Effective Teaching Strategies

 
      Aesop's Fables are designed to achieve a goal, to teach lessons about life.  By analogy, goal-directed Aesop's Activities can help students learn ideas and thinking skills.  In a goal-directed approach to improving education, the basic themes are simple:  a teacher should provide opportunities for educationally useful experience, and help students learn more from their experience.

      Let's begin with an important question: Why should students want to learn?

      Personal Motivation
      In an ideal educational setting, students will be excited about learning.  Instead of doing only what is required to fulfill schoolwork tasks, they will invest extra mental effort with the intention of pursuing their own goals for learning.  Why?  Because they are motivated by a forward-looking expectation that what they are learning will be personally useful in the future, that it will improve their lives.  They will wisely ask, "What can I learn now that will help me in the future?"
      An essential function of education, and a satisfying aspect of teaching, is to motivate students so they want to learn.  How can teachers do this?  We all know that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Similarly, utility is in the mind of the beholder.  Students will be motivated when instructional activities "connect" with their own ideas about what is fun or useful.  Motivation can be inherent (to enjoy an interesting activity), extrinsic (to perform well on an exam), personal (to improve the long-term quality of life), and interpersonal (to impress fellow students or a teacher).  Hopefully, we can help students discover that thinking is fun and useful, so they will want to do it more often and more skillfully!
 

 
      A Plan for Goal-Directed Action
      An Aesop's Approach to instructional design involves a goal-directed coordination of instructional activities and teaching methods, with two modes of action:  1) define goals for education in terms of the knowledge (the ideas and skills) to be learned by students,  2) design activities that will provide experience with these ideas and skills, and will help students learn more from their experience.   {resources for Educational Design}
 

 
      2. Design Activities that lead to Achieving Educational Goals
      In goal-directed education, instructional activities are designed to help students achieve educational goals.

      Activities and Experience
      How can we design activities (with the goal of helping students learn ideas & skills) that are enjoyable and educationally productive?  For a creative teacher the possibilities are numerous and the range is wide.  During an activity, students can:  engage in lively discussions or debates, read a book or listen to a lecture;  search the library or internet to discover what others have learned about a topic;  study history or current events;  learn about different perspectives on "science, technology, and society" issues;  analyze a complex situation that involves conflicting goal-criteria and complex causal factors;  learn and apply new ideas;  learn and apply new skills, including strategies for problem solving;  solve problems (ranging in difficulty from simple to complex, solvable by known methods or requiring improvisational creativity), do case studies, play "detective" games, formulate a question or problem;  design and do an experiment, or do an experiment by converting instructions (written or verbal) into action;  make observations and collect data (with only the senses or using measuring instruments);  analyze data (that they have collected, or that was supplied for them) by searching for patterns and working with statistics, make a graph (by hand or using a computer) and use it for visual/mathematical data analysis;  use scientific logic (to analyze and evaluate existing theories, or invent new theories, to analyze and evaluate an existing experiment, or design a new experiment), examine the content and style of scientific writing in a journal paper, or...
      Most of these activities promote thinking by students, so they are thinking activities.

      During an activity, students can think and do, listen and talk, read and write.  If activities are well designed, students will be gaining educationally functional experience with the ideas and skills that are your educational goals.
      A useful analytical tool for teachers — a visually organized method for exploring and improving the structure of instruction, for creatively coordinating activities and experiences — is below, in Analyzing the Structure of Instruction.  First, however, let's look at a valuable type of educational activity.

      Reflection Activities to help students Learn from Experience 
      A goal-directed approach to education has two main components: instructional activities that promote educationally useful experience (as described above), and (in this section) teaching methods that help students learn more from their experience, and remember what they have learned, and transfer this knowledge to new situations.  In an effort to do this, one effective teaching strategy is to direct students' attention to "what can be learned" from an experience in a reflection request that encourages students to think about what they are doing and why, about the possibilities for learning, and why they should want to take advantage of this valuable opportunity.
      A thinking activity can be implicit or explicit, and either can effectively promote learning.  According to Webster's Dictionary, reflection is "a fixing of the mind on some subject; serious thought; contemplation," and a request for reflection converts a thinking activity from implicit to explicit.  An implicit thinking activity is an intrinsic part of an overall activity;  students will automatically think because it's necessary to finish the activity.  In an explicit thinking activity a teacher directs attention to what can be learned, by a simple reminder or by a request for action, such as discussing a question verbally or writing about it in a report.  Either way, it can shift a student from a minimally aware "going through the motions" mode to a more aware "active thinking" mode.  /  Of course, reflection can occur without a reminder from a teacher, whenever a student is thinking about an activity or "what can be learned" from it.  And learning can occur even when a student is not aware of what is happening.  But a reflection request will often increase learning by students.
      the timing of reflection:  A teacher can initiate reflective mental-activity before a physical-activity, during it, or after it.  One practical application of goal-directed thinking activities is Teaching Scientific Methods in Science Labs.  Closely related to Scientific Method is Design Method, which can be used as an educational tool that helps teachers integrate a wide variety of thinking activities;  these possibilities are explored in An Introduction to Design and Designing a "Thinking Skills" Education. }

      Analyzing the Structure of Instruction
      When students do activities, they gain experience.  Opportunities for educational experience — for experience that is educationally functional, that is useful for achieving educational goals — can be analyzed using an activity-and-experience table, as shown below, with student ACTIVITIES in the top row and educationally functional EXPERIENCES in the left column.
      This table clearly shows multi-experience activities (scanning vertically down the second column, we see that Activity #2 provides Experiences B and C) and repeated experiences (scanning the C-row horizontally, we see that experience with B occurs in Activities 1, 2 and 5).  A table may reveal gaps that will guide the designing of new activities.  For example, an earlier version of this table might have motivated a teacher, who noticed that after Activities 1-3 the students have no experience doing A, to add Activities 4 and 5.

      Of course, a "yes" does not tell the whole story.  A table with larger cells could show more details, such as the differences between a student's experience with "C" in Activities 2, 3 and 5.
      How long is an activity?  This varies.  A mini-activity may be over in a few minutes, while a coherent mega-activity (composed of related mini-activities) can last several hours.  In the example above, Activities 1-4 might occur in the same class session, and (if we wanted) all of these could be combined into one mega-activity (1234?) with experiences A, B, C, D, and E.  Or a single activity might span several class sessions.  There is lots of flexibility in defining "activities" and "experiences" so A-and-E tables can be made and used in any way you want.  Do whatever will help you understand and improve the structure of your instruction.
      A common educational goal is to help students improve their mastery of ideas and skills.  To illustrate, imagine that "C" is the skill of theory evaluation, and that students begin with simple "one theory" evaluations in Activities 2, 3 and 5, then move on to complex "multiple theory" evaluations in Activities 6-7-8-9.  To help students gradually increase their ability to do these evaluations, a teacher might "show them how" in Activity 6;  in 7, the students evaluate but with lots of support (coaching by the teacher,...);  in 8, some of this support is removed;  in 9, the students complete their move toward independence by doing an evaluation themselves, with no support.  /  Or perhaps students are solving of problems (of a certain type) that become more and more challenging, from 6 (easy) to 9 (difficult).  Or the building-up process might correspond to increasing levels of sophistication, beginning (in 6) with the basic understanding of a concept, followed (in 7 to 9) by applications requiring various types of creativity and/or critical thinking.
      The "exam activity" tests most of the educational goals (A B C D) but not all (not E).

      a confession:  In many teaching situations I don't MAKE this kind of table.  But I usually THINK in terms of "activities and experiences and their interactions" while planning instruction, because this provides a different perspective that can be very useful.
      a summary of benefits:  In a table, the visual organization of information can improve our understanding of the educationally functional relationships between activities, between experiences, and between activities and experiences.  This knowledge about the structure of instruction can help us creatively coordinate — with respect to types of experience, levels of sophistication, and contexts — the activities that promote experiences.  The goal of a carefully planned selection and sequencing of activities is to develop a mutually supportive synergism between the activities, to build a coherent system for teaching each type of thinking skill, to produce a more effective environment for learning.

      Evaluation Activities 
      Why?  1) motivation: Although students will study for reasons that are intrinsic, personal, and interpersonal, external rewards (like a course grade) are usually a powerful motivator.  2) experience: Because an exam is an opportunity to gain experience with ideas and skills, an evaluation activity is just a special type of thinking activity.  3) guidance: If students are studying "for the exam" we can guide their studying by telling them what will be on the exam; in a good course design, there is a close match between what is desired (the ideas and skills that are the educational goals) and what is evaluated.  4) feedback for learning: Student can continue their old "strategies for learning" with confidence (if they do well on an exam) or make appropriate changes (if they do poorly) in an effort to learn more effectively.  5) feedback for teaching: Similarly, "strategies for teaching" can be affected by feedback from exams when a teacher asks, "Are my instructional methods effective in helping students learn?"  6) evaluation of students: In most schools a teacher assigns grades for each student, based on the results of evaluation activities.
      What?  Usually, it's easy to construct (and grade) an exam that tests lower-level knowledge, such as a student's ability to recall facts or solve familiar problems by applying a known method.  But it's difficult to construct and grade an exam that accurately measures higher-level thinking skills, that measures how well a student responds to challenges like a novel problem requiring creative improvisation, or a complex situation requiring a critical evaluation of conflicting factors.  But if one of our goals is to help students learn higher-level skills, then making exams that test these skills can be a worthwhile investment of time and effort that will be rewarded with improved education.
      How?  An evaluation activity can ask students to work as individuals or in a collaborative group.  It can be in-class or take-home, written (with multiple choice or short-answer questions, problem solving, essay writing,...), oral (by answering questions, asking questions, discussing issues, evaluating policies, solving problems,...), or physical (for example, by performing a laboratory procedure).  Or a teacher can observe the quality of work (in a lab) or the quality of thinking and expression (in a discussion), or have students do a long-term project, or...

      Goals?  A good exam should:  measure knowledge accurately (there should be a high correlation between a student's exam score and level of knowledge-and-skill);  measure appropriate knowledge (by testing the ideas and skills that are the educational goals and, in a well designed course, have been the focus of teaching and learning);  differentiate between levels of knowledge (by including tasks that vary in difficulty, with some that most students can do, some only a few can do, and some in between, thus avoiding a "ceiling effect" or "floor effect" where everyone does equally well or poorly).  Achieving these goals is not easy, but the potential rewards make it a challenge worth pursuing.
 

      Modes and Interactions
      What kinds of interactions (between past, present, and future, and between goals, activities, and methods) stimulate and guide the process of design?
      Sections 1 and 2 describe modes of action, not sequential steps.  During the process of instructional design, there is interaction between modes.  Typically, design begins with a careful examination of the activities now being used in a classroom:  a goal-oriented analysis of these activities (in Mode 2) stimulates thinking about goals (Mode 1), which inspires a revising or supplementing of the activities (Mode 2).  Activities for reflection and evaluation are a logical extension of this analysis.  To help students learn more from their experience, to help them convert potential learning into actual learning, we add thinking activities — both implicit and explicit — that encourage students to think about what they are doing (Mode 2) and what they can learn (Mode 1) and why they may want to learn (motivation).  Evaluation activities provide useful feedback about whether the current instructional methods (Mode 2) are effective in achieving the educational goals (Mode 1).

      Constraints on Design
      The following paragraph is from a section (The Challenge of Educational Design) in a page (Problem Solving in Education: Helping Students Learn How to Combine Creativity and Critical Thinking in Design and Science):
      For the design of education, challenges are posed by three practical constraints.  First, a curriculum and the accompanying instruction should be flexible so it can accommodate a wide range of learning styles and teaching styles.  Second, we should make it easy for teachers to teach well and to learn new methods quickly with a minimum of extra preparation time.  Third, if teachers feel obligated to cover a large amount of subject-area content, they may be reluctant to invest the classroom time required to teach thinking skills.

      Radical and Practical
      Educators should make decisions based on merit, not tradition, by examining every activity (old or new) and asking whether it performs a useful educational function.  But this radical attitude should be combined with a recognition that — when our objective is to achieve maximally beneficial results in a limited amount of time — instead of aiming for a fresh beginning (with a new set of goals, activities, and methods) it is often more practical and immediately productive to build on what already exists, to use the past for improving the future.
 
 

 
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