Classroom Teaching Tips

Classroom Resources

Contents

• Socractic Questioning [PDF]
• 10 Teaching Tips
• Educational Quotes
• Skip Downing's " On Course " active teaching ideas for student success
• Faculty Development Associates ONLINE RESOURCES by RICHARD LYONS'
• Air War College Learning, Teaching, and Tech Central (LTTC). Loads of useful links on curriculum, faculty development, assessment, research and more.

Teaching Tips

Tip 1: Print 3 PowerPoint slides per page with lines to the right for notes.

Print 3 slides per page with lines to the right for student notes. Printing the lines to the right is done automatically for the 3 slides per page option. Having the lines for note taking is helpful to the students and the size of the slide on the page is usually readable. Four slides to a page provides no place for notes and sometimes makes the slides so small they are difficult to read. Two slides per page is nice but they print toward the center of the page and no lines are provided for notes.

Before you print, choose the "pure black and white" option as opposed to "black and white." This eliminates the possibility of a template design being displayed and obscuring your text.

Tip 2: Create PowerPoint Handouts Without the Lines Across the Text

Even when you choose the "pure black and white" printing option you get lines (outline of a design) across the text with some templates. Two examples are the templates: Blue Diagonals and Soaring. Here are two ways to deal with this.

1. Eliminate the design from the template. This can be done by going to the Master Slide under the View option on the pull down menu. You are now looking at the Master Slide. Place your pointer on some part of the design that is outside a text box and click on the design and hit your delete key and the design will be removed from the Master Slide. Removing it from the Master Slide removes it from all your slides. You can go to the Master Slide and do this before you start making your slides or after you have finished. Now the design is removed from the slides so that when you print the handouts, the design will not obscure any of your text.

However, you may be saying that you want to show your slides in the lecture hall with the design on them because it adds some interest and contrast to the slides. So here is a suggestion.

2. Create your slides just as you normally would and save them. This saved version is what you will show in the lecture hall. Now do a "save as" and rename the file. Now with your renamed file open go to the Master Slide under the View option on the menu bar. With the master up on your screen, delete the design from the slide and resave. Now you can use this version from which to print your handouts.

Tip 3: Getting Your Presentation off to a Good Start

All of us are probably familiar with the phrase, "Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what your told them." Actually, this is pretty good advice. The first few minutes of a presentation is very important and it is the time to give an introduction to your presentation. Think of the introduction as a 3 to 5 minute period in which you are preparing the student for the rest of the class time. In a sense, you are helping the student establish a mental framework or a context. As part of this introduction it is important to have everyone's attention. One way to do this is to stand in front of the podium assuming a friendly but formal posture that says, " When everyone is quite, we will get started." You probably won't have to do this over two or three times and students will get the message. Remember that silence is a powerful communication tool.

Here are some components you might consider including in the introduction to your next presentation.

• A brief content overview/preview
• A rationale for the importance of the content
• Learning objectives for the session

Tip 4: The Three Person Teach

The three person teach refers to a teaching strategy in which the teacher explains something to the class and then the students work in pairs to teach that same content to each other. For example the instructor might explain the process of mitosis to the class. The instructor then asks the students to pair up and explain/teach mitosis to each other. The instruction might be given that each explanation should go no more than 2 minutes. It is well know that we learn something better by teaching it to someone else, thus the phrase "To teach is to learn twice." As a student explains something to another student he often discovers that he doesn't understand something as well as he thought. Thus a form of self -assessment has taken place. Self-assessment is a skill critical to all of our medical students. Additionally as as student listens to his peer he may hear an explanation that is easier to understand than the one given by the teacher. In addition to all of these good things, the three-person teach also forces learning upward on Bloom's Taxonomy from verbal learning (memorization) to comprehension because to explain something in a meaningful way we must comprehend it.

Tip 5: Tips on Giving CME Presentations (Also applies to classroom presentation to students)

Stay within your time limit

Going over your time is the most egregious sin of CME speakers and is easily the most common complaint on feedback forms. Since a certain amount of time is required for questions and herding a large number of participants in and out of the lecture hall, plan to actually speak less than the allotted time. For example, if your talk is slated for 55 minutes, practice it for 40-45 minutes.

Have clear goals for your talk

Have a few main points that you want the audience to come away from the talk with (and, preferably, state them explicitly at the beginning and the end of the talk). The outside limit of major points is probably five and only the most accomplished speakers can do that. Most speakers do best with two or three major points.

Have limited goals for your talk

You have the audience for only a few minutes, so you cannot teach them everything you know about a topic. If they clearly remember two points you made the day after your talk, you are an excellent communicator. If ONE thing you tell them has changed a practice pattern one month later, you are one of the very best.

Avoid the `NBA syndrome'

We all know that in the NBA, only the last two minutes counts. Many CME talks are similar--a huge amount of time is spent on pathophysiology, basic science, etc and all the practical stuff is crammed in at the very end.. Unfortunately, by that time, audience attention has wandered and the last few minutes often have no impact. One way to avoid this is to begin the talk with a case (or several cases) that illustrates a common clinical problem and then shape the rest of the talk to show how the information you have can be used to help solve that problem.

Public speaking is a form of entertainment

You do have to do some things to keep an audience's attention for a prolonged period of time. Be energetic. Use transitions and voice inflections to get messages across. Use brief silences. If your talk lends itself to this approach, do lots of `show and tell' (surgical pictures, x-rays, etc). Use humor if you are comfortable with doing so (but be careful--self-deprecating humor is usually the safest). If you are not an experienced public speaker, practice in front of a mirror, with a tape recorder or to a supportive person.

A short list of `don'ts'

* Don't start with `it is impossible for me to cover this whole topic in 45 minutes'

* Don't use a slide that is too detailed for the audience to follow easily--either break it down into several slides, or provide the full information in the handout with a summary slide for viewing

* Don't wave your laser pointer all over the slide as you talk

Tip 6: Periodically Summarize During a Presentation

Midway through your presentation you may want to stimulate students' attention by summarizing. This can be done a couple of ways. You can provide the summary or you could ask one or more students to provide the summary. You could also provide them some of the summary information and ask student to add to that information. For example, suppose you were making a presentation on the complications of otitis media and you had covered four of the nine complications. You might say, " Thus far we have talked about four complications of Otitis Media, those being, hearing loss, damage to the tympanic membrane and ossicular chain, mastoiditis, and facial nerve paralysis. Before we move on, lets review how these complications occur. As succinctly as possible, explain how hearing loss occurs because of otitis media." You might ask the question to the whole class so that everyone thinks about it and then ask for a volunteer. After a student answers, you would go to the next complication until all four were explained by students. Then to move on with the presentation, you would say, "Now lets move on and talk about the additional five complications."

Tip 7: When Using PowerPoint slides and Handouts Leave Opportunities for Them to Write

Many instructors use PowerPoint slides and handouts. Many of those same instructors make the PowerPoint slides and PowerPoint handouts an exact duplicate of what they verbalize as they present from the podium. With this approach students sometimes say, "Why bother coming to class? I will just pick up the handout and leave." Other students may say, "If the slides, handout, and words coming from the mouth of the instructor are all the same then there is nothing for me to write down. I become inactive and tend to stop paying attention." If you would like to address both of these student responses, you may want to create your slides with a different approach. One easy way to do this is to insert a slide with a question. Ask students to answer the question by writing in the space provided to the right of the slide on the handouts. To use this approach you will want to have only 3 slides per page on the handout. Another approach that can be used in conjunction with the "question slides" is to have some of your slides appear with just key words on them instead of complete sentences. This forces the student to write some notes about the slide and thus gets them mentally engaged. You might not want every slide to be this way but perhaps you choose them carefully so that they are the ones with some very critical information on them and as you show the slide and talke about the content, you say, "These are very important points, be sure and write something down to help you remember them."

Tip 8: Place PowerPoint Presentation on Web

A PowerPoint presentation can be placed on the web and then can be viewed by students with the Internet Explorer browser. Explanatory notes can be placed at the bottom of each slide. This might be an option for instructors who want to assign the students to go through a PowerPoint presentation before coming to class so that a discussion could be conducted on the content.

Tip 9: Some Tips on Giving Feedback (Adapted from December 1997, vol. 1, number 5, issue of Postive Feedback)

1. Handle with care. Use a "desire to help" attitude with the student.
2. Focus your attention. Don'st split your focus with any other activity (e.g. incoming phone calls beepers, etc.) while delivering feedback.
3. Be direct. Vague or general statement don't show the student what needs to be done.
4. Stay objective. don't guess or assume that you know why the student is doing something. Stick to what's factual, and withold judgments about the student's behavior
5. Watch your timing. Feedback is processed most effectively when you deliver it promptly, so that whatever incident you're discussing is gresth in both your minds. Feedback that is saved up over tiem can confus and anger the student.
6. Feedback should be easy to act upon. Offer realistic suggestions and options for change that the student can put into use right away. Don't hammer away at things beyond everone's control.
7. Involve the student in corrective action. Allow the student to work collaboratively with you to come up with some options for change. The more the student feels empowered, the more likely the chances of behavior change.

Tip 10: Presentation Tip: Tell The Learners Where You are Going

When presenting a topic that is complex, it is sometimes easy for some students to "get lost in the details." One way a presenter can help these learners is by giving a broad overview of the topic before launching into the details. To add more clarification the presenter might want to verbalize the path he/she is going to follow to get to the end point. In a sense, when the presenter does this, he/she is providing the student with a cognitive structuring strategy.

Educational Quotes

Teaching as Telling

"By giving up on the notion that teaching at heart consists of Telling, we can begin to envisage other forms of teaching. the minute we let go of the axiom that teaching equals Telling, it is not hard to imagine alternatives." p.5

"One scholar (LIon Gardiner) summarizes some of this research as follows: ...research clearly favors discussion over the lecture as an instructional method when the variables studied are retention of information after a course is over, transfer of knowledge to novel situations, development of skill in thinking or problem solving, or achievement in affective domains, such as motivation for additional learning or change in attitudes--in other words, the kinds of learning we care most about." p. 3

From book: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut by Donald L. Finkel, Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1999, Portsmouth, NH.

Not knowing

"Learning is now lifelong, and ignorance and uncertainty are OK. Learning is about knowing how to find out what you don't know. (See Pencheon's full list of contrasts on the BMJ's website.) These new attitudes need to be shared with patients. Patients may take time to celebrate ignorance in their doctors, but pretending to know when you don't is rapidly becoming old fashioned."
From: article entitled, "I don't know": the three most important words in education. BMJ 1999, 318 (8, May) on-line at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7193/0

Readiness to learn

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." (source not known)

Spoonfeeding

"Spoonfeeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." __E.M. Foster

A teacher who missed something about a student

Yor're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? (pauses to light cigarette) No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, "It's not what you know ...." (Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein)

Thinking

"What did you do in school today, believe or think?" __Ralph Nader quoting his father's daily question to as a child

Instructional Effectiveness

"Instruction is effective to the degree that it succeeds in changing students in desired direction sand not in undesired directons." __Robert Mager, author of Preparing Instructional Objectives.

Impact of Teachers

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influences stop." __Henry Adams, Historian

Futurist View on Learning

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." __Alvin Tofler

A Paradigm Shift

Good teachers are best when students barely know they exist,
Not so good when students always obey and acclaim them,
Worst when students despise them,
Of good teachers, when their work is done and their aims fulfilled,
The student will say, "I did this myself." __ Lao-Tzu

Vision

"A good coach will make players see what they can be rather than what they are."
__Ara Parasheghian

Memory Based Learning

"One of the cheif defects in our plan of education in this country is that we give too much attention to developing the memory and too little to developing the mind." __W.J. Mayo, 1933

"Real" Learning

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." __ B.F. Skinner

Being Up-to-Date

"Our schools are OK if it were 1965." Stoll and Fink

On Learning Theory

"The overwhelming number of teachers...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do." Alfie Kohn

Innovation and Teacher Attitudes

"There can be no significant innovation in education that does not have at its center the attitudes of the teachers. The beliefs, assumptions, feelings of teachers are the air of the learning environment; they determine the quality of life within it." Postman and Weingartner

Relationships

"The guts of teaching is simple - it is the relationship between a teacher and a group of kids." Howard Wilson

Ready to Learn

"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like to be taught." W. Churchill

Quick Tips for

• beginning the term
• helping student learn
• giving students feedback
• for using a variety of instructional strategies

USED WITH PERMISSION FROM: Quick Tips for College Teaching Bookmarks, Series A, Info-Tec (1-800-995-5222) x4632

...for beginning the term:

The first day is the most vital day, and the first week is the most vital week for determining whether or not students will continue attending and be successful in your class. Consider trying some of these faculty-generated ideas (or send me yours to be added):

• Starting each class on time reinforces a positive learning environment.

• Tell students by what name you prefer to be called (Mr., Mrs., Dr., first name...).

• Learn student's names right away. Talking with a few students before class helps associate names with individuals' attributes.

• Address students by name in class. It has a positive influence on self-esteem and classroom atmosphere.

• Present substantial content on the first day. Students will be eager to come back for more!

• Introduce yourself in a unique way (i.e. skit, video, slides).

• Distribute and clearly discuss an informative, easy-to-understand syllabus.

• To diagnose basic skills, give a short, in class, writing assignment during the first week. Refer to those who need help to the counseling center.

• Have students write or discuss their expectations for the course and their own learning goals.

• Collect students' day and night phone numbers and addresses for times you need to reach them.

• Arrange a buddy system or help groups so students have a contact to discuss assignments and coursework. Match them by major or geographical proximity.

• Form dyads or small groups for acquaintanceship activities. Ask partners to make introductions to the class. Time spent allowing students to know each other now will pay off throughout the term. Benefits include increased self-concept and class participation.

• To show students they'll be learning in your class, make an assignment during the first day to be due the next class.

... for helping students learn:

Although it is clearly the students' responsibility to learn the material presented in class, faculty can facilitate learning in many ways. College teachers suggest:

• At the beginning of each class, write down and describe the format and your goals for the day.

• Hand out study questions or a study guide.

• Make specific suggestions for taking notes in your class.

• When showing a film or video, begin with an overview. Then, ask a few key questions for students to keep in mind as they watch it. End with a small group and/or whole class discussion.

• Make learning as active as possible. In addition to lectures, provide opportunities for students to SEE and DO things with key concepts. Group discussions and projects, demonstrations, skits, cases, surveys, short papers and experiments are a few ways to employ active learning methods.

• Giving a learning styles inventory helps students identify how they learn, and helps you select appropriate teaching methods.

• Describe good learning habits: how to study you subject area, preparing before topics are discussed in class.

• Explain how to study for your tests. Give concrete examples and answers.

• Assign written summaries of difficult material.

• Provide study aids such as practice exercises, study tips, supplemental readings, and lists of new vocabulary words.

• Increase retention: if students are absent for 2 or more consecutive classes, phone them. Usually miscommunications are brought to the surface and resolved with one quick call.

• Arrange for a tour of the library and provide instructions for using their materials, especially as they relate to your class.

• Give midterm grades and offer suggestions for improving.

...for giving students feedback:

It seems that no matter what college faculty do, students perceive that they aren't getting enough feedback. Some faculty make the following suggestions:

• Give short quizzes over the day's material.

• Have students grade objective quizzes and tests in class to provide more immediate feedback.

• Reward successful behavior with verbal praise, an honor roll, or personal notes.

• As a motivator, post all students' grades in bar chart form (using assigned student numbers rather than names to insure confidentiality). Unsuccessful students often see that others are succeeding and seek help.

• Give midterm grades and offer suggestions for improvement.

• Keep your gradebook current and encourage students to check it regularly.

• Give a test early in the term (i.e. during the second or third week of the quarter). Return it the next class day. Discuss the answers and allow students to ask questions in class.

• Ask students to critique each others' papers, projects or essay test answers for readability and/or content.

• Discuss or post answers to ungraded quizzes or homework problems.

• Ask that students write questions at the end of a lesson. Answer them individually in writing or discuss them during the next class.

• Encourage students to use study groups to solicit feedback on their comprehension of class material.

• Establish an atmosphere that is open and safe for students to ask questions that will help check their understanding of materials covered in class or reading assignments. Start each class with a question & answer session.

... for using a variety of instructional strategies:

We know that students learn and retain material best when they employ a variety of senses and have varied experiences. College faculty make the following suggestions to help facilitate learning through mixed strategies:

• Increase your repertoire of teaching strategies. Refer to the partial list of teaching methods below and try to use at least two methods during each class.

• Ask students to assume the role of a professional in the field: social worker, psychologist, engineer, nurse, accountant, etc.

• Assign or encourage participation in community events such as state or county fairs, plays, concerts, business-sponsored activities or open houses, and local government meetings.

• Show films in different ways: ask students to predict endings or be critics, replay sections, show only a few frames at a time, discuss what might happen in a sequel.

  • Teacher-Centered Methods

    • Chalkboard

    • Commercial materials

    • Demonstration

    • Lecture

    • Visual aids (charts, graphs, pictures, PowerPoint

    • Models

  • Group Discussion Methods:

    • Informal discussion

    • Committee work

    • Debates

    • Panels

    • Oral reports

    • Role playing

  • Other Group Learning Methods:

    • Class problems

    • Club/organization work

    • Contests

    • Demonstrations

    • Displays & exhibits

    • Experiments

    • Field trips

    • Surveys

    • Skits

    • Outside speakers

    • Questionnaires

  • Individual Learning Methods:

    • Information interviews

    • Manuals and handbooks

    • Reference reading

    • Research

    • Work experience