Knowing the Subject Matters (but So Does Teaching Skill)
There is an old iolte that -go es like this:
Qaestion: What do you need to laow to be able to teach a horse?
Answer: More than the horse!
This joke makes the obvious point that the first thing a teacher must have is some knowledge or skills that the learner does not have; teachers must know the subject - matter they expect to teach. But if you think about teaching horses (or children), you will soon realize that although subject matter knowledge is necessary, it is not enough. A rancher may have a good idea of how a horse is supposed to act and what a horse is supposed to be able to do, but if he doesn't have the skills to make an untrained, scared, and unfriendly animal into a good saddle horse, he's going to end up with nothing but broken ribs and teeth marks for his troubles.
Children are a lot smarter and a little more forgiving than horses, but teaching them has this in common with teaching horses: Knowledge of how to transmit information and skills is at least as important as laowledge of the information and slulls themselves. We have all had teachers (most often college professors, unfortunately) who were brilliant and thoroughly knowledgeable in their fields but who could not teach. Ellen Mathis may know as much as Leah Washington about what good writing should be, but she has a lot to learn about how to get third-graders to write well.
For effective teaching, subject matter knowledge is not a question of being a walking encyclopedia. Effective teachers not only laow their subjects, but they can also communicate their knowledge to students. The celebrated high school math teacher Jaime Escalante taught the concept of positive and negative numbers to students in a Los Angeles barrio by explaining that wllen you dig a hole, you might call the pile of dirt +1, the hole -1. What do you get when you put the dirt back in the hole? Zero.
Mastering the Teaching Skills
The link between what the teacher wants students to learn and students' actual learning is called instruction, or pedagogy. Effective instruction is not a simple matter of one person with more knowledge transmitting that lcnowledge to another. If telling were teaching, this boolc would be unnecessary. Rather, effective instruction demands the use of many strategies. For example, suppose Paula Ray wants to teach a lesson on statistics to a diverse class of fourth-graders. To do this, Paula must accomplish many things. She must make sure that the class is orderly and that students lmow what behavior is expected of them. She must find out whether students have the prerequisite slulls; for example, students need to be able to add and divide to find averages.
If any do not, Paula must find a way to teach students those skills. She must engage students in activities that lead them toward an understanding of statistics, such as having students roll dice, play cards, or collect data from experiments; and she must use teaching strategies that help students remember what they have been taught. The lessons should also talce into account the intellectual and social characteristics of students in the fourth grade and the intellectual, social, and cultural characteristics of these particular students. Paula must make sure that students are interested in the lesson and are motivated to learn statistics.
To see whether students are learning what is being taught, she may ask questions or use quizzes or have students demonstrate their understanding by setting up and interpreting experiments, and she must respond appropriately if these assessments show that students are having problems. After the series of lessons on statistics ends, Paula should review this topic from time to time to ensure that it is remembered. These tasks-motivating students, managing the classroom, assessing prior lnowledge, communicating ideas effectively, taking into account the characteristics of the learners, assessing learning outcomes, and reviewing information-must be attended to at all levels of education, in or out of schools.
They apply as much to the training of astronauts as to the teaching of reading. How these taslcs are accomplished, however, differs widely according to the ages of the students, the objectives of instruction, and other factors. What malces a good teacher is the ability to carry out all the tasks involved in effective instruction (Burden & Byrd, 2003). Warmth, enthusiasm, and caring are essential, as is subject matter knowledge. But it is the successful accomplishment of all the tasks of teaching that makes for instructional effectiveness (Shulman, 2000).
Read More : What Makes A Good Teacher?
