TEACHING STRATEGIES

1. TEACHING STRATEGIES Presentor LIBERTINE CEPE-DE GUZMAN,MAEd, MASpEd, Ed.D.

2. What is it? • approaches that a teacher may take to actively engage students in learning. These strategies drive a teacher's instruction as they work to meet specific learning objectives. Effective instructional strategies meet all learning styles and development needs of the learners.

3. Student Learning • Research shows clearly that a person must be engaged to learn.  • People learn by actively participating in observing, speaking, writing, listening, thinking, drawing, and doing. • Learning is enhanced when a person sees potential implications, applications, and benefits to others. • Learning builds on current understanding (including misconceptions!)

4. What does this mean? • If student learning is the goal, effective teaching means creating effective learning environments, and environments where students are actively participating and engaged with the material are crucial to student learning. • Students are more likely to learn and retain if we ask them to do more than learn information. Including activities where students can explore applications and implications will improve learning. • A traditional lecture classroom focused on presentation of content by an instructor does not typically promote active participation and engagement.

5. The different teaching strategies • Making lectures more interactive • What happens when you try to engage students by floating a question during class? Silence? The same eager student anxious to answer? Most of the students not thinking about the question but just hoping that you won't call on them? What can we do to make students more actively engaged with the material during lecture in order to improve student learning? 

6. When is a lecture beneficial? • McKeachie and Svinicki (2006, pg. 58) believe that lecturing is best used for: • Providing up-to-date material that can’t be found in one source. • Summarizing material found in a variety of sources. • Adapting material to the interests of a particular group. • Initially helping students discover key concepts, principles or ideas and model expert thinking.

7. What are some essential considerations for a lecture? • Enthusiasm: both for the subject and students’ ability to learn it. Expert thinking: Learners look to the teacher for not only content (facts), but an expert’s way to think about the content.  Help them structure their thinking by providing scaffolding, examples, metaphors, and relationships between the material and everyday life. Telling ≠ learning: Consider yourself a ‘teacher of thinking’ not a ‘dispenser of facts.’

8. Thinking takes time: Realize students need time to think about the material and adjust your pace accordingly. Rapid coverage of material results in rapid note-taking from students and little time to process the information.  Most students will only memorize, and not try to understand, large volumes of material that are covered quickly.  • Learning needs to be learned: Students need additional time to process and need more structure early in the semester. As the course progresses, you can shift to activities that ask the student to perform higher level cognitive functions.  Be sure to make the students aware of your plan to change the course format.

9. Engagement: Students must be engaged in order to retain and understand the material.  You can help students gain understanding by: • Providing a clear opening and summary of sections of the lecture.  In addition to verbal cues about openings and closures, consider such non-verbal cues as walking from one area to another to signal change. • Lecturing for no more than twenty minutes before employing an activity. Some activities could include: • Having students share notes with each other and talk about discrepancies in their notes. • Thoughtful questions followed by the think-pair-share technique and reporting out of answers • One- minute Papers

10. Asking students to put their notepads away for five minutes, and then giving them a few minutes to summarize what you have just said.  This works well for helping students to understand concepts. • Using analogy, examples, and metaphors.  Better yet, ask students to provide an analogy. • Using classroom assessment techniques • Providing a lecture outline only, rather than a complete set of your notes. • Cool is not always cool: Resist the temptation to use anything just for its “cool factor.”  Any technique, audiovisual, and/or technology must be used because it fits the goals and objectives of the course, not just because it’s cool.

11. What is the format of a good lecture? Introduction This should include a call for questions from previous material, an overview of today’s class and how today’s class fits into the bigger scheme of the course.  Also consider a brief summary of the previous class, but resist the temptation to completely review old material. The summary serves only to trigger memories.  (As an alternative, have a student or student group briefly summarize the previous class.)

12. Body The purpose of the body is to improve students understanding of a few points, not cover material in great depth (students can gain understanding by reading).    Concentrate on your objectives for today’s class, summarize the main points of those objectives, and provide students with examples of your main points. Again, if the purpose of your lecture is to cover great amounts of content, do not expect students to understand the material, just to have memorized it.  If you must cover great amounts of material, you must provide students some other activity that provokes student engagement.  This “engaging material” can be homework, online discussions, or written assignments.

13. Checking for understanding Remember to leave time for students’ questions, but don’t use students’ head nods and amount or level of questions as your only means of checking for understanding. The use of classroom assessment techniques greatly improves both your and your students’ understanding of what they really know. • ConclusionThis signals a clear ending to the class’ activities.  The conclusion should provide a wrap-up of the day’s activities, major points, how the class fit into the course objectives, and previews upcoming activities.  Consider having students provide a list of the major points as part of your wrap up activity and check for understanding.

14. What is Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT)? • Just-in-Time Teaching focuses on improving student learning through the use of brief web-based questions (JiTT exercises) delivered before a class meeting. Students' responses to JiTT exercises are reviewed by the instructor a few hours before class and are used to develop classroom activities addressing learning gaps revealed in the JiTT responses. JiTT exercises allow instructors to quickly gather information about student understanding of course concepts immediately prior to a class meeting and tailor activities to meet students' actual learning needs.

15. Why use Just-in-Time Teaching? • Just-in-Time Teaching improves student learning and increases in-class teaching efficiency and effectiveness. JiTT does this by incorporating research-based knowledge about effective teaching and learning practices. Specifically, JiTT:Improves students' preparation for class • Enhances student motivation for learning • Promotes ongoing formative assessment of student learning (by both instructors and students) • Informs in-class activities that target student learning gaps

16. How to use Just-in-Time Teaching • A key to successful JiTT implementation is developing a set of effective questions that will be posted online for students to answer before the next class. JiTT questions are generally open-ended and require students to do something - read a textbook chapter or article, analyze a video, complete a simulation, or analyze data - related to material that will be addressed during the next class period. For each JiTT exercise, instructors post JiTT questions in a course management system and students respond online a few hours before class. After the posting deadline - but before class begins - instructors examine students' responses, group them into clusters reflecting similar thinking processes, and select a representative sample of responses to show in class. The instructor also uses the student responses to develop interactive in-class activities targeting learning gaps identified in the JiTT responses. 

17. Concept sketches • Concept sketches (different from concept maps) are sketches or diagrams that are concisely annotated with short statements that describe the processes, concepts, and interrelationships shown in the sketch. Having students generate their own concept sketches is a powerful way for students to process concepts and convey them to others. Concept sketches can be used as preparation for class, as an in-class activity, in the field or lab, or as an assessment tool.

18. The jigsaw technique • Have you struggled with group work in class? The jigsaw technique can be a useful, well-structured template for carrying out effective in-class group work. The class is divided into several teams, with each team preparing separate but related assignments. When all team members are prepared, the class is re-divided into mixed groups, with one member from each team in each group. Each person in the group teaches the rest of the group what he/she knows, and the group then tackles an assignment together that pulls all of the pieces together to form the full picture (hence the name "jigsaw").

19. The gallery walk • The gallery walk is a cooperative learning strategy in which the instructor devises several questions/problems and posts each question/problem at a different table or at a different place on the walls (hence the name "gallery"). Students form as many groups as there are questions, and each group moves from question to question (hence the name "walk"). After writing the group's response to the first question, the group rotates to the next position, adding to what is already there. At the last question, it is the group's responsibility to summarize and report to the class.

20. Numbered Heads Together • Ask students to number off in their teams from one to four. Announce a question and a time limit. Students put their heads together to come up with an answer. Call a number and ask all students with that number to stand and answer the question. Recognize correct responses and elaborate through rich discussions.

21. Thank you!