Strategies of Teaching Effectively

Effective teaching strategies are one of the cornerstones of classroom success.

You need to put in place, first of all, a good classroom management plan followed by a
sound behaviour management plan but once they are in place and you're comfortable with
them you're ready for the 'main act', namely teaching your classes.

There are lots of different strategies for effective teaching, inlcuding everything from
tried and tested direct instruction to cooperative learning and accelerated learning.

Effective teaching is a complex mix of the teacher performing the role of what Hattie calls
the 'activator', taking direct charge of lessons and leading the learning, being the 'sage on
the stage', and sometimes performing the role of 'facilitator', setting the scene and
handing the reins to the students, being 'the guide at the side.'

But no matter what methods and techniques you use, effective teaching techniques all
have the same 'ingredients' in common.

Teaching is like baking a cake

When I'm coaching, mentoring or training colleagues I often use the metaphor of 'baking a
cake' to illustrate the process of developing effective teaching strategies.

The base layer of the 'cake' consists of the four 'Ps':

Partnership Purpose Process Product

All teaching involves a partnership between teacher and student. The teacher can't do it
without the students and it's best if teachers think of doing it with the students rather
than doing it to them.

Once the partnership is established, all effective teaching has a clear purpose - everyone
needs to know what teaching this information aims to achieve.

The process is the means by which teachers enable students to learn and the product is
the final outcome of the teaching and learning process.

This all might seem fairly obvious, yet in the many lessons I've observed, those that failed
most dramatically usually failed because of deficiencies at this basic level of thinking.

The next level of the effective teaching strategies 'cake' is made up of 5 more
'Ps':

1
 Prepare Present Practice Perform Permanent
Effective teachers prepare their students at the start of every lesson to be in the right
frame of mind and ready to learn. They do this by helping students to 'warm up' in the
same way that athletes do, except in lessons the warm ups are mental rather than physical
- these starter activities also help settle students and give a clear signal the lesson has
started.

In this preparation phase, effective teachers also explain the purpose of the learning, and
help to get students ready to learn by showing the WIIFM factor [What's In It For Me] - it's
very important to let students see how they can profit from what they're about to learn.

After that the teacher needs to present the information to be learned. There are many
effective teaching techniques you can use to present information: successful teachers build
up, over time, a wide repertoire of presentation techniques, that take account of different
ways to learn, the nature of the learning, and the need to motivate and engage all
learners.

Next comes the crucial practice phase. It's important not to neglect this phase. Often
teachers spend a lot of time presenting, to the detriment of practice. Students need time
to assimilate and organise what they experience in the presentation phase, to make
mistakes, to make their own sense of it.

Practice does not always mean students being left to try lots of different examples on their
own. Some research suggests that the practice phase works best when practice attempts
by the students alternates with worked examples demonstrated by the teacher.

The logical next step is for students to have the opportunity to perform what they've
learned. Performance here means students get the chance to show what they know - not
necessarily as a formal assessment [although sometimes this is apropriate].

The more imaginative ways that teachers can find for this demonstration phase the better.
These might include: literally performing by using drama techniques to show what they
know, producing posters, creating web pages or other ICT -led activities, presentations to
other students, short video presentations, formal examination questions... with
imagination the list can stretch a long way.

Making the learning permanent is crucial so techniques to help students recall what's been
covered in lessons over a period of time are necessary. These are more than just
homework assignments or class-based memory tests - a systematic program of revisiting
key information by spacing learning over time and getting students actively to recall the
learning will help to optimize the learning for students.

The next level of the effective teaching strategies 'cake' comprises 4 'Es':

2
 Engage Excite Enjoy Evaluate
If the teaching activities don't engage students they won't be successful. Students will
accept some dull activities for a while if they can see a greater ultimate value further
down the road, but strategies for effective teaching depend on being able to engage
students most of the time.

We may not often be able to get the pulses of our students racing in lessons, but if we do
get the opportunity to spice things up with a dash of real excitement we should take it
and use it to best effect.

Most people accept that learning can be more effective when it's fun, even though we
need to accept the fact that successful learning really depends on thinking hard and
working hard. Nevertheless, all teachers know that sometimes learning can get a little
'gritty', and teachers need to make real efforts to enable students to enjoy lessons.

Fun doesn't mean a chaotic free-for-all where students can do as they please, but it does
mean a positive, imaginative approach that harnesses young people's natural predipostion
to light-heartedness, to make sometimes heavyweight learning more accessible and
tolerable. I call it enabling students to have 'serious fun' in lessons.

An important ingredient is evaluation because you need to to test if what you're doing is
successful. Testing here does not necessarily mean academic testing of knowledge,
although clearly that is appropriate some of the time.

Testing the success of effective teaching strategies means setting aims and objectives, and
building in milestones to enable you to check how much progress students are making and
what the next steps are.

Evaluating also means getting feedback on how students learn as well as what they learn.

Effective teaching has built in mechanisms to check 'qualitative' measures , in other words,
do the strategies being used do what they set out to do, and, importantly, are they seen
by students as effective ways to improve their learning and attinment. It's important to
keep in mind that attainment is the 'acid test' - students need to make progress in their
learning and if they don't, however much fun classroom activities might be, if the students
are not progresssing, they are wasting their time.

One of the biggest errors we make as teachers is not giving enough time, thought and value
to just how important it is to be certain what students have learned. More and more
teachers are now accepting that finding out what students actually know, rather than what
we think we've taught them, is the first step in planning the next series of lessons for any
particular class.

The next layer comprises the 3 'Cs':

3
 Choice Challenge Creativity
Just like adults, young people often respond better when they are presented with
a choice of things to do, and, more importantly, how to do them. A consistent feature of
effective teaching strategies is that they sometimes give students some different options
of how to arrive at their learning goals.

Choices based on different learning activities can often make learning much more
accessible and represent a 'win win' situation for all learners. Of course, effective teachers
know [or learn] how to control choice in the interests of good learning - for example, it's
not good for students always to learn in the same way, despite their so-called 'preferred'
learning style, as this will disadvantage them when they enter the 'real world' beyond the
school gates.

Despite what they sometimes say, most students repond well to being challenged in their
learning, but it needs careful handling and is a long term process in developing effective
teaching strategies. A lot of evidence suggests that teaching that does not challenge
students is at least as harmful as teaching that is beyond students' capabilities.

Creativity doesn't mean teachers have to be particularly artistic. Effective teachers

encourage creative responses to learning. For example, a powerful way of assimilating
information is by converting the information from one form to another. A section from a
textbook or worksheet might be re-created in the form of a poster, or a comic strip;
students might demonstrate their understanding of coordinates in mathematics by creating
a 'treasure island' in the classroom and physically standing on different squares to
represent different coordinates. There are many, many ways to be creative in what you
ask students to do.

All that remains is to put the topping on our effective teaching

strategies cake.
The icing on this particular cake is a liberal sprinkling of the teacher's own....

Personality

We are all different and we need to let our students see our personality, in the same way
as we need to get to know our students' personalities. We shouldn't try to be someone
we're not just because we think it will give us some 'street cred' with students; we don't
have to be their best friends, but we should let them see that we enjoy being in their
company, and that we are human beings who empathise with them as 'learning partners'.

And the final touch...

Humour

4
Drizzle some humour over the top of the effective teaching strategies cake.
Drizzle it liberally so it permeates all the way through. It will add a light touch to all
classroom proceedings, and will be a powerful way to take students with us on the learning
journey.

Humour should never be at anyone's expense, it should always be respectful. Teachers who
learn how to laugh with students are often much more successful than their more strait-
laced colleagues.

Of course humour needs to be used appropriately, after all, this is learning not a game
show. The best advice I can give about humour is, start with yourself - when students see
you can be good sport and poke gentle fun at yourself, you're on to a winner, provided of
course you can serve up all the other ingredients of the effective teaching strategies cake.

Our teaching strategies cake is complete and looks like this:

Humour

Personality

Choice Challenge Creativity

Engage Excite Enjoy Evaluate

Prepare Present Practice Perform Permanent

Partnership Purpose Process Product