Can anyone reference a superior teaching method/system that is not based on anecdotal evidence?
I realize superior is relative, and if it causes some sort of problem, assume it means superior for you.
Well my lecturer’s for physics have been doing this, and they seem to think its the best way to learn. Personally I don’t mind it, the lectures are fun, but I’m not sure I’m learning more.
What do you want to teach? I think the answer is probably very different for “fluency in Swahili” or “the first million digits of pi” or “dancing the foxtrot” or “how to conduct independent research in quantum mechanics”.
One thing I can tell you is that experience is not the best teacher.
Experience is the harshest teacher. It gives the test first and the lesson afterward.
…and the answer will also depend on how many people you are teaching, their ages, their previous experiences with education, your own skills and background, the resources available to you…
Not to mention how you define “effective”. What exactly are you measuring?
If people knew, they’d be using one system. The problem is that what is most effective for student A won’t work at all for student B.
New systems are proposed all the time, some with pretty good experimental results. But once they get used more widely, they break down due to the wide variety of students in the US system.
There are as many ways to learn as there are teachers and students.
First, read up a bit about different learning styles. After you realize that everyone in your classroom has their own way of learning, then you have to figure out how that meshes with your own unique talents as a teacher. I was trained to use the 4Mat system, which incorporates a bit of everything into each lesson. So far it has worked well for me and my students. But it will always work better for some students than others, and another teacher may be more successful using a different method.
Not only is there no one most effective form of teaching, there isn’t even one most effective form for a single individual.
How you learn to read isn’t going to be the same as how you learn to add and subtract, how you learn to hammer a nail or how you learn to buy a car.
I know how to teach “things” to soldiers, very quickly too I might add. And the things I tought them would save their lives someday so they might have been motivated to learn.
So teaching to different levels of motivation will always require different methods.
When teaching adults, everything is first cycled through memories of comparing it to something similiar they already know, teaching to an “empty” mind is much easier.
Individual Education Plans.
There’s a reason IEPs are developed for kids that are struggling - they need the material presented differently than the average, and without the IEP they cannot/will not succeed (either by not beingg able to learn the material or by being so far ahead of the group that they get bored and lose interest).
Or, stated another way; there is no best way. Everyone is different and excels in different environments.
By far the most effective method is individual tutoring – but the tutor needs to be able to use more than one method to make it work for the student. This is one reason why home schooling seems to work so well.
Of course, assigning one student to each teacher is cost-prohibitive in any school system.
In my experience, not only does every student react differently to different methods, but a student can actually get more confused if taught with the “wrong” method. So you not only have to be proficient with multiple methods of teaching, you have to be able to figure out in advance which one is best for each individual student.
Teaching is one of the most underrated skills there is.
You can be a complete expert in a given field, but totally lousy at teaching it.
The biggest mistake I see teachers make is trying to explain concepts using terminology not understood by the student, or referencing other concepts, that are also not understood by the student. Wikipedia’s science articles are a good example of “bad teaching”. Want to learn what a charge is, as in physics? Well, let me “clear it up” for you, using the opening few paragraphs of wikipedia’s article on charge (physics):
All clear now?
From the “Active Learning” article:
I think they’d better control for that variable before reaching a conclusion.
Take a class of any size. Assign reading material…say Chapter 1 of the text.
Next class, call on students and ask questions. First student with a wrong answer, shoot him in the head. Assign Chapter 2 for tommorrow. Class dismissed.
As someone else pointed out, is this because it’s a better method, or simply because people are now being forced to come to class
Why?
Why?
Would you mind giving me links to a few of them?
Nothing personal, I just don;t have the time to reply to all of the responses, but does anyone know of a better system (as opposed to singe method)?
As most people above have already said, it really depends on the subject matter and audience.
My trade in the Canadian Forces was training, and we had to take courses on teaching. We were taught four different methods of teaching, based on the class and subject, but the instructor also touched on other methods that the CF didn’t use.
One thing we had to deal with is that the lowest common denominator in the military was simply that one had to have graduated high school* and be physically fit. A university professor, obviously, can expect a different level of academic aptitude, and will therefore have different tools to use.
- Only one of the courses I taught regularly was exclusive to officers, who generally had a university degree.
Someone said:
Let me answer with a story. When I was in my early twenties, I was cutting firewood with a friend of mine for most of the day in deep snow. When we finished I came into his house, took off my wet boots, went into his basement in my damp socks and grabbed the refrigerator handle to get a beer.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a dead short in the refrigerator that energized the chassis while the defrost cycle was operating, and that proved to be the case. Clamped hard by 110 volt current, unable to let go, I was forced to back up still holding the handle until the refrigerator tipped over and pulled out the power cord.
That was over thirty years ago, and to this day whenever I open a refrigerator I brush the handle with the back of my knuckles, just to be sure. I do it even if the handle is non-conductive.
So, a five second 110 volt shock taught me a permanent lesson. How you choose to apply it to teaching is up to you.