Tips for Effective Teaching

The most difficult thing in teaching is to get students paying attention to you. Teachers are public figures who encounter hundreds of students per day if working full time and confront with parents' complains can be a headache to the teachers sometimes, so, how do a teacher teach effective lesson so as to avoid minimum complains from students and parents?

Recently, I read a book by Penny Ur (1996) who teaches the teacher or educator on ways of keeping effective presentation. Ur teaches four important areas that a teacher must pay attention to when conduct the lesson:

1.
Attention - The need to ensure the students paying attention to the lesson is important. So, interesting materials are the key to alert the students.

2.
Perception - Making clear the target material visibly, repeating in order to get reinforced by the students and checking the students if they have perceived the material accurately.

3.
Understanding - Make links to previous materials, and explain. Making illustration, responses from the students provide feedback on how well they understood.

4.
Short-term memory - Colours, dramatic, unique in ways can elicit short-term memory. Types of students should be emphasised: Good in memory, audio and visual students.

A teacher's job is to mediate new material for students to perceive and understand it. The word presentation is used to define the mediation. A teacher is to:

1.
Limit and control the target item when introducing a new word or grammatical structure.

2.
Using explanations, instructions and discussion to maximize the input of the students.

3.
Using effective spoken and written texts.

To conduct the new language lesson, a teacher must activate and harness students' attention. Ur (1996) suggests effort, intelligence and conscious or metacognitive learning strategies and enhancing learning. "For example, point out how a new item is linked to something they already know, or contrast a new bit of grammar with a parallel structure in their own language" (Ur, 1996). It is important to engage students first in their learning, the key mediation of effective instruction. After the job of engaging is done, presentation may follow by introducing the new word, sound, structure and text. Follow by clarifying the new word and its' meaning. The discussion of the new word is best leave to the students; they can do it in pairs or in groups of four, finishes by the teacher to confirm the best explanation offer by one of the pairs or groups.

If you find this is sound interesting, why not research for books about effective teaching like I got this one!