Teaching Strategies

 

To become an effective teacher, one must posses an effective teaching strategies first. Teaching strategies refer to methods used to help students learn the desired course contents and be able to develop achievable goals in the future. Teaching strategies identify the different available learning methods to enable them to develop the right strategy to deal with the target group identified. Assessment of the learning capabilities of students provides a key pillar in development of a successful teaching strategy.

There are tons of teaching strategies that can be adapted to your classroom. However, I will only be discussing about 4 of it.

a) Jigsaw

b) Context-rich problems

c) Socratic questionning

d) Music

Let's start off with Jigsaw Teaching Strategies!

The jigsaw classroom is a research-based cooperative learning technique invented and developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since 1971, thousands of classrooms have used jigsaw with great success.

The jigsaw classroom has a four-decade track record of successfully reducing racial conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes such as improved test performance, reduced absenteeism, and greater liking for school.

Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece — each student's part — is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.

If each student's part is essential, then each student is essential; and that is precisely what makes this strategy so effective.

 

The second one is Context-Rich Problems.

Context-rich problems are short, realistic scenarios giving the students a plausible motivation for solving the problem. The problems require students to utilize the underlying theory to make decisions about realistic situations.

A traditional problem focused on the concept of present value in economics would follow this type of format:

 A discount bond matures in 5 years. The face value of the bond is $10,000. If interest rates are 2%, what is the present value of this bond?

A context-rich problem would instead follow this type of format:

You and your sister just inherited a discount bond. The bond has a face value of $10,000 and matures in 5 years. You would like to hold onto the bond until maturity, but your sister wants her money now. She offers to sell you her half of the bond, but only if you give her a fair price. What is a fair price to offer her? How can you convince your sister it is a fair price

While the traditional problem tells the student what concept to use, the context-rich problem allows the student to connect the discipline to reality by requiring the student to decide present value is the appropriate concept to apply. The context-rich problem also requires the students to make the assumptions underlying the solution process explicit. Rather than being told to use 2% as an interest rate in the calculation, the student must come up with a reasonable interest rate and be able to defend that choice.

Components of context-rich problems

Every context-rich problem has the following properties:

• The problem is a short story in which the major character is the student. That is, each problem statement uses the personal pronoun "you."
• The situation in the problems are realistic (or can be imagined) but may require the students to make modeling assumptions.
• The problem statement includes a plausible motivation or reason for "you" to do something.
• Not all pictures or diagrams are given with the problems (often none are given). Students must visualize the situation by using their own experiences and knowledge.
• The problem may leave out common-knowledge information
• The problem's target variable may not explicitly be stated

Moving on to Socratic Questionning.

 Socratic questioning (or Socratic maieutics) is disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don't know, to follow out logical implications of thought or to control the discussion. The key to distinguishing Socratic questioning from questioning per se is that Socratic questioning is systematic, disciplined, deep and usually focuses on fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues or problems.

Due to the rapid addition of new information and the advancement of science and technology that occur almost daily, an engineer must constantly expand his or her horizons beyond simple gathering information and relying on the basic engineering principles. A number of homework problems have been included that are designed to enhance critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is the process we use to reflect on, access and judge the assumptions underlying our own and others ideas and actions. 

Socratic questioning is at the heart of critical thinking and a number of homework problems draw from R.W. Paul's six types of Socratic questions:

1. Questions for clarification:	Why do you say that? How does this relate to our discussion? "Are you going to include diffusion in your mole balance equations?"
2. Questions that probe assumptions:	What could we assume instead? How can you verify or disapprove that assumption? "Why are neglecting radial diffusion and including only axial diffusion?"
3. Questions that probe reasons and evidence:	What would be an example? What is....analogous to? What do you think causes to happen...? Why:? "Do you think that diffusion is responsible for the lower conversion?"
4. Questions about Viewpoints and Perspectives:	What would be an alternative? What is another way to look at it? Would you explain why it is necessary or beneficial, and who benefits? Why is the best? What are the strengths and weaknesses of...? How are...and ...similar? What is a counterargument for...? "With all the bends in the pipe, from an industrial/practical standpoint, do you think diffusion will affect the conversion?"
5. Questions that probe implications and consequences:	What generalizations can you make? What are the consequences of that assumption? What are you implying? How does...affect...? How does...tie in with what we learned before? "How would our results be affected if neglected diffusion?"
6. Questions about the question:	What was the point of this question? Why do you think I asked this question? What does...mean? How does...apply to everyday life? "Why do you think diffusion is important?

 The last one is MUSIC!

Music allows learners to acquire information naturally and presents information as parts and wholes. A song gives students a chance to reduce the information into parts yet work with it as a whole. Frances H. Rauscher (2003) explored the relationship between spatial/temporal skills and music with high risk preschoolers and conducted three studies that examined the effects of music. The children who received music training scored higher on the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT) in reading, spelling, reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, numerical operations and listening tasks. Rauscher concluded:

“Learning music is an important developmental activity that may help at-risk children compete academically on a more equal basis with their middle-income peers…improvement on the spatial-temporal tasks was confined to those children who received music instruction…the music instruction was found to continue for at least two years after the intervention ended.”

In another study by Rauscher and colleagues, music training gave a significant boost to spatial-temporal memory (Rauscher et al., 1997). In this study, 78 preschoolers were divided into two groups with one group receiving music instruction. The researchers tested if music cognition would activate the same neural activities as those in spatial-temporal reasoning. This type of reasoning maintains and transforms mental images without a physical model and is used in both mathematics and science. The researchers found that: 

“Music training, unlike listening, produces long-term modifications in underlying neural circuitry (perhaps right prefrontal and left temporal cortical area) in regions not primarily concerned with music. The magnitude of the improvement in spatial-temporal reasoning from music training was greater than one standard deviation equivalent to an increase from the 50th percentile on the WPPSI-R standardized test to above the 85th percentile.”

Students with low language levels could benefit the most from this increase in memory.

Music benefits children’s oral communication. They learn to be attentive listeners, which is a skill that helps their phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and overall fluency. When teachers use music naturally, they expand vocabulary, promote sight words, identify rhymes and retell stories. According to Wiggins, simple songs such as “Down by the Station,” when coupled with a book, “nurtures auditory and visual discrimination, eye-motor coordination, visual sequential memory, language reception and, most importantly, promotes comprehension and dialogue” (Wiggins, 2007).

 

When you think of a classroom singing a song together, you probably envision a kindergarten class learning the alphabet or counting. But a new generation of classroom songs has arrived, and this time they’re helping older students learn difficult topics or concepts in math, English and just about any other subject you can think of. Through videos, interactive games, and online courses, teachers are integrating songs and music in general directly into their lessons and classroom activities, giving students the chance to join in. By using a song as an introduction to a new topic or to support the understanding of various topics being discussed in class, students are able to familiarize themselves with the relevant terminology and concepts in an easily, memorable way. Since most of today’s digital natives grew up learning through catchy YouTube videos or watching cartoons on their parent’s iPads, even older students are comfortable with musical lessons. For example, the song below, “Mean Median and Mode”, pulled from a course offered through Learning Upgrade’s online curriculum, is often used by math teachers to introduce basic measures of center to a class. It can keep students more engaged than a traditional lecture, and embeds the melody (and the facts) in their minds so they’ll continue to think with it long after they’ve left the classroom.

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