MSC4. Principles of Teaching

1. Principles of Teaching
1. Share intellectual control with students.
Building a sense of shared ownership is an effective
way of achieving high levels of student interest and
engagement. It can be achieved in many ways; many
of these involve some form of formal or informa l
negotiation about parts or all of the content, tasks or
assessment. Another complementary approach is to
ensure that students' questions, comments and
suggestions regularly influence, initiate (or
terminate) what is done.
2. Look for occasions when students can work
out part (or all) of the content or
instructions.
Learning is almost always better if students work
something out for themselves, rather than reading it
or hearing it. This is not always feasible of course,
but often it is. It can involve short, closed tasks: e.g.
'if the units of density are grams per cm work out the
formula by which we calculate the density of a
substance from the volume and mass of an object
made of that substance'. It can also involve much
longer open-ended tasks: e.g. ‘Here is a photo of the
ruins of Machu Pichu, work out as much as you can,
from this photo, about the Incas and their fate'.
3. Provide opportunities for choice and
independent decision-making.
Students respond very positively to the freedom to
make some decisions about what or how they will
work. To be effective, the choices need to be
genuine, not situations where there is really only one
possibility. These may include choices about which
area of content to explore, the level of demand (do
more routine tasks or fewer more demanding ones),
the form of presentation (poster, PowerPoint
presentation, role play, model etc.), and how to
manage their time during a day or lesson.
4. Provide diverse range of ways of
experiencing success.
Raising intellectual self-esteem is perhaps the most
important aspect of working with low and
moderately achieving students. Success via
interactive discussion, question-asking, role-plays
and tasks allowing high levels of creativity often
results in greater confidence and hence persistence
in tackling other written tasks. Publicly recognizing
and praising good learning behaviors is useful here.
5. Promote talk which is exploratory, tentative
and hypothetical.
This sort of talk fosters link-making and, as our
research shows, commonly reflects high levels of
intellectual engagement. Teaching approaches such
as delayed judgment, increased wait-time, and
promotion of ‘What if' questions and use of P.O.Es
are all helpful. The classroom becomes more fluid
and interactive.
6. Encourage students to learn from other
students' questions and comments.
The (student) conception that they can learn from
other student’s ideas, comments and questions
develops more slowly than the conception that
discussion is real and useful work. The classroom
dynamics can reach new, very high levels when
ideas and debate bounce around from student to
student, rather than student to teacher.
7. Build a classroom environment that
supports risk-taking.
We underestimated the very high levels of perceived
risk that accompanies many aspects of quality
learning for most students, even in classes where
such learning is widespread. It is much safer, for
example, to wait for the teacher's answer to appear
than to suggest one yourself. Building trusts in the
teacher and other students and training students to
disagree without personal put-downs are essential to
widespread display of good learning behaviors.
8. Use a wide variety of intellectually
challenging teaching procedures.
There are at least two reasons for this, one is that
teaching procedures that counter passive learning
and promote quality learning require student energy
and effort. Hence they need to be varied frequently
to retain their freshness. The other is that variety is
another source of student interest.

2. 9. Use teaching procedures that are designed
to promote specific aspects of quality
learning.
One of the origins of PEEL was the belief that
students could be taught how to learn, in part by
devising a range of teaching procedures to variously
tackle each of a list of poor learning tendencies, for
example failing to link school work to relevant out-of-
school experiences. The variety in (8) is not
random and one basis for selecting a particular
teaching procedure is to promote a particular aspect
of quality learning.
10. Develop students' awareness of the big
picture: how the various activities fit
together and link to the big ideas.
Many, if not most students, do not perceive
schooling to be related to learning key ideas and
skills. Rather, they see their role as completing tasks
and so they focus on what to do not why they are
doing it. Much teacher talk, particularly in skills
based areas such as Mathematics, Grammar and
Technology reinforces this perception. For these
reasons, students (including primary students)
commonly do not link activities and do not make
links to unifying, 'big ideas'.
11. Regularly raise students' awareness of the
nature of different aspects of quality
learning.
This is a key aspect of learning how to learn.
Students typically have no vocabulary to discuss
learning. it is very helpful to build a shared
vocabulary and shared understandings by regular,
short debriefing about some aspect of the learning
that has just occurred. Having a rotating student
monitor of a short list of good learning behaviors can
be very helpful.
12. Promote assessment as part of the learning
process.
Students (and sometimes teachers) typically see
assessments as purely summative: something that
teachers do to students at the end of a topic. Building
the perception that (most) assessment tasks are part
of the learning process includes encouraging
students learning from what they did and did not do
well as well as having students taking some
ownership of and responsibility for aspects of
assessment. It also includes teachers ensuring that
they are assessing for a range of aspects of quality
learning (e.g. if you want students linking differe nt
lessons then reward that in your assessment) and for
a wider range of skills than is often the case.