Best Practice/ First Year of Teaching

Listening to our students.

Last week I shared with you some thoughts on best practice instruction.  I hope it sparked some personal reflection and perhaps caused you to change your strategy for an upcoming lesson. Perhaps, you thoughtfully scrapped an upcoming lecture and re-worked the lesson to make it more active and hands-on. In this reformation of personal teaching styles, you must crawl before you can walk.

As a principal and superintendent, when I was overwhelmed with administrative minutia or an over active board of education, I always had a block of classrooms that I would go visit to see some good teaching.  Visiting these classrooms always brought me back to the reason that I became a teacher and chose education as a career.  In these visits, I was able to witness and personally celebrate powerful teaching and learning.  Rarely if ever were these lessons lecture based.  Upon reflection, I rarely told the teachers how powerful they were, and I should have.   If you are an administrator reading this blog or a future administrator, please do not make this same mistake.

This past week I read something which I think is a good follow-up to last week’s post.  Anne Curzan, in her blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education(2016), writes about what teachers can do and what students can do to promote good learning.  She compiled this using information gathered from student surveys.  Although written for college students, I believe the lessons can be applied for all educators and students.  You will have to modify these points based upon your personal audience.  Listed below is a brief summarization of these items:

What students can do to promote good learning:

• Expect to learn every day.
• Make an effort to participate.
• Ask questions.
• Listen to one another.
• Come prepared for class.
• Know when you need help and ask for it.
• Make a connection to your teacher.
• Know what you need to succeed.
• Talk to your classmates and support each other.
• Remember that your teacher is human too.

What teachers can do to promote learning:

• Humanize yourself.
• Know your students’ names and how to pronounce them.
• Know something about each student.
• Assume that students care and will come prepared.
• Foster mutual respect.
• Recognize that life sometimes gets in the way of what is happening in your class.
• Hold all accountable to high expectations.
• Try not to interrupt students.
• You do not have to comment all of the time.
• Listen to what the students have to say.

For the most part, these are common sense items.  However, as you go about your daily business, I am sure that it is easy to forget these things.

As you study these comments, I trust you see a common thread that is interwoven through most of them. The common connection to me is that it is all about the relationships that you as the teacher are able to build with the students.  Relationships that are built on respect and understanding.  Always remember the important triad that we have spoken about in this blog:  Namely, content knowledge, pedagogical skill, and relationships.  For me, without building the proper relationships you will never begin to show your content expertise or demonstrate your powerful pedagogical skill.

Good luck!

References

Curzan, Anne(2016). 20 things students say help them learn.  Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/author/curzan/