Six Elements of a Highly Effective Classroom

From personal experiences, observations and analyzing educational research, I have compiled a list of six elements that must exist in the classroom in order for effective learning to take place. Applying the following elements with consistency can lead to more productivity from both teachers and students.

1. Daily review of previous day's work is a crucial part of the learning process. Most lessons are taught in sequence. By reviewing the previous day's work, a teacher connects current lesson to knowledge obtain from prior lessons. As a result, new material becomes more relevant.

The review can take as little as a minute. Students merely need to mentally link to previous content to make sense of new information. You can give a brief summary of topics that have been discussed. Recapping the important vocabulary words would be helpful. A short Q&A session could also prove to be beneficial.

2. When presenting concepts, teachers must vary their presentations, explanations, demonstrations and examples. Be mindful that students have differing learning modalities. The same learning routines day in, day out can leave a handful of students in the dark. How well one introduces a topic can often determine the course of events that follow throughout a unit. In addition, when a teacher prepares concrete examples and uses demonstrations, it often makes lessons more meaningful to students than solely reading and answering questions from a textbook. If lessons are more meaningful, information will be better retained.

3. Practice should be teacher-led, guided and supervised. While in the guided portion of a lesson plan, students are only beginning to learn the material and are not yet proficient. Thus, support from the teacher is necessary.

4. Teacher must give constructive feedback following hesitant or incorrect student responses. Students must be given an opportunity to find out why their answers are incorrect. Teacher feedback should go further than merely marking an "X" for incorrect responses. Many times, especially for key concepts, teacher feedback can mean re-teaching or writing a brief note to the student. In addition, teacher feedback should be made in a timely fashion.

5. Monitoring of independent practice activities should be constant. Perfect practice makes perfect, so goes the saying. Although learning is a process where perfection is not necessary, when a teacher monitors practice sessions, students are more likely to practice correct methods. If too much unsupervised practice occurs, many students have the potential of developing bad or incorrect habits.

6. Weekly and monthly reviews should be conducted to check retention of material. Performing well on an assessment does not necessarily correlate to a high retention of material. Usage over time will allow students the opportunity to better retain the information learned from previous lessons. Weekly and monthly reviews can be in the form of warm-up activities or games. Students do not have to be formally assessed again.