TEACHING STRATEGIES

Teaching Strategies

Teaching Strategies

Teaching Strategies

The old adage "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is equally true of teaching strategies. If the only classroom teaching strategy you know is traditional lecturing, that's the teaching tool that you're likely to use for all classroom situations. If, on the other hand, you have more tools in your toolbox, you will have the opportunity to choose the most appropriate tool for the task at hand. The two teaching strategies selected are:

Effective discussion

Concept sketches

Effective discussion

Discussion is an excellent way to engage students in thinking and analyzing or in defending one side of an issue, rather than listening to lecture. Students must also respond to one another, rather than interacting intellectually only with the instructor. Good discussion can be difficult to generate, however. Clicking "more information" below will take you to some tips for having a good discussion in class and a sample template for class discussion.

The primary benefit is intelligent discussion by students during a class in which students are engaged in thinking and analyzing or in defending a side, rather than in listening to lecture. Students must also respond to one another, rather than interacting intellectually only with the instructor. This technique has several potential drawbacks:

•The primary drawback is that the technique can consume more time than lecture would for a comparable amount of material to be delivered. In discussion, though, students actively engage the material.

•Some students tend to dominate discussions. Some students come poorly prepared, no matter what the incentive.

•Discussion can go astray from the intended topic. This does not necessarily mean disaster, if the discussion leader can either steer the discussion back on track or profit from the digression.

•Assessing student learning associated with a discussion is potentially difficult. Ways of dealing with this include

1) giving students a grade for the discussion based on quality of comments,

2) asking questions about the topics on an exam,

3) giving a follow-up written assignment, and 4) grading the written preparation for the discussion.

Concept Sketches

Concept sketches (different from concept maps) are sketches or diagrams that are concisely annotated with short statements that describe the processes, concepts, and interrelationships shown in the sketch. Having students generate their own concept sketches is a powerful way for students to process concepts and convey them to others. Concept sketches can be used as preparation for class, as an in-class activity, in the field or lab, or as an assessment tool.

The beautiful, detailed diagrams in geology textbooks look wonderful to us but commonly don't accomplish for students what we would like them to:

Many students simply skip through the textbook without really examining or internalizing the figures, or they fail to appreciate the value of these figures or use them in constructing their own knowledge.

Most students do not know how to interpret scientific illustrations, nor can they identify the important factors represented in each (Lowe, 1989, 1993; Schwartz, 1993).

While students are commonly able to label a diagram with appropriate labels, they are commonly unable ...