Highly Effective Teaching

The fall evaluations came out recently and yours truly has received rankings in the highest bracket in all of my classes for another semester.  It's funny too because it was the same day a student actually said the following to me: "I showed up to class and when I realized your teaching schedule had changed, I was like, 'Man, this teacher is super nice, but I need Professoressa Jessica back.'"  Well, it's true, I'm not the nicest teacher in the world . . . but apparently I'm effective, so whatever!  

In honor of a request from the lovely and talented Ms. Cari, here are my top ten effective teaching techniques.  Hopefully I'm not giving away my secret weapons!

1.  I never reuse lesson plans year to year or even class to class.  Yes it's more work, but each class has its own personality and a "standard" lesson plan will not work.  I've also never taught the "perfect" class and until I do, I'll never reteach from the previous years' daily plans.

2.  I plan each lesson three times.  Yes it's overkill, I am very aware, but it works.  Once on the weekend with a weekly goal and a skeleton daily plan.  Once on the day before the lesson with a specific list of activities, exercises, etc.  And finally, the morning of the lesson adjusting for time, review, and questions from the previous lesson.

3.  The weather will affect your teaching.  Take today for example: the flood arrived in Texas.  That means about 5% of the class will not show, 50% will be depressed, and the other 50% will brood disruptively about their wet socks.  Probably not best to teach a super heavy lesson seeing as you'll probably end up reteaching the majority of it later.

4.  Students only have an attention span of about 27 minutes.  Plan to use the middle 27 minutes as your "meat and potatoes" if you will.  If you teach a 50 minute class, the first ten minutes are the "appetizer," review and questions from the previous lesson.  Then a "palette cleansing sorbet," a transition exercise that hopefully gets their heads out of last time's lesson and into the present.  Now it's "entree" time and make it quick, concise, and remember, you've only got them for 27 minutes.  That leaves you 8 minutes for "dessert," open-ended activities or games that will wind down your lesson and hopefully end on a good note.  

5.  College students are just tall elementary school students.  If you don't assign them homework every night, chances are they'll leave everything to the last minute (or perhaps not do it at all).  You can help them along by assigning daily work or you can gripe about their lack of time management skills later.  Either way they're going to need a little help planning and managing their time.

6.  You will need to embarrass yourself at some point, it's a rite of passage.  I can usually be found with a big white chalk mark across the butt of my black pants, pink ink smudged on my face, dancing around like a lunatic acting something out.  Have you ever made up a song about grammatical elements?  I have a whole arsenal.  Embarrassing?  Yes.  Effective?  Yes.

7.  Use your colleagues.  They always have good ideas you haven't thought of and you probably do something great that they haven't considered before.  

8.  Consider your tendencies.  I cradle the book like a baby even though I rarely look at it, I cannot write in a straight line on the board and I always favor the left side of the room.  Therefore, I try to make an effort to spend time in all the "neighborhoods" of the class and put my book down for a nap.

9.  Teaching is like comedy . . . if you can pull something funny in from the beginning of the class for your finale, you can hook 'em good.

10.  Always remember that what you think is easy or common sense is not to your students.  What you think is difficult may be insurmountable for them.  Remember how you're feeding them a "meal" each lesson?  You'll probably have to cut their meat for them; into teeny, weeny, little bite size pieces.