Effective Teaching Behavior

One of the prerequisites of a successful learning process is the way the teachers build their teaching strategies and behaviour. The appropriate teaching behaviour leads to a warm classroom atmosphere and good academic results among students. The techniques suggested in this article have been found effective for all my students at all levels.   

• Teaching relevant knowledge rather than just coursebook material 

A lot of teachers are worried about covering the syllabus and don’t take care of the quality of the material they cover and how much the students remember. Effective teachers are more concerned about the knowledge the students get, they concretize aims for each lesson, use authentic materials and not afraid to reduce the textbook material so that the students benefit as much as possible from it. Start each lesson by telling students what they are going to learn, how new material is connected to what they have learned before and to real-life usage.

• Explicit instruction

Explicit instruction is a way to teach skills or concepts to students using direct, structured instruction. If you assign a task, provide a model before students begin working.  A well-designed rubric is a good way to be explicit about your expectations.  Keep the models in front of students, so they can compare their work against a standard.

• Errorless Learning

Another effective teaching behaviour is errorless learning. It means that an instruction is presented at the level at which students can achieve success, with a minimal number of errors.  Often teachers reframe, redesign a learning task by teaching in smaller steps, providing more examples, using more visuals, and checking frequently for student understanding.  

• Active Involvement of Students 

Teachers should encourage students’ active involvement.  It can be done through pair or group work activities, students delivering a part of the lesson (assigning what they need to cover beforehand). This is a great tool since it reduces teacher talking time and makes learning more pleasurable.

• Providing Practice Opportunities

Effective teachers also provide numerous practice opportunities for students. For maximum effectiveness, practice must be sufficient, varied, distributed, and integrated into new learning tasks.

• Monitoring of Teacher Talking Time

All of us have surely listened to someone whose speech was difficult to grasp.  Perhaps he talked too fast, used words you never heard before, used very complicated sentence structure, or put so many ideas together that you simply could not follow what he was saying. Sometimes teachers do the same — present too much verbal information in a short period of time, they use vocabulary which is beyond students’ language level. Consider tape-recording yourself presenting a lesson. Take special note of your vocabulary. Try to have short and explicit instructions.  Teachers need to use proper pacing.  In addition to recording themselves, teachers can monitor each other and then give feedback. 

• Giving Feedback to Students 

Finally, effective teachers frequently assess and provide timely and corrective feedback to students. To know what to teach, you need to be aware of which students are learning and which students are falling behind. By having short chats after each lesson with students individually, you can have a general understanding of what they like and dislike about the classes and how you can further improve the quality of your lessons. 

• Get Well-prepared for Each Lesson

Effective teachers must have all the materials, flashcards ready before the lesson. They must have an in-depth lesson plan with anticipated problems and their solutions. Effective teachers know how to plan properly and always have Plan B if something goes wrong. 

• Cater to a Variety of Learning Styles 

Some students are more visual, others are clearly more auditory learners. The teacher’s role is to identify each student’s learning style and cater the activities accordingly so that all learners are reached. 

All these techniques have been tried and tested in my classes and led to tangible academic results. Surely, if each teacher works on improving his skills to cater to student needs and increase his effectiveness, then the learning will be with more progress.