were trained to generate a problem analysis called a theoretical problem description (Heller and Reif, 1984). The analysis consists of describing force problems in terms of concepts, principles, and heuristics. With such an approach, novices substantially improved in their ability to solve problems, even though the type of theoretical problem description used in the study was not a natural one for novices. Novices untrained in the theoretical descriptions were generally unable to generate appropriate descriptions on their own—even given fairly routine problems. Skills, such as the ability to describe a problem in detail before attempting a solution, the ability to determine what relevant information should enter the analysis of a problem, and the ability to decide which procedures can be used to generate problem descriptions and analyses, are tacitly used by experts but rarely taught explicitly in physics courses.

Another approach helps students organize knowledge by imposing a hierarchical organization on the performance of different tasks in physics (Eylon and Reif, 1984). Students who received a particular physics argument that was organized in hierarchical form performed various recall and problem-solving tasks better than subjects who received the same argument

FIGURE 7.1 Effects of two methods of training on problem-solving, final answer, and principle understanding. SOURCE: Dufresne et al. (1992).

non-hierarchically. Similarly, students who received a hierarchical organization of problem-solving strategies performed much better than subjects who received the same strategies organized non-hierarchically. Thus, helping students to organize their knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself, since knowledge organization is likely to affect students’ intellectual performance.

These examples demonstrate the importance of deliberate practice and of having a “coach” who provides feedback for ways of optimizing performance (see Chapter 3 ). If students had simply been given problems to solve on their own (an instructional practice used in all the sciences), it is highly

FIGURE 7.2 Effects of two methods of training on considering principles for categorizing problems. SOURCE: Dufresne et al. (1992).

unlikely that they would have spent time efficiently. Students might get stuck for minutes, or even hours, in attempting a solution to a problem and either give up or waste lots of time. In Chapter 3 , we discussed ways in which learners profit from errors and that making mistakes is not always time wasted. However, it is not efficient if a student spends most of the problem-solving time rehearsing procedures that are not optimal for promoting skilled performance, such as finding and manipulating equations to solve the problem, rather than identifying the underlying principle and procedures that apply to the problem and then constructing the specific equations needed. In deliberate practice, a student works under a tutor (human

Students enrolled in an introductory physics course were asked to write a strategy for an exam problem A disk of mass, M=2 kg, and radius, R=0.4 m, has string wound around it and is free to rotate about an axle through its center. A block of mass, M=1 kg, is attached to the end of the string, and the system is released from rest with no slack in the string. What is the speed of the block after it has fallen a distance, d=0.5 m. Don’t forget to provide both a strategy and a solution.   Strategy 1: Use the conservation of energy since the only nonconservative force in the system is the tension in the rope attached to the mass M and wound around the disk (assuming there is no friction between the axle and the disk, and the mass M and the air), and the work done by the tension to the disk and the mass cancel each other out. First, set up a coordinate system so the potential energy of the system at the start can be determined. There will be no kinetic energy at the start since it starts at rest. Therefore the potential energy is all the initial energy. Now set the initial energy equal to the final energy that is made up of the kinetic energy of the disk plus the mass M and any potential energy left in the system with respect to the chosen coordinate system. Strategy 2: I would use conservation of mechanical energy to solve this problem. The mass M has some potential energy while it is hanging there. When the block starts to accelerate downward the potential energy is transformed into rotational kinetic energy or computer based) to rehearse appropriate practices that enhance performance. Through deliberate practice, computer-based tutoring environments have been designed that reduce the time it takes individuals to reach real-world performance criteria from 4 years to 25 hours (see Chapter 9 )! Conceptual Change Before students can really learn new scientific concepts, they often need to re-conceptualize deeply rooted misconceptions that interfere with the learning. As reviewed above (see Chapters 3 and 4 ), people spend considerable time and effort constructing a view of the physical world through of the disk and kinetic energy of the falling mass. Equating the initial and final states and using the relationship between v and ω the speed of M can be found. Mechanical energy is conserved even with the nonconservative tension force because the tension force is internal to the system (pulley, mass, rope). In trying to find the speed of the block I would try to find angular momentum kinetic energy, use gravity. I would also use rotational kinematics and moment of inertia around the center of mass for the disk. There will be a torque about the center of mass due to the weight of the block, M. The force pulling downward is mg. The moment of inertia about the axle is 1/2 MR . The moment of inertia multiplied by the angular acceleration. By plugging these values into a kinematic expression, the angular speed can be calculated. Then, the angular speed times the radius gives you the velocity of the block. The first two strategies display an excellent understanding of the principles, justification, and procedures that could be used to solve the problem (the what, why, and how for solving the problem). The last two strategies are largely a shopping list of physics terms or equations that were covered in the course, but the students are not able to articulate why or how they apply to the problem under consideration. Having students write strategies (after modeling strategy writing for them and providing suitable scaffolding to ensure progress) provides an excellent formative assessment tool for monitoring whether or not students are making the appropriate links between problem contexts, and the principles and procedures that could be applied to solve them (see Leonard et al., 1996). experiences and observations, and they may cling tenaciously to those views— however much they conflict with scientific concepts—because they help them explain phenomena and make predictions about the world (e.g., why a rock falls faster than a leaf). One instructional strategy, termed “bridging,” has been successful in helping students overcome persistent misconceptions (Brown, 1992; Brown and Clement, 1989; Clement, 1993). The bridging strategy attempts to bridge from students’ correct beliefs (called anchoring conceptions) to their misconceptions through a series of intermediate analogous situations. Starting with the anchoring intuition that a spring exerts an upward force on the book resting on it, the student might be asked if a book resting on the FIGURE 7.3 Percent correct choices under strategy-based and traditional teaching conditions by problem number in a categorization, multiple-choice task. SOURCE: Leonard et al. (1996). middle of a long, “springy” board supported at its two ends experiences an upward force from the board. The fact that the bent board looks as if it is serving the same function as the spring helps many students agree that both the spring and the board exert upward forces on the book. For a student who may not agree that the bent board exerts an upward force on the book, the instructor may ask a student to place her hand on top of a vertical spring and push down and to place her hand on the middle of the springy board and push down. She would then be asked if she experienced an upward force that resisted her push in both cases. Through this type of dynamic probing of students’ beliefs, and by helping them come up with ways to resolve conflicting views, students can be guided into constructing a coherent view that is applicable across a wide range of contexts. Another effective strategy for helping students overcome persistent erroneous beliefs are interactive lecture demonstrations (Sokoloff and Thornton, 1997; Thornton and Sokoloff, 1997). This strategy, which has been used very effectively in large introductory college physics classes, begins with an introduction to a demonstration that the instructor is about to perform, such as a collision between two air carts on an air track, one a stationary light cart, the other a heavy cart moving toward the stationary cart. Each cart has an electronic “force probe” connected to it which displays on a large screen and in real-time the force acting on it during the collision. The teacher first asks the students to discuss the situation with their neighbors and then record a prediction as to whether one of the carts would exert a bigger force on the other during impact or whether the carts would exert equal forces. The vast majority of students incorrectly predict that the heavier, moving cart exerts a larger force on the lighter, stationary cart. Again, this prediction seems quite reasonable based on experience—students know that a moving Mack truck colliding with a stationary Volkswagen beetle will result in much more damage done to the Volkswagen, and this is interpreted to mean that the Mack truck must have exerted a larger force on the Volkswagen. Yet, notwithstanding the major damage to the Volkswagen, Newton’s Third Law states that two interacting bodies exert equal and opposite forces on each other. After the students make and record their predictions, the instructor performs the demonstration, and the students see on the screen that the force probes record forces of equal magnitude but oppositely directed during the collision. Several other situations are discussed in the same way: What if the two carts had been moving toward each other at the same speed? What if the situation is reversed so that the heavy cart is stationary and the light cart is moving toward it? Students make predictions and then see the actual forces between the carts displayed as they collide. In all cases, students see that the carts exert equal and opposite forces on each other, and with the help of a discussion moderated by the instructor, the students begin to build a consistent view of Newton’s Third Law that incorporates their observations and experiences. Consistent with the research on providing feedback (see Chapter 3 ), there is other research that suggests that students’ witnessing the force displayed in real-time as the two carts collide helps them overcome their misconceptions; delays of as little as 20–30 minutes in displaying graphic data of an event occurring in real-time significantly inhibits the learning of the underlying concept (Brasell, 1987). Both bridging and the interactive demonstration strategies have been shown to be effective at helping students permanently overcome misconceptions. This finding is a major breakthrough in teaching science, since so much research indicates that students often can parrot back correct answers on a test that might be erroneously interpreted as displaying the eradication of a misconception, but the same misconception often resurfaces when students are probed weeks or months later (see Mestre, 1994, for a review). Teaching as Coaching One of the best examples of translating research into practice is Minstrell’s (1982, 1989, 1992) work with high school physics students. Minstrell uses many research-based instructional techniques (e.g., bridging, making students’ thinking visible, facilitating students’ ability to restructure their own knowledge) to teach physics for understanding. He does this through classroom discussions in which students construct understanding by making sense of physics concepts, with Minstrell playing a coaching role. The following quote exemplifies his innovative and effective instructional strategies (Minstrell, 1989:130–131): Students’ initial ideas about mechanics are like strands of yarn, some unconnected, some loosely interwoven. The act of instruction can be viewed as helping the students unravel individual strands of belief, label them, and then weave them into a fabric of more complete understanding. An important point is that later understanding can be constructed, to a considerable extent, from earlier beliefs. Sometimes new strands of belief are introduced, but rarely is an earlier belief pulled out and replaced. Rather than denying the relevancy of a belief, teachers might do better by helping students differentiate their present ideas from and integrate them into conceptual beliefs more like those of scientists. Describing a lesson on force, Minstrell (1989:130–131) begins by introducing the topic in general terms: Today we are going to try to explain some rather ordinary events that you might see any day. You will find that you already have many good ideas that will help explain those events. We will find that some of our ideas are similar to those of the scientist, but in other cases our ideas might be different. When we are finished with this unit, I expect that we will have a much clearer idea of how scientists explain those events, and I know that you will feel more comfortable about your explanations…A key idea we are going to use is the idea of force. What does the idea of force mean to you? Many views emerge from the ensuing classroom discussion, from the typical “push or pull” to descriptions that include sophisticated terms, such as en- ergy and momentum. At some point Minstrell guides the discussion to a specific example: he drops a rock and asks students how the event can be explained using their ideas about force. He asks students to individually formulate their ideas and to draw a diagram showing the major forces on the rock as arrows, with labels to denote the cause of each force. A lengthy discussion follows in which students present their views, views that contain many irrelevant (e.g., nuclear forces) or fictitious forces (e.g., the spin of the earth, air). In his coaching, Minstrell asks students to justify their choices by asking questions, such as “How do you know?” “How did you decide?” “Why do you believe that?” With this approach, Minstrell has been able to identify many erroneous beliefs of students that stand in the way of conceptual understanding. One example is the belief that only active agents (e.g., people) can exert forces, that passive agents (e.g., a table) cannot. Minstrell (1992) has developed a framework that helps both to make sense of students’ reasoning and to design instructional strategies. (For a related theoretical framework for classifying and explaining student reasoning, see the discussion of “phenomenological primitives” in DiSessa, 1988, 1993.) Minstrell describes identifiable pieces of students’ knowledge as “facets,” a facet being a convenient unit of thought, a piece of knowledge, or a strategy seemingly used by the student in addressing a particular situation. Facets may relate to conceptual knowledge (e.g., passive objects do not exert force), to strategic knowledge (e.g., average velocity can be determined by adding the initial and final velocities and dividing by two), or generic reasoning (e.g., the more the X, the more the Y). Identifying students’ facets, what cues them in different contexts, and how students use them in reasoning are all helpful in devising instructional strategies. Interactive Instruction in Large Classes One of the obstacles to instructional innovation in large introductory science courses at the college level is the sheer number of students who are taught at one time. How does an instructor provide an active learning experience, provide feedback, accommodate different learning styles, make students’ thinking visible, and provide scaffolding and tailored instruction to meet specific student needs when facing more than 100 students at a time? Classroom communication systems can help the instructor of a large class accomplish these objectives. One such system, called Classtalk, consists of both hardware and software that allows up to four students to share an input device (e.g., a fairly inexpensive graphing calculator) to “sign on” to a classroom communication network that permits the instructor to send questions for students to work on and permits students to enter answers through their input device. Answers can then be displayed anonymously in histogram form to the class, and a permanent record of each student’s response is recorded to help evaluate progress as well as the effectiveness of instruction. This technology has been used successfully at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to teach physics to a range of students, from non-science majors to engineering and science majors (Dufresne et al., 1996; Wenk et al., 1997; Mestre et al., 1997). The technology creates an interactive learning environment in the lectures: students work collaboratively on conceptual questions, and the histogram of students’ answers is used as a visual springboard for classwide discussions when students defend the reasoning they used to arrive at their answers. This technology makes students’ thinking visible and promotes critical listening, evaluation, and argumentation in the class. The teacher is a coach, providing scaffolding where needed, tailoring “mini-lectures” to clear up points of confusion, or, if things are going well, simply moderating the discussion and allowing students to figure out things and reach consensus on their own. The technology is also a natural mechanism to support formative assessment during instruction, providing both the teacher and students with feedback on how well the class is grasping the concepts under study. The approach accommodates a wider variety of learning styles than is possible by lectures and helps to foster a community of learners focused on common objectives and goals. Science for All Children The examples above present some effective strategies for teaching and learning science for high school and college students. We drew some general principles of learning from these examples and stressed that the findings consistently point to the strong effect of knowledge structures on learning. These studies also emphasize the importance of class discussions for developing a language for talking about scientific ideas, for making students’ thinking explicit to the teacher and to the rest of the class, and for learning to develop a line of argumentation that uses what one has learned to solve problems and explain phenomena and observations. The question that immediately occurs is how to teach science to younger children or to students who are considered to be educationally “at risk.” One approach that has been especially useful in science teaching was developed with language-minority grade-school children: Chèche Konnen, which in Haitian Creole means search for knowledge (Rosebery et al., 1992). The approach stresses how discourse is a primary means for the search for knowledge and scientific sense-making. It also illustrates how scientific ideas are constructed. In this way it mirrors science, in the words of Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar (1982:111): Like other exploratory processes, [the scientific method] can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about a Possible World— a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life. The Chèche Konnen approach to teaching began by creating “communities of scientific practice” in language-minority classrooms in a few Boston and Cambridge, MA public schools. “Curriculum” emerges in these classrooms from the students’ questions and beliefs and is shaped in ongoing interactions that include both the teacher and students. Students explore their own questions, much as we described above in Barb Johnson’s class. In addition, students design studies, collect information, analyze data and construct evidence, and they then debate the conclusions that they derive from their evidence. In effect, the students build and argue about theories; see Box 7.5 . Students constructed scientific understandings through an iterative process of theory building, criticism, and refinement based on their own questions, hypotheses, and data analysis activities. Question posing, theorizing, and argumentation formed the structure of the students’ scientific activity. Within this structure, students explored the implications of the theories they held, examined underlying assumptions, formulated and tested hypotheses, developed evidence, negotiated conflicts in belief and evidence, argued alternative interpretations, provided warrants for conclusions, and so forth. The process as a whole provided a richer, more scientifically grounded experience than the conventional focus on textbooks or laboratory demonstrations. The emphasis on establishing communities of scientific practice builds on the fact that robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity, and interaction around meaningful problems and tools (Vygotsky, 1978). The teacher guides and supports students as they explore problems and define questions that are of interest to them. A community of practice also provides direct cognitive and social support for the efforts of the group’s individual members. Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process does not fall to any one individual. In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for constructing scientific meanings. In challenging one another’s thoughts and beliefs, students must be explicit about their meanings; they must negotiate conflicts in belief or evidence; and they must share and synthesize their knowledge to The seventh- and eighth-grade students in a Haitian Creole bilingual program wanted to find the “truth” of a belief held by most of their classmates: that drinking water from the fountain on the third floor, where the junior high was located, was superior to the water from the other fountains in their school. Challenged by their teacher, the students set out to determine whether they actually preferred the water from the third floor or only thought they did. As a first step, the students designed and took a blind taste test of the water from fountains on all three floors of the building. They found, to their surprise, that two-thirds of them chose the water from the first-floor fountain, even though they all said that they preferred drinking from the third-floor fountain. The students did not believe the data. They held firmly to their beliefs that the first-floor fountain was the worst because “all the little kids slobber in it.” (The first-floor fountain is located near the kindergarten and first grade classrooms.) Their teacher was also suspicious of the results because she had expected no differences among the three water fountains. These beliefs and suspicions motivated students to conduct a second taste test with a larger sample drawn from the rest of the junior high. The students decided where, when, and how to run their experiment. They discussed methodological issues: How to collect the water, how to hide the identity of the sources, and, crucially, how many fountains to include. They decided to include the same three fountains as before so that they could compare results. achieve understanding (Brown and Palincsar, 1989; Inagaki and Hatano, 1987). What do students learn from participating in a scientific sense-making community? Individual interviews with students before and after the water taste test investigation (see Box 7.5 ), first in September and again the following June, showed how the students’ knowledge and reasoning changed. In the interviews (conducted in Haitian Creole), the students were asked to think aloud about two open-ended real-world problems—pollution in the Boston Harbor and a sudden illness in an elementary school. The researchers were interested in changes in students’ conceptual knowledge about aquatic ecosystems and in students’ uses of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning (for a complete discussion, see Rosebery et al., 1992). They worried about bias in the voting process. What if some students voted more than once? Each student in the class volunteered to organize a piece of the experiment. About 40 students participated in the blind taste test. When they analyzed their data, they found support for their earlier results 88 percent of the junior high students they preferred water from the third-floor fountain, but 55 percent actually chose the water from the first floor (a result of 33 percent would be chance). Faced with this evidence, the students suspicions turned to curiosity. Why was the water from the first-floor fountain preferred? How can they determine the source of the preference? They decided to analyze the school’s water along several dimensions, among them acidity, salinity, temperature and bacteria. They found that all the fountains had unacceptably high levels of bacteria. In fact, the first-floor fountain (the one most preferred) had the highest bacterial count. They also found that the water from the first-floor fountain was 20 degrees (Fahrenheit) colder than the water from fountains on the other floors. Based on their findings, they concluded that temperature was probably a deciding factor in taste preference. They hypothesized that the water was naturally cooled as it sat in the city’s underground pipes during the winter months (the study was conducted in February) and warmed as it flowed from the basement to the third floor. Conceptual Knowledge Not surprisingly, the students knew more about water pollution and aquatic ecosystems in June than they did in September. They were also able to use this knowledge generatively. One student explained how she would clean the water in Boston Harbor (Rosebery et al., 1992:86). Like you look for the things, take the garbage out of the water, you put a screen to block all the paper and stuff, then you clean the water; you put chemical products in it to clean the water, and you’d take all the microscopic life out. Chlorine and alum, you put in the water. They’d gather the little stuff, the little stuff would stick to the chemical products, and they would clean the water. Note that this explanation contains misconceptions. By confusing the cleaning of drinking water with the cleaning of sea water, the student suggests adding chemicals to take all microscopic life from the water (good for drinking water, but bad for the ecosystem of Boston Harbor). This example illustrates the difficulties in transferring knowledge appropriately from one context to another (see Chapter 3 ). Despite these shortcomings, it is clear that this student is starting on the path to scientific thinking, leaving behind the more superficial “I’d take all the bad stuff out of the water” type of explanation. It is also clear that by making the student’s thinking visible, the teacher is in an excellent position to refine her (and perhaps the class’s) understanding. Scientific Thinking Striking changes appeared in students’ scientific reasoning. In September, there were three ways in which the students showed little familiarity with scientific forms of reasoning. First, the students did not understand the function of hypotheses or experiments in scientific inquiry. When asked for their ideas about what could be making the children sick, the students tended, with few exceptions, to respond with short, unelaborated, often untestable “hypotheses” that simply restated the phenomena described in the problem: “That’s a thing…. Ah, I could say a person, some person that gave them something…. Anything, like give poison to make his stomach hurt” (Rosebery et al., 1992:81). Second, the students conceptualized evidence as information they already knew, either through personal experience or second-hand sources, rather than data produced through experimentation or observation. When asked to generate an experiment to justify an hypothesis—“How would you find out?” —they typically offered declarations: “Because the garbage is a poison for them…. The garbage made the fish die” (Rosebery et al., 1992:78). Third, the students interpreted an elicitation for an experiment—“How would you be sure?” —as a text comprehension question for which there was a “right” answer. They frequently responded with an explanation or assertion of knowledge and consistently marked their responses as explanatory (“because”): “Because fish don’t eat garbage. They eat plants under the water” (page 78). In the June interviews, the students showed that they had become familiar with the function of hypotheses and experiments and with reasoning within larger explanatory frameworks. Elinor had developed a model of an integrated water system in which an action or event in one part of the system had consequences for other parts (Rosebery et al., 1992:87): You can’t leave [the bad stuff] on the ground. If you leave it on the ground, the water that, the earth has water underground, it will still spoil the water underground. Or when it rains it will just take it and, when it rains, the water runs, it will take it and leave it in the river, in where the water goes in. Those things, poison things, you aren’t supposed to leave it on the ground. In June, the students no longer invoked anonymous agents, but put forward chains of hypotheses to explain phenomena, such as why children were getting sick (page 88): Like, you could test what the kids ate and, like, test the water, too; it could be the water that isn’t good, that has microbes, that might have microscopic animals in it to make them sick. The June interviews also showed that students had begun to develop a sense of the function and form of experimentation. They no longer depended on personal experience as evidence, but proposed experiments to test specific hypotheses. In response to a question about sick fish, Laure clearly understands how to find a scientific answer (page 91): I’d put a fish in fresh water and one fish in a water full of garbage. I’d give the fresh water fish food to eat and the other one in the nasty water, I’d give it food to eat to see if the fresh water, if the one in the fresh water would die with the food I gave it, if the one in the dirty water would die with the food I gave it…. I would give them the same food to see if the things they eat in the water and the things I give them now, which will make them healthy and which wouldn’t make them healthy. Teaching and learning in science have been influenced very directly by research studies on expertise (see Chapter 2 ). The examples discussed in this chapter focus on two areas of science teaching: physics and junior high school biology. Several of the teaching strategies illustrated ways to help students think about the general principles or “big” ideas in physics before jumping to formulas and equations. Others illustrate ways to help students engage in deliberate practice (see Chapter 3 ) and to monitor their progress. Learning the strategies for scientific thinking have another objective: to develop thinking acumen needed to promote conceptual change. Often, the barrier to achieving insights to new solutions is rooted in a fundamental misconception about the subject matter. One strategy for helping students in physics begins with an “anchoring intuition” about a phenomenon and then gradually bridging it to related phenomena that are less intuitive to the student but involve the same physics principles. Another strategy involves the use of interactive lecture demonstrations to encourage students to make predictions, consider feedback, and then reconceptualize phenomena. The example of Chèche Konnen demonstrates the power of a sense-making approach to science learning that builds on the knowledge that students bring with them to school from their home cultures, including their familiar discourse practices. Students learned to think, talk, and act scientifically, and their first and second languages mediated their learning in power- ful ways. Using Haitian Creole, they designed their studies, interpreted data, and argued theories; using English, they collected data from their mainstream peers, read standards to interpret their scientific test results, reported their findings, and consulted with experts at the local water treatment facility. Outstanding teaching requires teachers to have a deep understanding of the subject matter and its structure, as well as an equally thorough understanding of the kinds of teaching activities that help students understand the subject matter in order to be capable of asking probing questions. Numerous studies demonstrate that the curriculum and its tools, including textbooks, need to be dissected and discussed in the larger contexts and framework of a discipline. In order to be able to provide such guidance, teachers themselves need a thorough understanding of the subject domain and the epistemology that guides the discipline (for history, see Wineburg and Wilson, 1988; for math and English, see Ball, 1993; Grossman et al., 1989; for science, see Rosebery et al., 1992). The examples in this chapter illustrate the principles for the design of learning environments that were discussed in Chapter 6 : they are learner, knowledge, assessment, and community centered. They are learner centered in the sense that teachers build on the knowledge students bring to the learning situation. They are knowledge centered in the sense that the teachers attempt to help students develop an organized understanding of important concepts in each discipline. They are assessment centered in the sense that the teachers attempt to make students’ thinking visible so that ideas can be discussed and clarified, such as having students (1) present their arguments in debates, (2) discuss their solutions to problems at a qualitative level, and (3) make predictions about various phenomena. They are community centered in the sense that the teachers establish classroom norms that learning with understanding is valued and students feel free to explore what they do not understand. These examples illustrate the importance of pedagogical content knowledge to guide teachers. Expert teachers have a firm understanding of their respective disciplines, knowledge of the conceptual barriers that students face in learning about the discipline, and knowledge of effective strategies for working with students. Teachers’ knowledge of their disciplines provides a cognitive roadmap to guide their assignments to students, to gauge student progress, and to support the questions students ask. The teachers focus on understanding rather than memorization and routine procedures to follow, and they engage students in activities that help students reflect on their own learning and understanding. The interplay between content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge illustrated in this chapter contradicts a commonly held misconception about teaching—that effective teaching consists of a set of general teaching strategies that apply to all content areas. This notion is erroneous, just as is the idea that expertise in a discipline is a general set of problem-solving skills that lack a content knowledge base to support them (see Chapter 2 ). The outcomes of new approaches to teaching as reflected in the results of summative assessments are encouraging. Studies of students’ discussions in classrooms indicate that they learn to use the tools of systematic inquiry to think historically, mathematically, and scientifically. How these kinds of teaching strategies reveal themselves on typical standardized tests is another matter. In some cases there is evidence that teaching for understanding can increase scores on standardized measures (e.g., Resnick et al., 1991); in other cases, scores on standardized tests are unaffected, but the students show sizable advantages on assessments that are sensitive to their comprehension and understanding rather than reflecting sheer memorization (e.g., Carpenter et al., 1996; Secules et al., 1997). It is noteworthy that none of the teachers discussed in this chapter felt that he or she was finished learning. Many discussed their work as involving a lifelong and continuing struggle to understand and improve. What opportunities do teachers have to improve their practice? The next chapter explores teachers’ chances to improve and advance their knowledge in order to function as effective professionals. First released in the Spring of 1999, How People Learn has been expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning. Like the original edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods—to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system. Topics include: How learning actually changes the physical structure of the brain. How existing knowledge affects what people notice and how they learn. What the thought processes of experts tell us about how to teach. The amazing learning potential of infants. The relationship of classroom learning and everyday settings of community and workplace. Learning needs and opportunities for teachers. A realistic look at the role of technology in education. READ FREE ONLINE Welcome to OpenBook! You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website. Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features? Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name. ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one. Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book. Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text. To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter . Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email. View our suggested citation for this chapter. Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available. Get Email Updates Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released. Reflective Essay on Learning and Teaching October 2019 Discover the world's research 25+ million members 160+ million publication pages 2.3+ billion citations Susulawati Susilawati Vachira Jantarach Shenggao Wang Thomas J. Shuell D W Johnson R T Johnson F C Lunenburg Recruit researchers Join for free Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up Classroom Q&A With larry ferlazzo. In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog. Four Strategies for Effective Writing Instruction Share article (This is the first post in a two-part series.) The new question-of-the-week is: What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing? Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike. The topic is no stranger to this column—you can see many previous related posts at Writing Instruction . But I don’t think any of us can get too much good instructional advice in this area. Today, Jenny Vo, Michele Morgan, and Joy Hamm share wisdom gained from their teaching experience. Before I turn over the column to them, though, I’d like to share my favorite tool(s). Graphic organizers, including writing frames (which are basically more expansive sentence starters) and writing structures (which function more as guides and less as “fill-in-the-blanks”) are critical elements of my writing instruction. You can see an example of how I incorporate them in my seven-week story-writing unit and in the adaptations I made in it for concurrent teaching. You might also be interested in The Best Scaffolded Writing Frames For Students . Now, to today’s guests: ‘Shared Writing’ Jenny Vo earned her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.Ed. in educational leadership from Lamar University. She has worked with English-learners during all of her 24 years in education and is currently an ESL ISST in Katy ISD in Katy, Texas. Jenny is the president-elect of TexTESOL IV and works to advocate for all ELs: The single most effective instructional strategy that I have used to teach writing is shared writing. Shared writing is when the teacher and students write collaboratively. In shared writing, the teacher is the primary holder of the pen, even though the process is a collaborative one. The teacher serves as the scribe, while also questioning and prompting the students. The students engage in discussions with the teacher and their peers on what should be included in the text. Shared writing can be done with the whole class or as a small-group activity. There are two reasons why I love using shared writing. One, it is a great opportunity for the teacher to model the structures and functions of different types of writing while also weaving in lessons on spelling, punctuation, and grammar. It is a perfect activity to do at the beginning of the unit for a new genre. Use shared writing to introduce the students to the purpose of the genre. Model the writing process from beginning to end, taking the students from idea generation to planning to drafting to revising to publishing. As you are writing, make sure you refrain from making errors, as you want your finished product to serve as a high-quality model for the students to refer back to as they write independently. Another reason why I love using shared writing is that it connects the writing process with oral language. As the students co-construct the writing piece with the teacher, they are orally expressing their ideas and listening to the ideas of their classmates. It gives them the opportunity to practice rehearsing what they are going to say before it is written down on paper. Shared writing gives the teacher many opportunities to encourage their quieter or more reluctant students to engage in the discussion with the types of questions the teacher asks. Writing well is a skill that is developed over time with much practice. Shared writing allows students to engage in the writing process while observing the construction of a high-quality sample. It is a very effective instructional strategy used to teach writing. ‘Four Square’ Michele Morgan has been writing IEPs and behavior plans to help students be more successful for 17 years. She is a national-board-certified teacher, Utah Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, and a special education elementary new-teacher specialist with the Granite school district. Follow her @MicheleTMorgan1: For many students, writing is the most dreaded part of the school day. Writing involves many complex processes that students have to engage in before they produce a product—they must determine what they will write about, they must organize their thoughts into a logical sequence, and they must do the actual writing, whether on a computer or by hand. Still they are not done—they must edit their writing and revise mistakes. With all of that, it’s no wonder that students struggle with writing assignments. In my years working with elementary special education students, I have found that writing is the most difficult subject to teach. Not only do my students struggle with the writing process, but they often have the added difficulties of not knowing how to spell words and not understanding how to use punctuation correctly. That is why the single most effective strategy I use when teaching writing is the Four Square graphic organizer. The Four Square instructional strategy was developed in 1999 by Judith S. Gould and Evan Jay Gould. When I first started teaching, a colleague allowed me to borrow the Goulds’ book about using the Four Square method, and I have used it ever since. The Four Square is a graphic organizer that students can make themselves when given a blank sheet of paper. They fold it into four squares and draw a box in the middle of the page. The genius of this instructional strategy is that it can be used by any student, in any grade level, for any writing assignment. These are some of the ways I have used this strategy successfully with my students: * Writing sentences: Students can write the topic for the sentence in the middle box, and in each square, they can draw pictures of details they want to add to their writing. * Writing paragraphs: Students write the topic sentence in the middle box. They write a sentence containing a supporting detail in three of the squares and they write a concluding sentence in the last square. * Writing short essays: Students write what information goes in the topic paragraph in the middle box, then list details to include in supporting paragraphs in the squares. When I gave students writing assignments, the first thing I had them do was create a Four Square. We did this so often that it became automatic. After filling in the Four Square, they wrote rough drafts by copying their work off of the graphic organizer and into the correct format, either on lined paper or in a Word document. This worked for all of my special education students! I was able to modify tasks using the Four Square so that all of my students could participate, regardless of their disabilities. Even if they did not know what to write about, they knew how to start the assignment (which is often the hardest part of getting it done!) and they grew to be more confident in their writing abilities. In addition, when it was time to take the high-stakes state writing tests at the end of the year, this was a strategy my students could use to help them do well on the tests. I was able to give them a sheet of blank paper, and they knew what to do with it. I have used many different curriculum materials and programs to teach writing in the last 16 years, but the Four Square is the one strategy that I have used with every writing assignment, no matter the grade level, because it is so effective. ‘Swift Structures’ Joy Hamm has taught 11 years in a variety of English-language settings, ranging from kindergarten to adult learners. The last few years working with middle and high school Newcomers and completing her M.Ed in TESOL have fostered stronger advocacy in her district and beyond: A majority of secondary content assessments include open-ended essay questions. Many students falter (not just ELs) because they are unaware of how to quickly organize their thoughts into a cohesive argument. In fact, the WIDA CAN DO Descriptors list level 5 writing proficiency as “organizing details logically and cohesively.” Thus, the most effective cross-curricular secondary writing strategy I use with my intermediate LTELs (long-term English-learners) is what I call “Swift Structures.” This term simply means reading a prompt across any content area and quickly jotting down an outline to organize a strong response. To implement Swift Structures, begin by displaying a prompt and modeling how to swiftly create a bubble map or outline beginning with a thesis/opinion, then connecting the three main topics, which are each supported by at least three details. Emphasize this is NOT the time for complete sentences, just bulleted words or phrases. Once the outline is completed, show your ELs how easy it is to plug in transitions, expand the bullets into detailed sentences, and add a brief introduction and conclusion. After modeling and guided practice, set a 5-10 minute timer and have students practice independently. Swift Structures is one of my weekly bell ringers, so students build confidence and skill over time. It is best to start with easy prompts where students have preformed opinions and knowledge in order to focus their attention on the thesis-topics-supporting-details outline, not struggling with the rigor of a content prompt. Here is one easy prompt example: “Should students be allowed to use their cellphones in class?” Swift Structure outline: Thesis - Students should be allowed to use cellphones because (1) higher engagement (2) learning tools/apps (3) gain 21st-century skills Topic 1. Cellphones create higher engagement in students... Details A. interactive (Flipgrid, Kahoot) B. less tempted by distractions C. teaches responsibility Topic 2. Furthermore,...access to learning tools... A. Google Translate description B. language practice (Duolingo) C. content tutorials (Kahn Academy) Topic 3. In addition,...practice 21st-century skills… Details A. prep for workforce B. access to information C. time-management support This bare-bones outline is like the frame of a house. Get the structure right, and it’s easier to fill in the interior decorating (style, grammar), roof (introduction) and driveway (conclusion). Without the frame, the roof and walls will fall apart, and the reader is left confused by circuitous rubble. Once LTELs have mastered creating simple Swift Structures in less than 10 minutes, it is time to introduce complex questions similar to prompts found on content assessments or essays. Students need to gain assurance that they can quickly and logically explain and justify their opinions on multiple content essays without freezing under pressure. Thanks to Jenny, Michele, and Joy for their contributions! 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The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications. Sign Up for EdWeek Update Edweek top school jobs. Sign Up & Sign In Teaching & Instructional Methodology Essay To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block As a source of information (ensure proper referencing) As a template for you assignment Introduction Student categories, methodologies. Instructional Methodology has the same meaning as methods of teaching. This entails the various ways through which information is presented to the student. There exist two broad categories of Instructional Methodology. These include the teacher centered approach and student centered approach. The teacher centered method involves teaching, demonstration and lecture discussions. In these methods the teacher only directs and leaves the part of understanding to the student. Learner centered approach on the other hand entails instructions in which the lecturer only facilitates the learning process while the learner does enjoy constructing their understandings and insights. The styles that are common in this are: corporate learning, graphical discussions and analysis, discussion between student, role plays, simulation and story telling. All the above methods are good and are applicable to all kinds of students in various grades of learning. All teachers will agree with the fact that no one specific style of teaching is the best. This is because students have different needs and are in various classes. In a school, different students require different treatments as per their individual needs. To begin with, schools have various classes or grades. A lower grade student requires a slow and gradual teaching method. This however advances as the student’s grade increases. Student categories are further divided into fast and slow learners. Those with disabilities are also given special treatment for example: blind students need Braille and audio systems. Deaf students require sign charts and sign instructors. Common teaching methods are grouped into two. All these are delivery methods like lectures, direct instructions, modeling, guided practice, corporate groups among others (Kroeger A. 2003). CIAI continuum is a rather practical unit. The best teaching style for it is student focused learning. This is important because of the many modeling, mathematical problems and science practicals that the unit contains. CIAI continuum has a lot of science content. Science generally is best understood through involving the students. This curriculum involves mathematics, technology and science. Student Focused Learning This method boosts student understanding of the concept. The work of the teacher is mainly to facilitate the process while learners construct their own understanding. This method entails many practices that students will find applicable. These include discussions, corporative learning, graphical analysis and incorporation of role plays to boost understanding. Simulation and modeling is another stage in student centered learning. Simulation is a case where the student is put in real situation without taking risk. As observed, CIAI as a science unit has many practical and mathematical problems to solve. (Kroeger A. 2003). This makes group discussion a very necessary tool for student success. Students are further motivated to do a lot more learning because nothing is destroyed in the process of creating many models of the real technology. All these learning processes are overseen by the teacher. The lecturers work is to introduce the concept in theory form, give a few examples then proceed to involve students in creating solutions for themselves. Fast learning students find this method useful since they develop great understanding when involved in sharing ideas. Slow learners also benefit from combined group discussion class and also when they are involved in leading teams in class. Class assessment is even easy and new concepts are learned in every circle of assessment. Student centered method has an advantage of pulling all ideas and experiences together and to help the whole class progress as a block. Even though many teaching methodologies exist, teachers should always evaluate their environment and student types that they have. This will in turn help them to choose the best methodology. Student centered method is good since it helps the student to arrive at the understanding of the concepts. Many teachers of CIAI continuum should embrace this method because it benefits all students across the board. Kroeger A. (2003). Teaching methods. New York: Henn Inc. Lindsay (2000). Handling of special students in a class. London: Oxford Publishers. Should Professors Be Allowed to Advocate Their Views on Political or Social Issues in the Classroom? Workshop Model: Term Definition Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom Continuum The Instructional Power of Games-based learning and simulations in education Instructional Practices and Educational Stakeholders Observational Approaches in Childhood Education Teaching Strategies: The Art and Science of Teaching Early Childhood Development: Teacher’s Responsibilities Positive Reinforcing in Education Teaching Length Measurement Aspects Chicago (A-D) Chicago (N-B) IvyPanda. (2021, October 11). Teaching & Instructional Methodology. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-amp-instructional-methodology/ "Teaching & Instructional Methodology." IvyPanda , 11 Oct. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-amp-instructional-methodology/. IvyPanda . (2021) 'Teaching & Instructional Methodology'. 11 October. IvyPanda . 2021. "Teaching & Instructional Methodology." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-amp-instructional-methodology/. 1. IvyPanda . "Teaching & Instructional Methodology." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-amp-instructional-methodology/. Bibliography IvyPanda . "Teaching & Instructional Methodology." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/teaching-amp-instructional-methodology/. Teaching & learning    The Complete List of Teaching Methods and Strategies Apply as a tutor to teach students online from anywhere in the world. The complete list of teaching methods and strategies. Chloe Daniel Published On: September 11 ,2021 Teachers are the main asset of a country because they are nation builders. Teachers and education systems play a vital role in building an individual’s character, and great teachers have set examples of changing their student’s lives. Therefore, one country should invest more in its educational institutes and teachers to succeed. You can find an endless amount of stories about how appropriate teaching methods and strategies have brought remarkable changes in a student’s life. The art of teaching matters a lot. To be a successful teacher, one should know all the possible teaching methods and strategies and use them correctly because students learn better when their teacher knows which teaching method will engage the students more. Bertrand Russell has summed up the whole process in his quote as: ‘More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.’ After reading this blog, you will understand the difference between teaching methods and strategies, different teaching methodologies and strategies, their advantages and disadvantages, and how a teacher should prepare himself before the class lecture. So let’s get started. Difference between teaching methods and strategies Methods and strategies are two different terms, but both are essential to make a class full of students of different caliber and understand the same subject. The method is a process, procedure, or way something is done or implementing a plan. While on the other hand, strategy is the goal, set of actions, or plans to achieve one aim or something. Let me clarify it with an example: strategy is how a teacher makes a whole year’s plan to complete a specific book or syllabus, and the method is how that teacher delivered the lecture or which way the teacher selects to do a task. And there is a list of teaching methods and strategies acquired by the teachers or instructors that you will read below. The ideal teaching method is the one in which the learning of students occurs the most. Teaching and learning are considered the two sides of a coin, and for completing the teaching side, teachers should consider all the teaching strategies and methods. Related Read:   Hacks to Help Students Beat Procrastination Types of teaching methods The way of teaching is categorized into different types of teaching methods adopted by the teachers, and most of them are mentioned below: Teacher centered method It is the method where the teacher is the only expert or an authority figure for the learners or students. They rely on the expert and receive knowledge to achieve positive grades in the end exams or assessments. The lecture method is used in the teacher-centered method, and it requires very little involvement of students or learners during the teaching process. It is also called a closed-ended method if the involvement of learners or students is zero. Learner-centered method In this teaching method, the teachers play a dual role. They act as learners and teachers; they learn new things every day while delivering the lecture. The learner-centered method is beneficial for both teacher and the student. The best way to implement this method is to follow the class’s discussion, inquiry-based, or discovery strategies. Content-focused methods Among different teaching methodologies, the teacher can use the content-focused method when the content, set of information, or skill taught by the teachers or experts cannot be changed or altered. It means the content to be taught is so important or unimpeachable that both the learner and the teacher have to fit in the subject without being critical about the content. Interactive or participative method It is the type of learning method that is considered beneficial for both the learners and the teachers. The teacher’s responsibility is to explain the key points or the importance of following the interactive or participating method during class in general so that students may not resist following it. Many strategies are used in this teaching method like writing exercises, think-pair-share, debate, problem-based learning, or situation analysis. The lecture method One of the most commonly used formal or semiformal teaching methods is the lecture method. Teachers mostly use this method for a large class. In this method, the teachers pick a topic and explain its basic definitions, facts, events, principles and clarify the whole point of the subject or topic with relevant examples and problems. The students are allowed to take notes and ask questions at the end of a lecture, and the master of the subject has to answer them all. Thus, in this method, a teacher is the main role model for the large class, and it has a strong mastery of that specific subject. The discussion method The discussion method can only be followed when the teacher is highly skilled and disciplined. Because in this two-way communication method, students are prepared to listen to their fellow’s point of view and exchange ideas. The role of a teacher is to introduce disciplined group discussion techniques among students and clear the concept of the topic meanwhile. This method is mainly used to utilize the knowledge, experience, and creativity of each student. When the whole discussion ends, the teacher corrects the mistakes and clears the debatable concepts. The study assignment method It is one of those teaching methods that promote active learning. In this method, the teacher or an instructor assigns a task to students before the class. It can be a book or research paper reading, project analysis, or any relevant material review. This method enhances the research skill abilities of students, and the discussion part in class makes the teacher and students know different points of view of each other. The tutorial method It is a teaching method that can only be used when a teacher or an instructor teaches one student and works directly. This method is also known as  online tutoring , and it demands more money and time, unlike other teaching methods. Those who follow such methods know the safety and active participation of both learner and the reader. The tutorial teaching methods are user-friendly. The students can skip or restart the lesson any time, leave the tutorial in between, or get access to it when they feel like learning or motivated. Mostly these are the recorded lectures. The seminar method The seminar method is one of the costly teaching methods used by the experts or teachers to guide or educate the students about a certain topic or project. In this method, the instructors make groups of students work on their projects and then ask them to exchange the information or techniques used while completing the project. Highly professional; or competent teachers must arrange a seminar method and then evaluate the study, research paper, or project. The demonstration method The demonstration method is the kind of teaching method in which the teacher has to perform something or an operation to make its learner understand deeply and clearly. It can be the functioning of a tool or equipment, teaching troubleshooting, performing a certain job or an operation or anything. This teaching method can only be proposed when the instructor explains the why, how, where, what, and when. If the highly competent teacher will choose the method and rehearse well before teaching, it will save time, and the clarity of operation will help the students perform right. The demonstration teaching method is mostly used in laboratories. Direct teaching The direct teaching method is commonly used in all institutions as it makes the teacher or an instructor directly communicate with their student within the school or institution premises. This method lessens the communication barrier between students and the teacher. It focuses on the immediate teaching process, and the students are allowed to ask questions or give suggestions in between, with certain time limitations. Online teaching method One of the most flexible teaching methods is the  online teaching  method. The teacher and the learner can offer a flexible timescale, which is unrestricted to time and place. Both can communicate with each other via email or any other digital support. The access to recorded lectures after the online session helps the students to listen to them later and understand better. The advancement of technology has turned learners into online learning in the last few decades. Online and private tutors  have their way of teaching concepts within a certain time limit. Students with jobs mostly use this teaching method to learn during their free time and achieve their desired goals without moving places. Independent study or practice Some teachers or an instructor follow the independent study or practice teaching method because this improves the  self-learning  or self-study abilities of the students. In such methods, teachers mostly assign the same task to each student to practice or study it from home on their own, and then the other day, teachers evaluate the task and solve the students’ queries. Types of teaching strategies Before moving to the teaching strategies, I would like to add a quote from Benjamin Franklin, which says: ‘Tell me and I forgot. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ And this is how the teaching strategies work on students. Classroom management The very first strategy to engage all the students of a class is its management. The etiquette of a class is matters, and so does the management of the whole class. If you start listing down the classroom management strategies, the list will go on because it has its own set of techniques and different strategies to keep the class managed. Before moving to the teaching method, the teacher or an instructor should acknowledge the whole class management rules in dos and don’ts. Develop an atmosphere of learning The atmosphere of learning matters the most because no matter how well the teacher or an instructor delivers the lecture, it’s futile if the atmosphere does not support that all students are willing to learn or excited to start the new chapter or topic. So, to develop a learning atmosphere, the expert should get the whole class’s attention and inform them of the facts and purpose of reading the lecture. The more they will show interest in learning a subject, the more they will learn. Celebrate achievements Teachers should assign certain achievement levels with a reward to keep the whole class motivated to learn and do better. And the reward could be anything like the winning student will display their work in the school assembly or get to read the whole chapter and get candy from their teacher in return. The celebration can be small or big, it doesn’t matter, but the outcomes of celebrating success will make huge positive differences in a student’s life. This teaching strategy is mostly used by the primary or secondary level student teachers to motivate and build students’ confidence. Teachers who make use of this strategy more often prepare the future winners. There is no failure. Only feedback. – Robert Allen Flexible seating The appropriate seating in the classroom that keeps the students comfortable is the utmost teaching strategy. Here the flexible seating of both the teacher and the learner matters. Institutions of all levels should follow many  flexible seating ideas . Because if the students are sitting uncomfortably, then they will not be able to focus on the lecture. It is more of an institution’s duty to take care of students’ sitting comfort and posture because students spend a lot of their day at schools or colleges. Active learning Active learning strategy is one of those strategies that not only help the students but the teachers too. The discussion break between the lecture and asking students to submit the clearest point after the lecture keeps the whole class attentive, and it’s called active learning. Their participation makes the teacher understand which part of the lecture has gotten more attention. Such smart tactics or quick questions in between lectures make the student learn better and faster. Focus on student’s interests When teachers focus on a student’s interests, it helps them understand the nature of their students way better, and ultimately, they follow the teaching method that can be more effective. And the constructive feedback on what students have done and what they have not mastered helped them determine how they could improve that mastery. This strategy makes the bond of student and teacher strong and improves the learning environment. ‘There is no failure. Only feedback. ’–Robert Allen Differentiated instruction One of the most useful teaching strategies is differentiated instruction. In this strategy, the teacher assigns tasks to each student based on abilities and interests. Doing so the students who are struggling will get the proper support or help, and the students with academic skills or capabilities will be assigned tasks that match their caliber. It ensures the dedicated behavior of teachers after knowing everyone’s learning gaps, and no student remains left behind. Personalized learning Teachers should focus on personalized learning strategy a bit too much. Students should review their content once learned. Sometimes, students’ queries remain unanswered and make all the students master their studies. Teachers should assign tasks to each individual according to their learning capability and style. This teaching strategy will help students develop reliability, motivation, self-learning, self-advocacy, and self-reflective abilities. Peer teaching method The teacher should follow the peer teaching strategy sometimes. It is being said that ‘to teach is to learn twice,’ which is the same case with this strategy. Peer teaching has its advantages and disadvantages, but it is worth pursuing a disciplined class atmosphere as it grows the student’s confidence and enhances communication skills. “The best answer to the question, ‘what is the most effective teaching method?’ depends on the goal, the student, the content, and the teacher. But the next best answer is, ‘Students teaching other students’.” Wilbert J. MacKeachie Response to intervention RTI RTI, or Response to intervention, is one of the general teaching strategies that should be considered from day one of teaching. This strategy is to find out the learning and behavior needs of the students. Teachers should start the intervention process early in each class because the earlier the teacher understands the RTI strategies, the easier it will be to follow a better teaching method. Project-based learning Experienced teachers agree on the importance of getting students to recap the information learned during the lesson. And when it comes to project-based learning, it is important to educate students about what they need to learn to complete the assigned project. It is also crucial to get them to engage with the content actively. So, to foster their engagement, it is important to promote project-based learning in groups. Teachers should make the groups of students quite carefully and selectively as each student’s learning style and ability vary. Classroom technology Classroom technology is the best teaching strategy a teacher can use to keep the whole class engaged. This strategy can be used at any level or year of education because students get excited when they have to experience something new for the first time. Video lessons, virtual trips in geography or history class, animations to help kids learn basic skills, and many more adapt to this teaching strategy. Moreover, smart whiteboards, projectors should be used in classrooms. Blended teaching and learning In this modern era, teachers should go for a blended teaching strategy. It is a blend of  online and offline teaching  and uses digital strategies. Some students hesitate to speak up in the class, so blended learning works best for them. They contribute to an online class. Teachers like the blended teaching and learning strategy because it ensures that all voices are heard. Humor in class The use of humor should be one of the important teaching strategies, as dry lectures make the students feel bored and tiring and ultimately makes them lose interest. In such cases, a pinch of humor will not harm anyone. But teachers should be smart enough to quickly change the atmosphere of class back to lessons from fun. A comfortable and cozy class environment captures learners’ attention and results in better understanding and active learning. Inquiry-based teaching Interactive teaching enables students to be instructed by actively involving them in their learning process through regular teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction. And taking some time out of the class for inquiry-based questions helps improve students’ life skills like communication and problem-solving. The quality of questions matters a lot, and a teacher should ask the students to inquire with subject-based questions or other appropriate questions. However, the inquiry-based teaching strategy has guided inquiry, structured inquiry, open inquiry, and confirmation inquiry. These all promote the use of long-term memory of both teachers and learners. Class gamification It is observed that lessons learned while playing stays long in the student’s mind. This teaching strategy keeps the students more engaged and active in the class. Play and learn techniques should be in each teacher’s teaching method list. Age requirement shouldn’t be the barrier because class Gamification builds and improves the essential skills. A teacher can play any games to teach the basics like mind games, math multiplication games, problem-solving games, language learning games like  ESL games , and many more. Gamification  has a future in education, and teachers or instructors should effectively use this strategy. Convergent and divergent thinking One of the main teaching strategies that all teachers should be aware of is two thinking methods: convergent thinking methods and divergent thinking methods. Teachers should educate their students about its difference as convergent thinking means there are multiple ways to reach one solution. On the other hand, the divergent teaching method makes the students learn and understand the base concepts to solve the given question or problem. If the teachers and students know these differences, learning will be easier and better. Problem-based learning One of the essential teaching strategies a teacher or an instructor should follow is problem-based learning. They should prepare a list of problem-based open-ended questions before a class and ask the class to solve them in groups or teams. This technique helps in developing and improving the transferable and teamwork skills of students, respectively. Media literacy Students need to be educated about all the things happening around them. Like nowadays, students are very active on social media and get influenced quite easily. It’s the responsibility of the teachers to guide their students and understand what they are consuming from these platforms. Media literacy lets the students critically think and talk about the changes and innovations. Teachers should follow  media literacy activities  to bring out the creative side of students. Visualization Introducing visualization in class is the most advanced teaching strategy that institutions and teachers can use to make the students understand the textbook content with visuals and the real world. It lets the students experience the world while sitting in their classrooms. But again, it is just another strategy to keep the class engaged. The teacher has to play the main role, Bill Gates has said it too: “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids to work together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” Cooperative learning Teachers should work on cooperative learning strategies in class, once a week at least. There are many ways to follow this strategy, such as solving mathematical puzzles, quick fraction questions, performing science experiments, short drama sketches, group presentations, or frequently asked question-answer sessions among students of the same class. This teaching strategy improves the verbal skills of students. Behaviour management Just like teaching methods, teachers should be acknowledged properly about the behavior management teaching strategy. Mutual respect of teachers and students is important to keep the class’s productive learning and disciplined environment. Institutions or teachers should reward students based on their behavior during class and overall interaction with their teachers and fellow mates. Teachers should be strict with this strategy because a noisy, disturbed, or undisciplined class cannot promote productive learning. Professional development Undoubtedly, teaching is a challenging job because you have to deliver the same knowledge to students with different mindsets and caliber simultaneously. It gets exhausting sometimes. To keep the teachers motivated and engaged, they should attend professional development seminars and people in the same field. These will keep the teachers updated about the new teaching tools, technologies, methods, and strategies. How teacher should prepare for a lecture Even after understanding the teaching strategies and teaching methods, teachers should prepare themselves before delivering a lecture. Just like a student rehearsing before giving a presentation. Because teachers too are presenting themselves and it is their job to keep the attention of the whole class throughout the lecture. So, to make the lecture qualitative, teachers should keep in mind that the lecture should not be too long as it exhausted the students and lost their attention. The whole theme and the purpose of studying certain topics should be explained before teaching, the teachers should use maximum examples or illustrations to make it easy to understand, usages of approaches and fluency of lecture should match with the student’s existing knowledge, so they relate to it and understand more clearly. Other than considering these points, the teacher should make notes and rehearse the follow of lecture in advance, checklist the important points, keep all the relevant textbooks, tools, or other things prepared which need to be utilized during the lecture, pick the teaching strategy or teaching method that will go with the topic. Meanwhile, the teacher should also ensure that if all the students can see or hear him clearly, he should use the entire why, how, tell, and show techniques to explain the lecture or the assigned topic. Lastly, class discipline matters a lot, and teachers should already tell the students to write down the question if any crosses their mind during the lecture, and in the last 15 minutes of discussion, they can ask freely one by one. And it is how the discipline of class and the flow of the lecture will not be disturbed. And if all the students have not got their answers due to a shortage of time or any other reason, it’s the teacher’s responsibility first to solve the queries the other day and then teach a new topic. That’s the complete preparation process of a teacher before delivering a qualitative lecture. Here we summed up the difference between teaching strategies and teaching methods that all teachers should know. Knowing these teaching methodologies and strategies will make the classrooms a more creative and dynamic place for students to get qualitative education; furthermore, if you are a teacher and learning new teaching strategies or methods from this page, then make sure to use them in your classroom. In this rapidly changing world, teachers should be given proper guidelines to transform the smart, creative, and tech knowledge into their students. And the personality of the teacher should inspire the students to learn from them and be a better addition to this world. The truth is teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions, so educational institutions should invest in providing proper guidelines on types of teaching methods and teaching strategies from time to time to keep their teachers updated to the modern world. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. Malcolm X Find Top Tutors in Your Area LATEST POST Learn Mathematics From a Private Tutor To Overcome Math Anxiety July 24 ,2024 How to Cover Syllabus Quickly Yet Effectively July 22 ,2024 8 Practical Ways to Choose Your GCSE Subjects Combine Math and Physics Tutoring For Maximum Support July 19 ,2024 Confidence and Academic Performance: What's the Link? July 18 ,2024 Top 11 Reasons Why You Should Study Math How Many IGCSE Subjects Are Required In The UAE? July 16 ,2024 What IGCSE Subjects Are Needed for Computer Science? July 15 ,2024 Proven Exam Tips to Improve Your GCSE Creative Writing The Preferable Option: Coursework vs Exams July 13 ,2024 Recent post. Communication Offer Ends in Hire an Expert Tutor in Just $9.8/hr Form Submitted Successfully No, I Don't Want to Avail This Offer Teaching as Innovation First Online: 14 August 2024 Cite this chapter John M. Carroll 2   57 Accesses Innovative teaching can be achieved in many ways—leveraging what students already do, know about, and think about; relying on student engagement, self-regulated activity, and collaborative activity; and embedding teaching discourses in the values, practices, and institutions of the domain. Teaching innovation is especially critical and appropriate in computer and information sciences: critical because of the need to enroll and graduate more students and stronger students in these areas and appropriate because these areas broadly depend upon and consist of continuous innovation. This book describes and reflects on a diverse collection of innovative teaching practices across the faculty of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Access this chapter Subscribe and save. Get 10 units per month Download Article/Chapter or eBook 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter Cancel anytime Available as PDF Read on any device Instant download Own it forever Available as EPUB and PDF Durable hardcover edition Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days Free shipping worldwide - see info Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Institutional subscriptions Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction . Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Google Scholar   Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022). Occupational outlook handbook . At http://www.bls.gov/ooh/. Accessed 11 Feb 2024. Carroll, J. M. (1990). 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Download references Acknowledgments I am grateful to my innovative teaching colleagues for encouraging the concept for this book (and its predecessor) and for working to develop and share that concept. More personally, I hope this honors the memory of my former colleague Professor Larry Spence who did more than anyone to establish the culture of innovative teaching and learning in our college. Author information Authors and affiliations. College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, PA, USA John M. Carroll You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar Corresponding author Correspondence to John M. Carroll . Editor information Editors and affiliations. College of Information Sciences and Technology, University Park, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, PA, USA Rights and permissions Reprints and permissions Copyright information © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG About this chapter Carroll, J.M. (2024). Teaching as Innovation. In: Carroll, J.M. (eds) Innovative Practices in Teaching Information Sciences and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61290-9_1 Download citation DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61290-9_1 Published : 14 August 2024 Publisher Name : Springer, Cham Print ISBN : 978-3-031-61289-3 Online ISBN : 978-3-031-61290-9 eBook Packages : Computer Science Computer Science (R0) Share this chapter Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative Publish with us Policies and ethics Find a journal Track your research 162 IMAGES Types of teaching methods, their advantages and disadvantages Interactive Methods of Teaching English Essay Example ⇉Teaching methods for diverse learners Essay Example Teaching Approaches, Methods, Techniques and Strategies Teaching Methods Pdf 85745 ≫ Research on the Use of Teaching Methods Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com COMMENTS Essay on Teaching Methods for Effective Learning Today Teaching methods are vital for everyone - we all go or went to a school where teachers try to involve each student in the learning process. Namely, this learning process is identified as effective or ineffective by means of effective or ineffective methods of teaching accordingly. Methods of teaching are one of the primary topics any student ... Teaching Methods and Their Determinants Essay Teaching Methods and Their Determinants Essay. Teaching methods can be described as learning activities that facilitate the flow of information from the teachers to the students whether verbally or through non-verbal communication. Teaching methods can widely be classified into direct and indirect instructions. Modern Teaching Methods and Learning Environment Modern Teaching Methods and Learning Environment Exploratory Essay. The success of education is attributed to the use of modern teaching methods that have been developed in the last few years. These methods include project work, providing meaningful choices for students, self-directed learning, literature-based reading, and problem-based ... Full article: Reviews of teaching methods Since our interest is the claims made in each article about the teaching method under study, the analysis concerned the abstract, results, discussion, conclusion, and implication parts of each review. Three main issues, cutting across the reviews over time, were identified: 1) the abundance of moderating factors, 2) the need for highly ... Teachings Methods in Modern Educational System Essay Get a custom essay on Teachings Methods in Modern Educational System. Many experts argue that it is necessary for teachers to use different methods of teaching in order to ensure effective presentation of curricula. The major concerns of teachings methods include ways used by learners to obtain information, how to use theoretical knowledge to ... PDF The Role of Teaching and Learning Aids/Methods in a Changing World The diverse teaching methods used in today's world provide opportunities to enrich and develop teachers. A teaching method is an effective way to organise learning and unite both the teacher's and learner's efforts. It is important that teachers are creative and professionally developed to use and combine these teaching methods. Teaching Methods and Strategies: The Complete Guide Using these different teaching methods you will engage, motivate and reach the students in your classes, whether in person or online. The Complete List of Teaching Methods Today's discussion topic: A comprehensive review of dozens of teaching methods and educational strategies. Teaching Methods Teaching methods are the broader techniques used to help students achieve learning outcomes, while activities are the different ways of implementing these methods. Teaching methods help students: master the content of the course learn how to apply the content in particular contexts Instructors ... Full article: The quest for better teaching The quest to improve teaching on a wide scale is an enduring challenge globally. Yet demonstrable improvement in teaching quality is both elusive and slow. In this essay, I explore some of the complexities that contribute to the slow pace of change, including: the slippage between teachers and teaching as the object of improvement; the poorly ... Teaching Methods Essays: Examples, Topics, & Outlines View our collection of teaching methods essays. Find inspiration for topics, titles, outlines, & craft impactful teaching methods papers. Read our teaching methods papers today! Teaching Styles: Different Teaching Methods & Strategies List of effective teaching styles: Authority, Demonstrator, Facilitator, Developer, Hybrid — examples of the best teaching methods for diverse learners. Teaching Statements A Teaching Statement is a purposeful and reflective essay about the author's teaching beliefs and practices. It is an individual narrative that includes not only one's beliefs about the teaching and learning process, but also concrete examples of the ways in which he or she enacts these beliefs in the classroom. Teaching method A teaching method is a set of principles and methods used by teachers to enable student learning. These strategies are determined partly by the subject matter to be taught, partly by the relative expertise of the learners, and partly by constraints caused by the learning environment. [ 1] For a particular teaching method to be appropriate and ... Effective Teaching: Examples in History, Mathematics, and Science We now move to a more detailed exploration of teaching and learning in three disciplines: history, mathematics, and science. We chose these three areas in order to focus on the similarities and differences of disciplines that use different methods of inquiry and analysis. Reflective Essay on Learning and Teaching In light of the afore-mentioned, this reflective essay deals with some of my personal experiences in learning and teaching from my secondary years to my tertiary years and beyond. Four Strategies for Effective Writing Instruction What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing? Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike. Teaching Methods in the Classroom There is a relationship between applying a wide range of teaching strategies and effective learning in the classroom. Apart from having different teaching strategies, there are also different learning styles which include Accomodators, Assimilators, Convergers and Divergers. Most students learn by adopting a mixture of these learning styles. Teaching & Instructional Methodology These include the teacher centered approach and student centered approach. Get a custom essay on Teaching & Instructional Methodology 187 writers online Learn More The teacher centered method involves teaching, demonstration and lecture discussions. In these methods the teacher only directs and leaves the part of understanding to the student. 9 Teaching Methods To Promote Success in the Classroom Learn about what teaching methods are, nine types of teaching methods, benefits of using them in the classroom and tips for using these methods effectively. The Complete List of Teaching Methods and Strategies Here is a complete list of teaching methods are strategies. Knowledge of both is essential to build a career in the teaching field. Learn this all and how to prepare for a lecture. Teaching as Innovation Teaching may be the original and most important innovation in human history. Sharing elements of knowledge and skill with others, guiding and inspiring them to assimilate and make sense, to practice and apply, to appropriate and re-appropriate, and to criticize, reinterpret, and extend, is the very essence of human progress and essential to human existence. Methods Of Teaching English English Language Essay Language teaching methods are dependent on and influenced by different theories of language and language learning. The history of language teaching puts forward different kinds of methods. These methods are adopted by different people in different situations according to the need of the learners. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis