Educational Pedagogy

Even if you weren’t born with some of these qualities, you can develop them.

 

American higher education seems to be experiencing a kind of teaching renaissance. Articles on the subject proliferate on this site and others, suggesting a renewed interest and commitment to the subject across academe.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

On the surface, learning objectives don’t seem all that complicated. You begin with an objective or you can work backwards from the desired outcome. Then you select an activity or assignment that accomplishes the objective or outcome. After completion of the activity or assignment, you assess to discover if students did in fact learn what was proposed. All that’s very appropriate. Teachers should be clear about what students need to know and be able to do when a course ends. But too often that’s where it stops. We don’t go any further in our thinking about our learning objectives. There’s another, more challenging, set of questions that also merit our attention.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Research on the forgetting curve has revealed some shocking statistics. Within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 % of new information. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 % of the new information, and within a week, they will have forgotten 90 % of it. Of course, it’s not the same for everybody, but it’s still pretty disconcerting.

And this fact is the problem with corporate training – most of it goes to waste. Most of what your employees have learned will be forgotten unless you employ what is known as “spaced repetition.”

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Learning anything comes with some kind of labour whether it’s time spent, a search for meaning, or a simple struggle to understand. After all, every learner is different. With those differences will come the process of overcoming learning barriers of every definition. You won’t always see them coming if you’re a teacher, but there are ways to help your learners get over them.

Here we have 6 of the most efficient methods for giving your learners the upper hand with overcoming learning barriers as they appear.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Getting faculty on board with active learning is key to improving student outcomes; as such, incorporating these learning strategies requires buy-in from both instructors and students. Although active learning is any instructional method that engages students, it actually goes beyond engagement and requires students to perform meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing.1 But for faculty, the time and preparation needed to create and deliver these activities can be obstacles.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

In addition to literacy strategies, approaches to assessment, and grouping strategies (among many others), knowing the right teaching strategy for the right academic situation may not be a matter of expertise or training, but memory: out of sight, out of mind, yes?

Which makes the following infographic from fortheteachers.org useful.

While it doesn’t offer definitions and explanations for each strategy (it’s an infographic, not a book), and many great strategies are missing (e.g., 3-2-1, exit slip, project-based learning, accountable talk, ask a question, etc.) it does work well as a kind of reminder for what’s possible, even offering categories for each strategy, from progress monitoring (think-pair-share, KWL charts), to Note-Taking (graphic organizers).

There are 87 instructional strategies listed below, but several are repeated across categories, so let’s call it “50+” strategies.

Via John Evans, Dean J. Fusto, Elizabeth E Charles