Theories of Teaching

There are a myriad of ways to conduct a teaching episode, which supports the notion that there is no single ‘right way’ or even ‘best way’. In that sense, I consider context is key to determining the best way for your topic, your students and your resources. Every group of students has their own personality, and the session that worked really well last year could fail miserably to engage the students in the next cohort. It doesn’t mean that suddenly the session has become poorly designed, more likely that the groups just have different requirements and characteristics.

It is therefore important that teachers consider their group prior to delivering a particular session. It is also worthwhile to have a toolbox of different strategies that can be switched in if the group is not responding well to the planned activity.

This section of my blog is dedicated to theories relevant to teaching, with the aim of giving you some food for thought. It is complemented by the ‘Activities for Learners’ section, which offers some practical strategies for use in teaching sessions.

What kind of teacher are you?

We all plan to deliver teaching in the best way that we can (that is a broad assumption, but you are reading my blog, so I am sticking to it). But if we like to learn in different ways it surely follows that our ‘best guess’ for the perfect session will be intrinsically linked to our own perceptions of what makes a good learning episode.

In order to unpick my own perceptions of teaching, I found the work of David Wall (from the University of Dundee) incredibly helpful. In his article ‘Determining your teaching style‘ (2007), readers are asked to complete a 24-item questionnaire which provides an indication of how well they identify with each of the six proposed teaching types:

  1. The all-round teacher
  2. The student-centered teacher
  3. The official curriculum teacher
  4. The no nonsense teacher
  5. The big conference teacher
  6. The one off teacher

The original article can be accessed here.

In a group of learners with different learning preferences the best the teacher can hope for is to please all of the learners, for some of the time. This is achieved by having a wide range of activities to appeal to every learning preference at least once during each session if possible – variety is indeed the spice of life after all.

References

Wall, D. (2007). Determining your teaching style [online]. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Wall11/publication/253045944_Determining _your_teaching_style/links/56421ad408ae6e36ab55d476/Determining-your-teaching-style.pdf (accessed 12/12/2019)