Best practices in teaching
I'm closing in on retirement now, and here's what I've learned about best practices in teaching. This is specifically for the post-secondary education of adults, but the principles adapt to other educational contexts.
1. No change, no learning
2. Backwards design
3. Learning-centred teaching
4. Student agency is important
5. Teaching for wellbeing
6. Be a student sometimes
(More details below.)
I've been teaching full-time since 1989, worked as a TA before that, and taught guitar lessons as a teen in the 1970s. I have teachers in my family, but I was never lucky enough to be officially taught how to teach. As a student, I watched for good examples. In 1989, I had a colleague who let students choose their own due dates, and I was intrigued to try it myself. In 1991, I did a workshop with the faculty support unit of the university I was at that year on temporary contract, and the leader encouraged me to give students more choices than just due dates. The contractual evaluation method I subsequently developed helped me get a job as permanent teaching faculty at SFU. Cheryl Amundsen's Rethinking Teaching workshop run for and by faculty taught me some course design principles and alerted me to the fact that there were people who study teaching as their discipline and write about it. I became a facilitator and then a co-lead for the workshop. I adopted a phrase from Dee Fink to be my teaching mantra: "no change, no learning." A good teacher's students change, and the teacher changes, too. I've not had time to really throw myself into reading all about the theory and practice of teaching, but I know I can find experts and support when I need them, both live and in print.
1. No change, no learning. A new piece of information isn't going to stick in your head and be useful to you later unless you apply it fairly soon after receiving it. When you take action in response to a new thought/fact/suggestion, that's when the learning happens. You change because you've learned something, and you learn something because you've changed. This is why active learning and flipped classrooms are useful teaching techniques: learners need to apply what they've learned, and that's when change happens. We humans change the ways we think and act in response to what we genuinely, deeply learn, as opposed to something we just hear in a lecture or a podcast, or read in a book. And that's true of teachers, too: no change, no learning. We need to keep learning to be good teachers, both in general and in response to new situations and contexts (such as text-generating AI). And that means we have to keep changing the ways we teach. In small incremental ways is easier than a sudden big change.
2. Backwards design--another Dee Fink way of thinking about things, and a key component of what is now called the Rethinking Course Design workshop at SFU. Who are your students? What do you need them to know and be able to do at the end of your course? How are you going to get them there? Design back from the end point. Every assignment and every class meeting should have some connection to those learning objectives. And it's great if you can show/tell students what those connections are. Learning shouldn't be just jumping through hoops, doing tricks to gain the treats of grades and degrees. Lay out the course objectives in your syllabus (whether they're assigned to you or you design them), let students know why what they're learning is important and how it can benefit them in later courses, their work life, their personal life, etc.
3. Learning-centred teaching is an extension of backwards design, really. In each class meeting, what do you want students to know and be able to do? Think about the kinds of classroom activities that can get them there. For some things, lecture and demonstration are necessary starting points, for others throwing people into a task and letting them figure out how to do it works better. You know your subject, and, as you experience your students, you can learn what works best for them when doing a particular bit of learning. Where learner-centred teaching and active learning emphasize student activity (and that's great), learning-centred teaching gets you to think about whether you've added an activity just to get them engaged or that activity also helps them learn something important to the course. If you want them to learn to write, then lots of in-class writing and peer review of that writing is going to centre that learning in the classroom and in their lives. I'll throw in a couple of other terms here: experiential learning--learning something by experiencing it in some way--and authentic learning--practicing skills your students are going to use in careers they're likely to have in your discipline. Both good.
4. Student agency is important. Our students are most of them moving from situations in which they were young people being told what to do and into situations in which they are adults in charge of their own lives. Weighing advice, making choices, and taking the consequences gives students a sense of ownership and responsibility. If we encourage students to do assessments that mean something to them, that let them maximize existing skills and explore new ones safely, then they will be more engaged in their learning, more motivated to do well.
5. Teaching for wellbeing means building flexibility into assessments, making inclusion transparent, and having policies that centre compassion and encouragement. Some examples follow: 1) Our students have lives busy with courses, jobs, volunteer positions, and family responsibilities, so if your course can give them flexible assessments, flexible due dates, and/or flexible attendance policies, that will reduce their stress. 2) Our students have many different and intersectional identities, so if your course readings validate and give voice to scholars and creators of different races, ethnicities, genders, religions, neurodiversities, etc., that will help them feel included and heard. 3) Our students often struggle with their mental health and lack confidence in their abilities and intelligence, so if you can find ways to talk about (your own) feelings of impostor syndrome and the value of counselling/therapy, that will help them feel worthy.
6. Be a student sometimes. We need to keep learning to be good teachers, and that's not just learning more about our own disciplines, not just learning more about good teaching strategies: it's also learning things that are brand new to us! Lifelong learning. Find things you want to be able to understand and do, and find time and energy to be a student, whether that's an evening course in car repair, a one-day workshop in reflexology, or hiring a tutor to introduce you to the Korean language. We who teach as experts need to experience regularly what it's like to be a brand-new learner, totally unfamiliar with the terms and techniques of a subject, so we have empathy for and understanding of what our students are going through.
Change. Learn. Grow. Be better. Be kinder. We can do it!