You can teach anything with this list of essential American teaching methods. It will take skill and experience to decide which method works best in each situation – will cooperation or competition produce the best result? It’s a starting point.
You might even evaluate your past performance and consider whether one of the other methods might have worked better.
These fundamental teaching methods are here to remind you that pupils have preferences about the way they learn. And when they are taught the way they prefer to learn they generally behave better, enjoy themselves more and think of you and your school in a more positive way.
Instruction
Although it may be true that ‘I hear and I forget’, some things do need to be told and accepted. Direct instruction still has its place. It conveys a lot of information quickly.
Instruction can be enhanced by note-taking and by subsequent active tasks to consolidate and test learning.
Example
Give an example relevant to the pupil’s own experience where possible. Appropriate examples make an idea relevant.
Our personal example, our attitude – whether helping, being patient, bad-tempered, harsh or caring – will directly influence our pupils too. We are all role models and it makes sense to be positive.
How you say something and how you yourself do it will last longer than what you say.
Analogy or comparison
Use simile and metaphor to describe things and to connect them to the pupil’s experience.
Make ideas less abstract by comparing them with practical life. Make meaningful comparisons between historical figures and modern personalities.
Provide two texts or two ideas for comparison. This generates more creativity than a single example. The examples can then serve as models for pupils’ own work.
Experiment and discovery
Learning by doing is practical and creative. ‘I do and I understand.’ It may take longer, but the learning lasts longer too.
The delight of discovering something for yourself can lead to a lifelong fascination. Plan to give time for children to do things for themselves under -.our guidance. These are learning opportunities and they are very valuable.
Collaboration
Working with someone else or in a small team gives many benefits which can fast a lifetime. Sharing ideas and working cooperatively are skills much prized by industry and in our personal lives.
Competition
At other times competition between teams brings about a creative challenge.
Success is a great incentive and failure is a valuable lesson. There does need to be control to prevent the excesses of destructive ‘bare-knuckle’ competition.
Computer-mediated learning
Using a computer need not be a solitary activity. A computer can complement other activities and supply a team with additional powers and data.
Computers sprinkled liberally around learning areas are more likely to lead to balanced and practical use than if parked directly in front of each child. They are valuable tools, but not the only ones.
Mentoring
It’s not only the teacher and teaching assistant who can give help and guidance. Older pupils listening to younger children reading aloud serve as an audience, and they learn about responsibility and caring in the process. Peer support groups countering bullying can be particularly effective. Older pupils organizing games and sporting or fund-raising activities learn important skills and become role models for younger pupils.
Building on prior learning
Knowing the starting point and previous experience of your learners will determine the content and the speed at which learning takes place.
Ask your pupils what they know, then start to add to it rather than landing them with new knowledge out of context. This is also a good time to find out their interests and enthusiasms.
Frameworks
Use scaffolding, writing frames and prompts to suggest an overall shape into which a pupil can slot their personal answer, or provide part of a pattern to which the pupils can add.
A framework could be a model, an incomplete shape or a template. It offers somewhere to start from and an example of a possible solution.
Later, the pupil can go it alone, but in the early stages a template banishes the tyranny of the blank A4 page.
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