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Making Choices |
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Making Choices
It is important to choose teaching styles that you will be comfortable using when you plan, prepare and deliver your classes. Unless you specifically put it in your syllabus, however, you are not committed to using any one teaching style for an entire course. It is nice to know that you can try a new teaching style for an activity every now and then to see how you like it. Let students know in advance that you will be trying something new and ask them for feedback about how they feel it impacts their learning.
At the same time, do not be afraid to be spontaneous if the students are giving you glazed looks about a certain concept. For instance, take another look at the video clip of Kinesthetic Learning-- View clip | View in QuickTime (pop-ups)-- in the Overview of Teaching Styles. Getting all the students up out of their seats to reenact blood cell movements through the chambers of the heart and the aorta will give them a chance to see firsthand what the difficult text and graphs mean. When they sit back down, you can draw parallels between what they just did and what they see on the paper.
If you are not sure how to begin, contact your faculty development center to brainstorm, take a workshop, or borrow resources related to the teaching style you want to try. Some learning objectives make it easy to identify teaching styles that will accommodate student needs. For example, if a learning objective states that students will demonstrate critical thinking skills, then you may want to try problem-based learning activities.