If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then many teachers of yore are buttered with adulation. When people decide to become schoolteachers, they often do so thinking they will teach like their favorite teachers taught them. You see it in the eyes of an interviewee when asked “Tell us about your favorite teacher when you were in school”. Imitation later is demonstrated as a new teacher settles into patterns of mannerisms, classroom layout, and, most significantly, interacting with students. Vestiges of a favorite teacher try to appear in a new teacher constantly.
Stop doing that! Most of what we admired in a favorite teacher was personality and charisma not teacher effectiveness. Teach as you were taught to teach not as you were taught as a student.
What do we know?
There is art to teaching. Most favorite teachers touched us with their artful teaching, their personality, and their caring for each student. They proved the statement that children do not care what a teacher knows until they know that a teacher cares. Good teaching is an art form of connecting with children. Remembering a favorite teacher is like having that person’s arm around you or basking in her smile. It is an emotional, affective warm feeling, often of kindness and support. It grew from all the “atta-boys and atta-girls” she showered on students. Children, as people pleasers, will do most anything to get a smile or a nod or a note to take home from a favorite teacher. “How many books do I need to read? I’ll read every day after school!”. And the warmth of her smile gains even greater emotionality over time.
We would like to think that every teacher is a “favorite” to some students, but truth be told, there are some teachers who do not create adoring followers. The art of teaching is not distributed equally among all teachers.
Favorite or Most Effective
An equally telling question for a teacher interview is “Tell us about the teacher who most effectively challenged you to learn”. Effective teaching is causing children to learn and causation lies in the science of teaching. Children may learn to please a favorite teacher; they learn from highly effective teachers due to an application of best teaching strategies.
Highly effective teachers are not simply born. They are the product of their study of theories and practices of pedagogy that consistently cause children, or anyone for that matter, to learn. These theories and practices include –
- Motivation. Every child responds to positive triggers that encourage them to engage in learning. Effective teachers pull those triggers. They make learning personal by referencing a student’s name and that student’s high interest in the subject or skill as they introduce a lesson. They make the new learning sound unique and special. They attach new learning to recent successful learning. They create a mystery children are to solve. Effective teachers understand the need to continue to motivate throughout the lesson and unit not just as its beginning.
- Direct instruction, inquiry-based instruction, and problem- or project-based instruction. These three strategies are the arsenal for effective teachers, and they are masters of each. Any lesson can be taught by one of these three strategies, yet there always is a most appropriate strategy for the nature of the learning. Effective teachers provide variety in classroom work by rotating among these strategies.
- Practice and reinforcement. Effective teachers understand that practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. They use immediate and massed practice and interval and distributed practice. They don’t practice just to practice but for strategic reinforcement to build short- and long-term memory. Effective teachers avoid the drudgery of drills while knowing that learning will erode and be lost without practice over time. Reinforcement over time is a mantra.
- Assessment and corrective teaching. Effective teachers pre-assess, teach in chunks, model, practice, and use formative assessments to check the accuracy and strength of student learning. They understand that very few lessons will immediately cause all children to be successful learners. They use assessments to tell them “Correct this now before uninformed practice makes it harder to unlearn”. They unteach, reteach, and teach differently based on assessments to move children from early errors to later success. Effective teachers also are very good at observing student proficiency without testing; they have a mental rubric for the level of proficiency children need to achieve.
- Extended and advanced learning. Effective teachers know that some children will grasp and master new learning accurately and quickly. Those children will need extended and advanced learning rather than corrective teaching. Effective teachers plan enrichments and accelerated learning for children who need these to stay connected to the classroom.
- Lesson planning. Effective teachers are immaculate lesson planners understanding the steps of a plan that causes learning to happen. In the 1980s school districts taught teachers to use Madeline Hunter’s Model of Mastery Learning. Hunterisms became standard operating procedure for more than a decade. Splashback against No Child Left Behind caused some educators to consider Hunter too mechanistic. However, in the decades since, a Hunter lesson design rebounds as best practice.
https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/Holle-Lesson-Planning.pdf
- Curricular design. Effective teachers understand that some children really respond to direct instruction while others jump aboard for inquiry-based teaching and still others are excited by problem-based and project-based instruction. These teachers strategically use all three strategies to engage children as active learners. They also use Universal Design thinking in their curriculum to ensure learning is not hindered by avoidable barriers.
The Big Duh!
Teacher preparation programs teach us how to be effective in causing children to learn. Effective teachers remember their favorite teachers from their school years and emulate many of those veteran teachers’ mannerisms. Beyond that emulation, effective teachers are masters of the science of teaching and use all the tools they have been taught to cause all children to be successful learners of their annual curriculum.