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Defining Good Teaching

While we agree on many of the elements that go into teaching, each of us has our own personal conception of good teaching. However, there are elements of good teaching that guide what we suggest one should do to increase the chances that good teaching will occur. Defining good teaching is risky business. If one were to ask ten people to define good teaching, one might find common elements, but is highly unlikely that any two of the ten would be exactly the same. Many will describe a good teacher that they had in the past. Even experts have been known to say, “I know one when I see one.”

If one were to list all the elements of good teaching the list would fill pages, probably a book’s worth. Good teaching requires planning. Good teachers think through what they want their students to take away from the lessons these teachers teach. Planning may include detailed lesson plans or it may include more informal lesson planning. Seat-of-the pants teaching invites disaster. While many teachers like to “wing it,” the best advice was given years ago by Louis Pasteur who said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Here is our short list which includes the three basic generalizations we make about teaching:

First, describing student learning in terms of a change in behavior is imperative. Objectives not only describe what students will take away from the lesson, objectives describe how one should teach and assess.

Second, effective strategies usually have students “doing” in a classroom the behaviors described in objectives. Selecting strategies is almost that simple. Obviously there are other factors that should affect strategy selection, but the “doing” factor is the best place to start. The same goes for assessment in that valid assessment requires a student to “do” the behavior described in the objective.

Third, effective strategies include elements that increase the chance that students will retain what is learned and then be able to transfer or apply that which is learned to a situation outside the classroom. Briefly, these elements, which are elaborated on in the tutorial, are: