Tag Archives: effective teacher

Many Teachers Try To Teach As They Were Taught – Stop Doing That!

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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. 

Accountability Using Visual Contracting With Sub-Groups

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Educational accountability places a premium on a teacher’s ability to close achievement gaps. For a myriad of reasons, the academic achievement data of children in your class are scattered on the score sheet. An effective teacher will take this scattergram and teach so that every child’s next achievement score will cluster at or beyond the measure for a full-year’s growth in learning, and, there will be a diminished difference between the clustered scores of each disaggregated sub-group of students. In order to be an “effective” teacher, this is what must be done.

BA, or Before Accountability, I would commonly observe a teacher analyzing their students’ achievement data and resting their eyes upon the names of children whose data was significantly below that of the class norms. Usually this would be one to two children and they would become the teacher’s “special project.” These children would need “special” and very personalized instruction in order to cause their next achievement data to be more like their classmates. Teachers routinely picked their “projects” and did whatever was necessary for the achievement scores of those children to “jump.” That was BA.

Today’s educational expectation reads well but is very amorphous when a teacher stands in front of the class and scans two dozen or more faces. How can every child be a “project?” The theory of closing such gaps says, “Disaggregate the data, look at each face as a weighted score, pick out the faces with the lowest weighted scores and those students are your special projects while your quality teaching advances the learning of all other children.” The reality of projects today is in the faces.

Every face in a classroom represents a child who is looking back at their teacher wondering “Am I your project? Are you thinking that my achievement will provide the leap in numbers that will show you to be an effective teacher?” They are waiting for you to recognize them, understand how their needs mesh with your needs, and make them your project.

So, point your mental finger and to yourself say, “You, you and you. We need to grow you by almost a year and a half. This next group needs to grow at least a full year. You over there and you and you and you need to move your scores by eight months. You scan a large group, knowing they need to grow by several months. And, you and you, not many are you, are already at this year’s target – let’s see how much we can grow you.”

The pressure is on. The administrators know the scores and they also have seen the faces that must experience the greatest growth. At the same time, the administration has been pressured by parents of the two children who already have achieved more than your grade level. They want assurance that you will continue the wonderful achievement of their children so that they will be two years or more beyond their classmates.

So you scan the faces once again to make visual contacts that would sound a lot like this.

“We have a lot to do. I will be seem like a second skin to my first group because we have things to unlearn as well as learn. As your second skin, I will sit with you to make certain you understand what to do, how to do, and check that you always do it right. You may squirm but you will not escape my hard attention and in June you will be at grade level.

Now, I am looking at my groups that need to grow at least a grade level this year. I will be your shadow because shadowing is the way I cause children who are learning on schedule to stay on schedule. Although I will allow you to wander a bit, I will check your understanding every day. We will find what you need to know and do and ways of doing it together.

You kiddos who are within months of our grade level targets will also make a full year’s growth. I will hover above you to steer your learning but you will organize and conduct most of it. There are many ways to learn and you will experience these through our work.

Finally, my pair who are already a grade level ahead of the class, you will be more than that when we reach June. Together, we will talk about how you will achieve your goals and I will stand to the side to non-directively push your learning. We will assess your understanding of this grade level curricula to assure your foundations, but move on to new learning independent of your classmates.”

Visual contracting says “I see you and you see me. This is what I am going to do and I know what you are going to do. When I nod, you will know that the game is on.”

Nodding is a unique educational recognition. No one in a court of law would claim that shared nods represent a legal contract. Yet, in the classroom, when an effective teacher looks a student in the eye and nods, there is an understanding and there will be a reckoning.