Teaching Techniques, Essay Example

Perhaps an adequate definition of teaching techniques is the following: Teaching techniques are methods used by teachers to help students grasp the material they are being taught. If we use this definition, the first point that maybe comes to mind is that the technique will vary according to the material. This means that, for example, teaching someone about Ancient Chinese history will have a different teaching approach than teaching advanced calculus. At the same time, there are different types of students who have different ways of learning: some teaching techniques may simply not be effective for particular students because they do not emphasize the student’s strengths. Hence, when we think about questions concerning teaching techniques, we also have to consider crucial matter of context. Evaluating teaching techniques in other words can not be separated from contextual questions, such as “who are the students?” and “what is the nature of the material being taught”?

Considering the effectiveness of teaching methods according to the context of students shows the different ways in which students learn. For example, some students are visual learners and some students are auditory learners. If a teacher incorporates a method that emphasizes visual learning, saying showing images on a screen or projector, he or she may successfully communicate to the visual learners in the class, but fail to communicate to the audio learners. The reverse also obviously holds true. For this reason, an effective teaching method should be considered to be one that is dynamic: it would be one that tries to minimize the differences in which individual students learn to as help secure the greatest success rate of the class as an entirety. Hence, a teacher could combine visual and auditory learning aids so as to try to make sure no student is being left out.

At the same time, some subject matters would seem to emphasize certain ways of learning. For example, in mathematics there seems to be a cumulative method in teaching, whereby the student has to learn some basic rules and then build upon them to understand anything. A simple example: if one does not know what an equal sign means, then it is impossible to perform 2 + 2 or advanced calculus. Basic rules are taught, and over a period of time, one’s ability in math improves. Teaching methods, in such subject matters, therefore derive their effectivity by the extent to which the students can master the rules that serve as the foundation of the discipline.

This is not the case for a subject such as history. One does not have to start with ancient history and then move forward to contemporary history. History can therefore be approached as a teaching method in a more adventurous way. Arguably, this is because the narrative essence of history. By this I mean that history can be told as a story: it is the story of human beings’ lives. For this reason, every story becomes subject to a potential interpretation. Certainly, in history there are certain historical facts to be communicated, such as when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas. But history is not only a quantitative discipline with numbers, clearly. This is where effective teaching methods can involve imagination and creativity: asking students how they would imagine themselves, for example, in the situation of a Native tribe first encountering the Spaniards.

In conclusion, I have attempted to emphasize the contextual nature of teaching methods. Effectivity in teaching is crucial because we want students to be successful. But the subject matters that students learn, as well as the students themselves, are diverse. This means that when thinking about effective teaching methods, we have to be sensitive to context. The most successful teaching methods are therefore those that are understanding of context and try to emphasize strengths.