5 STEPS TO IMPROVE TEACHING By : Ms Kashfia Latafat

5 STEPS TO IMPROVE TEACHING

Explore→ Experiments→ Improve → Share & Celebrate → Embed.

Start from here

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Explore The Context: As a teacher/facilitator it is helpful to review your own context from time to time to thus enable you to create the best possible context for learning for the learners you work with. There are many ways in which you can examine the context within which you teach. Reviewing your context can be referred to an environmental analysis (a review of the environment within which you work).

Explore the Present Practice: How do we teach at present? (Existing Knowledge)

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Explore the Pedagogy: What other learning and teaching strategies could we use to teach better? Explore new ideas for the improvement of teaching and learning activities.

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Plan Experimentation and Implementation:

Decide as a team (Collaborative Approach) and as individual ways to teach better. Working together facilitates idea generation and creativity. Teamwork improves productivity and brings better results. Working in teams boosts teachers’ morale and motivation. It encourages taking healthy risks. When we work together, we learn faster. Teamwork relieves stress.

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Improve and Coach in Strategies:

Teachers develop strategies for themselves and for the team, while receiving support and coaching from the team and from leaders. In other words teachers carry out Supported Experiments for the team.

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 Share and Celebrate Successes:

Teachers report on their experiments and share their strategies. Sharing in both within and between teams. Celebrating successes creating an environment in the workplace that practices recognition and rewards good employees and improves morale. Its human nature to respond well to praise and acknowledgment. It can inspire people to keep up the good work they have been doing, and it gives them a sense of belonging to the organization.

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Embed Practice:

 New and improve strategies are agreed, and then put into schemes of work, assignments, worksheets, lesson plans etc. The whole team now has access to the improvements. 

Conclusion: These steps shows how evidence based teaching look like .We need to consider four major principles of EBT before following these above discussed steps:

1 We need all the evidence to make sound decisions

·        In order to evaluate an educational initiative or strategy, we must compare it with any alternatives that might achieve the same goals. However good a strategy, there may be another that is even better!

·        We need the views of experts who have looked at all the research and weighed all the arguments to reach their conclusions. This is necessary because one piece of research is often contradicted by another.

2 It is not enough to know what works, we need to know why, and if we use a highly effective teaching strategy blindly you are most unlikely to get the best out of it. You must understand why it works to mine its full potential. When you teach you react constantly to the situation in the classroom, and it is your understanding of the teaching situation and what your methods should achieve that guides these crucial decisions.

3 You need to find the critical success factors that are failing in your teaching context and fix these ‘Context is all’ in understanding many problems that inhibit attainment.

4 You need to review your teaching constantly in the light of the evidence

Above. The final court of judgment is not academic research, but what works in your classroom. Trust your own judgment! Try a new strategy a few times, learn from these experiments and adapt, but in the final analysis the best evidence you have is your own experience. So you must keep your practice under continual review and become a ‘reflective practitioner’.

 

Reference By:

Amazon.com. 2021. [Online] Available at: <https://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Based-Teaching-Practical-Approach-Second/dp/1408504529> [Accessed 22 March 2021].