Who Teaches the Best?

While meeting with the new Advisory Board for the Center for Teaching and Learning I listened as they described what they did. My mind wandered off, reflecting on their choice of words as they talked about teaching and learning.  All of them were asked to be a member because they have a reputation for good, solid teaching.  However they all teach differently; very differently.

My guess is that half of them have never read a scholarly  article in an educational journal outside of their discipline about differential learners, engaging students in guided inquiry, facilitating group discussions, the merits of behaviorism or diagnostic assessment to learn students preconceptions and misconceptions.  Never the less they all use these teaching strategies. They just didn't know the educational jargon or buzz words.

They have activities that vary so they can assess students fairly, they work with student projects in and outside the classroom, they divide students into groups to do projects or work on problems, and they know what misconceptions and misinformation is common in their content area and watch out for it.

For fun, I matched the their teaching styles to the philosophizer and definition of what they were doing with the how they are identified in educational jargon.

A discussion in LinkedIn was phrased on what type of "prophets" countries and individual schools adopted.  Education is a field of trends and this often translates into the "right" teaching style that all should adopt (until the next trend comes along).   We often toss out the baby with the bathwater in our zeal to evangelize  the most popular trend in teaching.It is interesting to watch the evolution of teaching.  Once popular behaviorism was tossed out for inquiry learning.

Remember the old teaching machines?  Watch this YouTube video if you don't.   Now behaviorism is reappearing, polished and sparkling in game based learning.  It is giving behaviorism new life in a much more powerful  tool.

The increase funding  from National Science Foundation in undergraduates in research is guided discovery.

Clickers, used for quizzes, make a fun behavioral activity.  Pair them with groups you have peer learning.  Use them to incite lively debate and you are facilitating students.  Use them in a lab, outdoor, or clinical setting you are conducing guided inquiry.


Most of the advisory board and other faculty around campus would call all the above - teaching. So, we are going to focus on good teaching: really, really good teaching!