Teaching Tips

Enter the classroom briskly and joyfully conveying to students the message, "I enjoy my discipline, I enjoy you, and I enjoy the act of teaching through which you and my discipline can meet."  Walk around as you speak.  Use facial expressions to convey your own reaction to a concept being addressed ? whether that reaction be acceptance, amusement, or disgust.  Use gestures, keeping hands apart and reaching out to students as though inviting them into your own enthusiastic sphere.  Nothing is less motivating to students during those "blues times" than a static, solemn, arms-folded dispenser of facts.

Get to know your students as the persons they are outside your classroom.  Learn who is in band, choir, athletics, and who is currently involved in a theatre production.  Keep current on who is achieving what in the Ambrose community.  Acknowledge these achievement with a brief mention. Even elicit a brief round of applause.  This can be done just prior to the time when the "start bell" sounds, so that no teaching time is sacrificed.

"Tell them what you are going to tell them.  Tell them. Tell them what you told them."  "Tell them what you are going to tell them" ? this provides an "advance organizer" so that students know what to expect.  "Tell them" ? well, don’t only tell.  More on this later. "Tell them what you told them" ? OK ? a summary never hurts.  Better still, "Make them tell you what you have told them."  Have a pack of student name cards and draw names at random ? always replacing a "victim’s" name in the pack so that no one is ever off the hook.  Knowing that they might be responsible for giving closure to a lesson will keep students at least endeavoring to absorb the main points of your presentation.

Open your lesson in a way likely to engage student attention.  Mention a current event that relates to upcoming concepts.  Ask a challenging question to which students can discover the answer by paying attention.  Read an appropriate poem or a brief literary passage or show a picture that captures the essence of your day’s topic.  Share a personal experience and invite others to do the same. All these serve as "advance organizers" giving students "hooks" on which they can hang in an orderly fashion new concepts they will be gaining that day. 

Two students make be equally intelligent, yet learn best in quite different ways.  Realize that your class will contain auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners and make sure that each lesson makes students listen, look, and write or do.  Nearly half of college-age students are quite concrete-operational meaning that they learn best when actions and objects are used in teaching, or when teaching is related to their own concrete experiences.  Make presentations object- and experience-centered whenever possible.  Use pictures, simulations, realia ? not only words ? to convey concepts

Periodically, break up the lecture mode with opportunities for student to engage in discussion with their peers.  Present a question and have students do a quick "pair-share."  Present a very open-ended question and have students generate as many responses as possible.  For maximal response generation, three students per group is the magic number.  Never form discussion groups larger than four of five unless you have a substantial block of time to dedicate to group learning.  Group dynamics become too complicated for efficiency with larger groups.

Students have not just one (the traditional verbal-mathematical-spatial), but many "intelligences" including musical intelligence, artistic intelligence, naturalistic intelligence, as well kinesthetic, inter-personal, intra-personal, spiritual, and existential intelligences.  Use of media and cooperative learning to engage some of these often under-acknowledged intelligences. Relating your discipline to other disciplines is another valuable strategy. The more intelligences that are engaged, the more likely students are to remain alert and learning.

To prevent student drift, alternate periods of high-intensity concept presentation and note-taking with lower-intensity periods of group discussion, audiovisual presentation, simulations, etc.  You can easily sense by monitoring students’ facial expressions, body language, and response level when it is time for a change of pace and mode of instruction. 

If possible, make the end of one lesson be the start of the next.  Present a question to which students are expected to bring an answer to the next session.  Have students open a session by reiterating what was learned during the previous session and then show them how what is to follow will be an extension of what they have already learned.  But still use a novel "Launch" at times.  The best way to fight the bio-rhythm blues is through diversity.

If you have powered yourself and your students through an 8:00, have a needed cup of coffee in the Beehive or Bookstore.  If you have powered yourself and your students through a 3:30, go home and have a beer.

Some students have bio-rhythm blues throughout the entire academic day.