On the challenges of delivering content or processes better:
Excellent teachers continue to use self-reflection as an excellent way to determine what practices are not working and which ones are working. Here are some suggestions and questions for both professional self-reflection, and as conversation starters with peers and others.
- With peers or even your students, discuss a concept or content you feel you have had difficulty teaching. This might be a concept or content you want to look at in a different way to get a new perspective. What is that concept or content? What is not working or needs strengthening or a new perspective or delivery technique? Write yourself notes and try to be specific.
- Think outside of your disciplinary box and discuss ways you could incorporate more diverse learning styles, newer versions of learning taxonomies, or newer research on cognition and learning into your teaching and presentation strategies.
- For instance:
- Can you expand the array of techniques that you use to deliver or present your content?
- Can you use aspects from the “backwards design” concept and run with it – even if you start out small?
- Can you use infuse a new teaching model into your teaching? Change is hard, but there are some excellent existing models out there!
- Can you use any of the taxonomies included in this website to monitor your classroom activities? Or might they help you keep track of what you are doing and at what levels?
- Could you use one of the existing educational taxonomies to help generate different activities? ( Examples: 6 Facets of Understanding, the Anderson/Krathwohl’s revisions of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, or L. Dee Fink’s)
- Could you organize information or materials differently, again using some of the suggestions from this website?
- Can you add metacognitive or reflective exercises so your students can understand better how they think and how they best retain information? Or, can you have them investigate how they think that might be different from their peers or others?
- Could you use different types of assessments or grading rubrics?
- Begin to educate yourself about the new knowledge about cognitive processing, and neuroscience and learning, and then let your teaching strategies evolve and change, as James Zull did in The Art of Changing the Brain.
On instructional design:
- Discuss what you currently do in your teaching that fits your vision of the learner, and/or your vision and knowledge of your students’ future instructional or educational needs.
- Have conversations with your students about their visions of themselves and their futures.
- Discuss the ways you know or might assess what you do that works or what doesn’t.
- Try to candidly identify what you do that impedes or hinders your ability to teach to your end vision for your students. Then honestly look for new ways to reach them, new ways to diminish barriers.
- Examine the ways you assess your learners. Do your assessments promote and measure enduring understandings, deeper learning, and continued investigations? If they do not, then why do you continue to use those methods?
** Please remember that today’s students will live in a world that is changing very rapidly. If you are using archaic and/or ineffective methods that do not promote information gathering, critical assessment and thinking, you are failing to prepare them for the world of the future!
If you would like to know more about the steps to become and excellent teacher, please view my PPT on the subject, Sharing time is a happy time faculty development seminars. These were presented to the faculty of UWSP-College of Professional Studies.