Developing a Teaching Method to suit your students

1. Developing a Teaching
Method
 Developing a
Teaching Method
to suit our student
environment-
Training Session
for University
lecturers
By
 Maxwell
Ranasinghe

2. Teachers
 Develop a good framework of mind to
teach
 Should learn how to understand
students
 Should know their subject very well
 Should update the with changes
taking place in the subject area
 Prepare good power point
presentations
 Get ready for teaching before you

3. First day Special
 On the first day, greet learners with
enthusiasm
 You must show that you are so interested in
teaching them
 Give them an idea of what you have been
doing professionally and as well as academic
( do not brag)
 Create an environment that everyone
including you are going to learn and be
happy about it

4. Know your customer
 Lecturer should know the student profiles
What qualifications they have?
What subjects they have studied?
What teaching methodology they have
gone through- class teaching- tuition etc..
Where do they work?
What is their work experience?
What is their level of language proficiency
What are their objectives of doing this
course?
Do they know each other in the class?

5.  Lecturer should come to class in time and
check the equipment such as multimedia,
A/C, fans, chairs etc. are in order ( never
blame the administration in front of students
if any of them are not in order)
 Lecturer should prepare well and have
confidence in conducting the class
 Lecturer should have a good introductory
comment
 Lecturer should have few motivating
statements

6. Methods
 There are many teaching methods a
lecturer could adopt for teaching
 They could be broadly divided into two
categories
Teacher centered
Learner centered
We need to assess the pros and cons for both
methods to select the best
We could use a mix of both depending on the
status of students, class, syllabus, time and
facilities

7. Teacher Centered Method –
pros and cons
Advantages
◦ Allows maximum teacher control
◦ Presents minimal threats to
students or teacher
◦ Able to enliven facts and ideas
that seem tedious in the text

8. ◦ Able to clarify issues relating to
confusing/intricate points
◦ Teacher knows what has been
taught
◦ Able to accommodate larger
numbers of students
◦ Cost effective
◦ Economy of time

9. ◦ Teacher controls pace of
presentation
◦ Teacher becomes known as an
expert in a specific area or topic
◦ Encourages and allows
deductive reasoning

10. Disadvantages
◦ Attempt to cover too much
material in given time
◦ An easy teaching method but a
far less effective learning
strategy
◦ 20% of lecture information
forgotten one day later and 80%
of remainder fades in one month

12.  Classes tend to be too large for
personalized instruction
 Presumes that all students are
learning at the same pace
 Not suited to higher levels of learning
 Creates passive learners
 Provides little feedback to learners
 Student attention wavers in less than
30 minutes

13. Teacher attempts to teach all
that he or she has learned in a
lifetime about a subject in few
hours
Poorly delivered lecture acts
as a disincentive for learning
Affective learning rarely occurs

14. Learner centered non
conventional
 Well structured- teacher guided – Student
centered learning
 Lecturer is only a facilitator
 Students study in advance and present
different parts of the content
 Students make seminars out of relevant
parts
 Students asks questions formed by them
from the rest of the class
 Lecturer sums up

15. Group Discussion
 Can we have learner centered
teaching for Degree, Certificate
Courses and Diploma Level ?
 If “No “why?
 Then what is the best option ?
 A Hybrid ?
 Or a different method and approach
suites our own Sri Lankan
environment ?

16. Most important first 10 minutes
of the Presentation
◦ Teacher outlines the objectives,
outcomes, and expectations held for the
participants
 Identify what learner should gain
 Make a connection between what the lecture
material is and real life
 Outline the key concepts to be addressed
 Describe rules of operation and establish
open atmosphere
◦ The above will let students decide whether to trust you to do what

17. During the presentation
Have a simple discussion
session for each topic if time
permits
Listen to students well and
understand them
Asks students comment on
other students questions

18. Do not react negatively to any
dumb/ stupid question ask by
students
Use multimedia, boards etc.
effectively to explain
Do not read your presentation
Have a good eye contact with
the whole class

19. How to take boredom out from
students
First day - have a standing session for
students to meet each other for at least 15
minutes. May be during the tea time and
ask them to meet as much as they can
Have small groups of students and ask them
to study part of the next lesson
Ask them to brand their team.
Ask them to wear a name tag with their
teams brand and individual name

20. Some other teaching techniques
that lecturers use
 Ask a question from a identified
student “ How do you relate this
concept to your company”
 Show a short video of a practical
aspects and relate it to the theory
 Ask students to write the important
points learned on the white board and
summarize the session

21.  Role-play – Give students a pre
written script and ask them to play the
role
 Ask questions from previous lecture
 Play a competitive game
 Use- kahoot.it ,Sli.do, Google Forms
and Zeetings for digital format ( good for
games)
 Provide prepared slides in advance to
groups of students and let them do a

22. Develop teams to learning interesting
Ideal team would be about 5 to
7 members
Ask students to nominate their
leaders
Ask the team leaders
nominated to select one if their
best buddies to the team

23.  Ask them to select one knows
about IT stuff for presentations if
presentations are part of the
team
 Ask them to select a person who
knows more about language
 Consider their location of living,
jobs etc also when selecting
team members

24.  Create a competitive environment
among the groups
 Give them simple assignments like
doing a simple presentation about a
topic in the class ( Max 5 minutes)
Asking questions based on the last
class, do a simple seminar on today’s
topic
 Give marks to teams and carry on it till
the end
 Have intermittent celebrations

25.  Create a whatsapp group for
monitoring purposes
 Send few messages to them to
show that you are with them
 Ask students to collect some
money and bring some food to
share in the tea time. Teams can
sponsor each day

26.  Provide Lecture breaks –
1 or 2 minutes after every 20 minutes.
Let them talk anything they like. Not
your subject matter.

27. Write a simple postmortem on
your class experience after every
class
Your overall grading for
achieving teaching objectives
Mark the areas that students
enjoyed
Mark the areas that students
did not enjoy

28.  Mark the areas that you found
difficult to get the attention of
students
 Mark areas that should be
improved
 Mark areas that should be
dropped if any
 Make a note on any difficult
situation you had with students.

29. Evaluation?
 Do not let authorities evaluate your
teaching only ( by students) on the
traditional evaluation forms used by
many universities and professional
bodies
 There are many elements on such forms
does not suit for all the situations of
teaching
 Send your own feedback about your
experience of teaching the class to the
authorities

30. Understand the cognitive
behavior of learning
 Bloom's taxonomy is a set of
hierarchical models used to classify
educational learning objectives into
levels of complexity and specificity. ...
(The models were named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired
the committee of educators in 1956 that devised the
taxonomy)
 Initially the taxonomy was based on hierarchical model that
describes the levels such as knowledge, comprehension,
application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. However, it
was revised in
 2001Blooms taxonomy focuses on learning
and assessment more than on how to teach

31. Blooms Taxonomy- Order of
cognitive behavior ( revised version 2001)

32. Blooms Taxonomy can be used to used
to
 Create assessments
 Evaluate the complexity of
assignments
 Increase the rigor of a lesson
 Simplify an activity to help personalize
learning

33.  Design a summative assessment
 Plan project-based learning
 Frame a group discussion, and more.
Because it simply provides an order
for cognitive behaviors, it can be
applied to almost anything.

34. Critiques of Blooms
Taxonomy
 Learning is not sequential – Bloom’s Hierarchy
seems too artificially constructed.
 It is a very linear, straightforward view of how
humans comprehend information. Researchers are
beginning to see the mind as more of a web.
 A person might skip from knowledge to application
then analyze the application, come to a conclusion
(evaluation) and then re-analyze the conclusion all
working toward a greater synthesis of information

35.  It is incomplete, so precise and
individualistic etc. But we do not wish
to go into detail about it as it is beyond
this topic.

36. Group Discussion
 Discussion on how students learn ( in
Sri Lanka) and how their knowledge
and skills could be assessed.
 Share your own experience
 Devise ways and means of testing
them . ( Do not restrict it to Bloom’s
model)

37.  I share this presentation for benefit of
all lecturers. I appreciate your own
comments to further develop this
presentation
Thank you
email maxran1@yahoo.com