Teaching, Educational Psychology, and Active Learning

A fundamental characteristic that expert teachers all have in common is a general working knowledge of the fundamentals of effective teaching. This "expertise" involves much more than just knowing a series of effective teaching techniques. Among other things, it includes an instinctive ability to quickly assess the subtleties of an entire classroom environment, and to respond quickly and effectively. Unfortunately, this is a very difficult thing to teach a teacher-to-be, and, in fact, most of these teachers have learned these skills from years of dedicated practice. (Which relates to "active" learning we'll discuss, briefly in a moment.) The most important point is that there are some fundamental characteristics of teaching that are common to all effective teachers at all levels, and we will make an effort to address some of these in this class. But it is also important for you to understand that this is not something that comes easily, and without experience. However, hopefully, by being aware of some of these characteristics, it will make the process of developing and practicing them a little easier.

One of these fundamental characteristics, which you will notice across all the examples cited in the text, is that good teachers promote "active" learning in students. They encourage students to actively engage the material by encouraging them to manipulate it, create it, and to relate it to "real world" concepts. For example, you'll read about a sixth grade teacher who has students write and even publish essays they've written on class materials and on their own experience. He even has them act out simulation games related to their materials. You will also read about one of the first educational psychologists to explicitly promote this concept of "active learning", Jerome Bruner, who developed a technique that is still popular in various forms today, "discovery learning." One of the fundamental tenets of discovery learning is that a student should actively "discover" the overall structure of concepts themselves by working with various examples of a concept. So, of example, he might suggest that the best way for you to learn about "active learning" would be for you to try and teach several groups of junior high school students how to do some sort of math problem. After some time you would most likely figure out or "induce" that they learn the technique most effectively by "actively" working problems that include the concept.

Unfortunately, "pure" discovery learning has some limitations, some of which you'll read about in the "point - counterpoint" in the text. One fundamental limitation is that, in its purest form, a student receives virtually no direction from the instructor, which, as you may imagine, can be very inefficient at least, and can even result in a student learning the incorrect concept. This has lead educational researchers to the general conclusion that "guided discovery" is generally more effective. Another fundamental problem is that setting up a "discovery learning" classroom, or a classroom that relies on active learning, in general, can be a very labor intensive activity for the instructor, and can also be quite a chore in terms of classroom control. Of course, another characteristic of the most effective teachers, which may not surprise you, is that they put more thought and effort into class preparation.