When is teaching most effective

This suggests that teachers should strive to do the following:. Science, mathematics, and technology do not create curiosity. Thus, science teachers should encourage students to raise questions about the material being studied, help them learn to frame their questions clearly enough to begin to search for answers, suggest to them productive ways for finding answers, and reward those who raise and then pursue unusual but relevant questions.

In the science classroom, wondering should be as highly valued as knowing. Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers prize the creative use of imagination. Indeed, teachers can express their own creativity by inventing activities in which students' creativity and imagination will pay off. Science, mathematics, and engineering prosper because of the institutionalized skepticism of their practitioners.

Their central tenet is that one's evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and one's experiments will be subjected to replication. In science classrooms, it should be the normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is the evidence?

What is the argument that interprets the evidence? Are there alternative explanations or other ways of solving the problem that could be better? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers. Students should experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. This means that teachers must take care not to convey the impression that they themselves or the textbooks are absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct.

By dealing with the credibility of scientific claims, the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists, science teachers can help students to balance the necessity for accepting a great deal of science on faith against the importance of keeping an open mind. Many people regard science as cold and uninteresting. However, a scientific understanding of, say, the formation of stars, the blue of the sky, or the construction of the human heart need not displace the romantic and spiritual meanings of such phenomena.

Teachers of science, mathematics, and technology should establish a learning environment in which students are able to broaden and deepen their response to the beauty of ideas, methods, tools, structures, objects, and living organisms. Teachers should recognize that for many students, the learning of mathematics and science involves feelings of severe anxiety and fear of failure.

No doubt this results partly from what is taught and the way it is taught, and partly from attitudes picked up incidentally very early in schooling from parents and teachers who are themselves ill at ease with science and mathematics. Far from dismissing math and science anxiety as groundless, though, teachers should assure students that they understand the problem and will work with them to overcome it. Teachers can take such measures as the following:.

Teachers should make sure that students have some sense of success in learning science and mathematics, and they should deemphasize getting all the right answers as being the main criterion of success. After all, science itself, as Alfred North Whitehead said, is never quite right. Understanding anything is never absolute, and it takes many forms. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools.

This fear may result primarily from the lack of opportunity many of them have to become familiar with tools in safe circumstances. Girls in particular suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools. Starting in the earliest grades, all students should gradually gain familiarity with tools and the proper use of tools.

By the time they finish school, all students should have had supervised experience with common hand tools, soldering irons, electrical meters, drafting tools, optical and sound equipment, calculators, and computers. Because the scientific and engineering professions have been predominantly male and white, female and minority students could easily get the impression that these fields are beyond them or are otherwise unsuited to them. Teachers should select learning materials that illustrate the contributions of women and minorities, bring in role models, and make it clear to female and minority students that they are expected to study the same subjects at the same level as everyone else and to perform as well.

A group approach has motivational value apart from the need to use team learning as noted earlier to promote an understanding of how science and engineering work. Overemphasis on competition among students for high grades distorts what ought to be the prime motive for studying science: to find things out.

Competition among students in the science classroom may also result in many of them developing a dislike of science and losing their confidence in their ability to learn science.

Group approaches, the norm in science, have many advantages in education; for instance, they help youngsters see that everyone can contribute to the attainment of common goals and that progress does not depend on everyone's having the same abilities.

Children learn from their parents, siblings, other relatives, peers, and adult authority figures, as well as from teachers. They learn from movies, television, radio, records, trade books and magazines, and home computers, and from going to museums and zoos, parties, club meetings, rock concerts, and sports events, as well as from schoolbooks and the school environment in general.

Science teachers should exploit the rich resources of the larger community and involve parents and other concerned adults in useful ways. It is also important for teachers to recognize that some of what their students learn informally is wrong, incomplete, poorly understood, or misunderstood, but that formal education can help students to restructure that knowledge and acquire new knowledge. In learning science, students need time for exploring, for making observations, for taking wrong turns, for testing ideas, for doing things over again; time for building things, calibrating instruments, collecting things, constructing physical and mathematical models for testing ideas; time for learning whatever mathematics, technology, and science they may need to deal with the questions at hand; time for asking around, reading, and arguing; time for wrestling with unfamiliar and counterintuitive ideas and for coming to see the advantage in thinking in a different way.

Moreover, any topic in science, mathematics, or technology that is taught only in a single lesson or unit is unlikely to leave a trace by the end of schooling. To take hold and mature, concepts must not just be presented to students from time to time but must be offered to them periodically in different contexts and at increasing levels of sophistication.

What Students Learn Is Influenced by Their Existing Ideas People have to construct their own meaning regardless of how clearly teachers or books tell them things. Never give up and try your best - that's all that you can do. That's what I tell the kids anyway! Never fall behind on the marking or filing of students' work. Try your best to be on top of it and not let the pile grow past your head!

It will save you a lot of time in the long run. It is also important to keep an organized planner and plan ahead! The likelihood of last minute lesson plans being effective are slim. Lastly, keep a journal handy and jot down your ideas as soon as an inspired idea forms in your mind.

Then, make a plan to put those ideas in action. You are constantly being evaluated and criticized by your boss, teachers, parents and even children.

Instead of feeling bitter when somebody has something to say about your teaching, be open-minded when receiving constructive criticism and form a plan of action. Prove that you are the effective teacher that you want to be. Nobody is perfect and there is always room for improvement. Sometimes, others see what you fail to see.

Create standards for your students and for yourself. From the beginning, make sure that they know what is acceptable versus what isn't. For example, remind the students how you would like work to be completed. Are you the teacher who wants your students to try their best and hand in their best and neatest work? Or are you the teacher who couldn't care less? Now remember, you can only expect a lot if you give a lot.

As the saying goes, "Practice what you preach". An effective teacher is one who is creative but that doesn't mean that you have to create everything from scratch! Find inspiration from as many sources as you can. In life, things don't always go according to plan.

This is particularly true when it comes to teaching. Be flexible and go with the flow when change occurs. An effective teacher does not complain about changes when a new principal arrives. They do not feel the need to mention how good they had it at their last school or with their last group of students compared to their current circumstances.

Instead of stressing about change, embrace it with both hands and show that you are capable of hitting every curve ball that comes your way! An effective teacher reflects on their teaching to evolve as a teacher. Undergraduate students at Georgetown have high expectations of their instructors, and they also have many competing interests beyond the course you are teaching.

Give them a reason to remember your class as an important part of their college experience! Keep your students engaged with a positive attitude. Teaching is most effective when students are motivated by the desire to learn, rather than by grades or degree requirements. Many first-time TAs are confused by the new authority of being a teaching assistant, and mistake intimidation for respect.

Think of your students as teammates, not adversaries. Learning and teaching are challenging, but that doesn't mean that you can't have fun in the classroom. Stay focused, but don't be afraid to be creative and innovative.

Allow yourself to be enthusiastic and find ways to let students see what is interesting about your subject. You should know the course material. If students are required to attend lectures and read assignments, then it seems reasonable that you would do the same.

Most faculty expect graduate TAs to attend lectures, especially if they have never taken or taught the course. Review key concepts and ideas if you are unclear about them, particularly if it has been a while since you have worked with the topics you will be teaching. Think about how the material can be most effectively demonstrated and design a strategy. Write an outline or take notes to follow during a lecture, and prepare your overheads, diagrams, handouts and other aids well in advance.

Don't wait until the morning of the class! Have a plan for what you want to teach. Your job is to illustrate key points and essential context, to help students integrate all of their work reading, labs, exams, papers, lectures, etc.

Given that there is never time to teach everything, choose the most important concepts and show how they are related. Explain ideas so students are able to build on material they have already mastered, whether from your course or previous classes. Don't just focus on what you happen to be teaching today. Show students how what they are learning now is connected to material covered later in the course. Keep your long term goals in mind, pace yourself so that you don't run out of time at the end, and try to end every class with a conclusion.

Effective teachers can explain complex ideas in simple ways.