Effective Teaching Strategies

In my 45 hours of observing the social science classes in the secondary school setting I found a number of effective strategies in how to make subject matter comprehensible to students assess student learning, engage and support all students in learning, plan instruction and design learning experiences for all students, and create and maintain an effective environment for student learning. While the strategies that I witnessed teachers utilize might not be effective in every classroom environment, I learned about a number of strategies that will help me in my own classroom. Making subject matter comprehensible to students is paramount to being an effective teacher. In one of the classrooms that I observed the teacher implemented a few techniques …show more content…
During my observation hours teachers used a number of different ways of assessing the understanding of the students from formative to summative assessments. One assessment that I saw work well is think-pair-share. The teacher had the students think about a particular question, then talk about it with their partner, and finally the students shared their answers in a class wide discussion on the question. This strategy allows the teacher to walk around the classroom while the students are pairing up and listen to the discussions that the students are having to see if they are understanding the question. Then in the class wide discussion the teacher is able to highlight great answers and assess the class as they are teaching the lesson to ensure that the students are learning the material. On one hand, this is a great strategy because it allows the teacher to take informal assessments as the students are talking and assess the whole class at the end of the exercise. It is a good formative assessment for teachers because it allows them to readjust their lesson if the class is not understanding a concept or idea after the think-pair-share is over. On the other hand, I would not use this type of assessment to evaluate students learning at the end of the unit. I would use an essay, exam, or project to gage the students …show more content…
Not matter how great the lesson might be, if the environment of the classroom is not conducive to student learning the students will not learn. In my 45 hours of observation I saw a number of good strategies that provide the students with an effective environment for student learning. One of the techniques that I found working in the classrooms was bunching desks together in groups of four. This created an environment where each group was regulating itself as well as creating a collaborative learning environment. In the classes that I saw this bunching I noticed that it created and maintained an effective collaborative student learning environment. I would use this strategy to increase student learning through collaboration and put students that have a tendency to disrupt class with students who are actively engaged in learning in hopes that the group would regulate the disruptive student. If that did not work I would put the disruptive students group close to where I was teaching to minimize the disruption of the entire class by quickly negotiating through the disruption without disturbing the entire