Most teachers care about the results of their students. There is no doubt that educators influence how well their children are in school. However, if you study thousands of studies on this topic, it is obvious that some learning strategies have a much greater impact than others. What is effective learning? What are its methods, means, forms and techniques?
Clear lesson objectives
Strategies to provide effective evidence-based learning include the following points:
- Goals. Of decisive importance is what, in your opinion, students should learn during each lesson. The clear objectives of the lesson help you and your students focus on every aspect of your lesson, on what matters most.
- Show and tell. As a rule, you should start your lessons with a kind of show, performance and story. Simply put, a story involves sharing information or knowledge with your students. After you have clearly communicated what you want your children to know and be able to tell by the end of the lesson, you must tell them what they need to know and show them how to solve the tasks you want to they were able to solve. You don’t want to spend your whole lesson on children listening to you, so focus on your show and tell us what’s most important.
Understanding Questions
Teachers usually spend a lot of class time asking questions. However, few teachers use questions to test understanding in class. But you should always check your understanding before moving on to the next part of your lesson. Effective teaching methods such as answering at the blackboard, frontal survey and “tell a friend” will help to check your understanding before moving from the show to the next part of the lesson.
A lot of practice
Practice helps students maintain the knowledge and skills that they have acquired, and also gives you another opportunity to test your understanding of the material studied. Your students should practice what they learned during your presentation, which in turn should reflect the purpose of the lesson. Practice is not meaningless employment in the lesson. An effective form of teaching involves solving certain problems that have already been modeled. Students learn information better when their teacher forces them to practice the same things for a period of time.
Using effective learning tools
This includes memory cards, block diagrams, and Venn diagrams. You can use them to help students summarize what they have learned and to understand the relationship between aspects of what you taught them. Discussing a graphical resume is a good way to end your show and preliminary story. You can refer to it again at the end of the lesson.
Feedback
This is the "breakfast for the champions" and is used by the best educators around the world. Simply put, feedback involves understanding how students completed a specific task together in ways that help them improve their outcome. Unlike praise, which focuses on the student rather than the task, the feedback provides a tangible understanding of what they did well, where they are and how they can improve their results.
Flexibility
This is another effective teaching method. Be flexible about how long it takes to learn. The idea that, given enough time, each student can learn effectively, is not as revolutionary as it seems. This is at the heart of how we teach martial arts, swimming and dancing.
When you master the mastery of learning, you differentiate yourself differently. You keep your learning goals the same, but change the time you give each child to succeed. Within the limitations of a crowded curriculum, this may be easier said than done, nevertheless we can all do this to some degree.
Group work
The most effective teaching methods include group work. This method is not new and can be seen in every class. However, productive group work is rare. Working in groups, students usually rely on the person who seems most competent and capable of solving the problem. Psychologists call this phenomenon social idleness.
To increase the productivity of groups, it is necessary to choose the tasks that are assigned to them and the individual roles that each member of the group plays. All you need to do is ask groups to complete tasks that all members of the group can successfully complete. You must also make sure that each member of the group is personally responsible for one step in the task.
Learning strategies
Effective training systems include various strategies. It is important not only to teach the content, but also how to use appropriate strategies. When teaching children to read, you need to teach them how to remember unknown words, as well as strategies that will deepen their understanding. When teaching math, you must teach them problem solving strategies. There are strategies underlying the effective implementation of many tasks that you ask students to complete at school. And you need to tell students about these strategies, show them how to use them, and give them oriented practice before asking them to use them on their own.
Education of metacognition
Many teachers believe that they encourage students to use metacognition when they simply ask students to use effective learning strategies such as reading relationships or self-verbalization to solve problems. Encouraging the use of strategies is important, but it is not metacognition.
Metacognition involves thinking about your options, your choices and your results, and this has an even greater impact on the results than the learning strategies themselves. Pupils may think about how effective a form of learning they would choose after thinking about their success or lack thereof before continuing or changing their chosen strategy. When using metacognition, it is important to think about which strategies to use before choosing one of them.
Conditions for a highly effective educational process
During the educational process, the conditions for effective learning must be created.
- Think about the relationship between teacher and student. This interaction has a major impact on learning, as well as on the “classroom climate”. It is important to create a classroom environment that “constantly requires more,” while reaffirming students' self-esteem. Success should be attributed to effort, not ability.
- An important role is played by behavior management. It would seem that this is not as important as knowledge of the subject and classroom instruction, but behavior is a powerful factor contributing to the success of the teacher. But classroom management — including how well the teacher uses class time, coordinates classroom resources, and behavior management — is noted as an extremely important condition for effective learning.
- Proper relationships with colleagues and parents. Teacher's professional behavior, including peer support and communication with parents, also has a moderate impact on effective student learning.
What can teachers do to improve their skills?
What do teachers need for professional growth? Keep track of your successful colleagues, just sit and watch how respected and dedicated employees practice their craft. Teaching can become an isolating profession if we allow it to be so, and getting into other people's classes destroys these walls and helps teachers grow in the process. Use technology to see others in action. You will not only be able to select specific tips for improving your skills - organizing work, increasing the effectiveness of homework, etc., but you will also be able to establish contacts with colleagues who otherwise would not be available to you.
Listen to those who see you every day. The irony in evaluating a teacher’s work is that we don’t offer to listen to those who see this the most — the students. Allowing children to share their thoughts about your practice and its effectiveness requires a high level of trust in them and a great deal of comfort in your ability to receive feedback. However, this feedback can be very valuable.
There is one effective learning tool - an open question at the end of the test, where students could comment on how well the teacher helped them learn the material. Going beyond the curriculum is the habit of the best teachers. Remember to study your topic extensively and try to consistently look for ways to bring new information to your practice.
Organization of effective training: methods and mechanisms
To survive and prosper, you need to be organized and disciplined. Effective teaching of children of high school age and university students is carried out using three approaches to teaching:
1. Lectures. They are organized for the entire class and determine the content and volume of the taught material. They do not necessarily teach everything that you need to know, but provide the basis for further study of topics through other forms of training (practical work, control) and through independent reading. It is important to visit and interact with the information provided. One must be prepared to take notes from the main points and determine which areas of the lecture are less clear in order to consider them later. Most lecturers provide some form of handout. Handouts are not intended to replace a lecture, but are provided to give you a “break” for closer interaction with the lecture.
2. Practice. Practical work, as a rule, serves to illustrate the topic from lectures and transfer the skills necessary for applying these concepts in a practical or experimental form. All practical work should be approached with a positive attitude and strive to learn from examples or experiments.
3. Supervisions are small group training sessions that are a unique learning opportunity. This is a good chance to clarify any confusing points from lectures or practical exercises and a good way to assess understanding and progress.
High Performance Class Features
There are some kind of criteria for measuring how productively you use effective learning tools. So, we list the characteristics of a highly effective learning environment:
1. Pupils ask good questions.
This is not a good result, but it is very important for the entire learning process. The role of curiosity has been studied (and perhaps not well understood and underestimated). Many teachers make students ask questions at the beginning of the lesson, often to no avail. Cliche questions that reflect a lack of understanding of the content may impede further mastery of the skills. But the fact remains that if children cannot ask questions, even in elementary school, something is wrong here. Good questions can often be more important than answers.
2. Ideas come from various sources.
Ideas for lessons, reading, tests, and projects should come from a variety of sources. If they all come from narrow slivers of resources, you run the risk of being stuck in one direction. It can be both good and not very good. Alternative? Consider sources such as professional and cultural mentors, the community, experts on a specific issue outside of education, and even the students themselves.
3. Various models and techniques of effective training are used.
Inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, direct learning, peer education, schooling, electronic, mobile, inverted class - the possibilities are endless. Most likely, none of them is incredible enough to satisfy every element of the content, curriculum, and diversity of students in your class. A hallmark of a high-performance classroom is diversity, which also has the side effect of improving your long-term ability as an educator.
4. The training is personalized according to various criteria.
Personalized learning is probably the future of education, but at the moment, the burden of student routing lies almost entirely with the classroom teacher. This makes personalization and even consistent differentiation a problem. One answer is personalization of learning. By adjusting your pace, entry points, and severity accordingly, you’ll be more likely to discover what students really need.
5. Success criteria are balanced and transparent.
Students should not be aware of what “success” looks like in a high-performance class. It also should not be completely weighted by “participation”, assessment results, attitude or other individual factors, but rather, be meaningfully melted into an integrated structure that makes sense - not for you, your colleagues or an expert book on your shelf, but for yourself students.
6. Learning habits are constantly being modeled.
Cognitive, metacognitive and behavioral “good things” are constantly being modeled. Curiosity, perseverance, flexibility, priority, creativity, collaboration, review, and even the classic habits of the mind are all great ideas to start with. Therefore, often what students learn from the people around them is less direct didactic and more indirect and observant.
7. There are ongoing opportunities for practice.
Old thinking is being redefined. Old errors are reflected further. Complex ideas are rethought from new angles. Divergent concepts are contrasted. New and effective teaching technologies are used.
No matter what, important - how
The characteristics of effective learning are divided into three groups: play and study, active learning, creation, and critical thinking.
- Game and study. Children naturally play and explore everything in order to satisfy their innate curiosity. They manipulate the environment, test it and draw their own conclusions without any hidden intent. They react with an attitude of open-mindedness to what happens as a result of their experiments. The nature of their learning is always practical, and the children are the authors who shape the experience. They use their knowledge and understanding of the world and bring it to their research. Using their imagination and creativity, they improve their understanding and explore their interests. When children play and research, when they feel motivated to do so, they are also naturally more willing to take risks and try new experiences.
- Active learning. Learning is effective when it is motivated. Then attention and concentration on experience and activity are at their peak level. When children are delighted with what they do, they become completely absorbed in the activity and focused on its details. They will also be more likely to remain motivated enough to try again if they fail, overcome difficulties and improve their work. They will do this to achieve their personal goals, and not just the goals of others, which is necessary to maintain their long-term success.
- Creation and critical thinking. Children understand the world when they can freely explore it, when they use their existing knowledge to creatively experiment with the environment, solve problems and improve their experience. They test their own hypotheses, come up with their own ideas on how to transfer their experience further. Using what they already know, children connect different interdisciplinary concepts, and this helps them predict, find meaning, organize events and objects in sequence, or develop an understanding of cause and effect. Organizing their own experience in their own way, children learn to approach tasks, plan, change their plans and strategies.
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