Professional Skills of Efficient Teachers
By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)
OFTEN, it is said that the only parameter of learning success is learning effectiveness. That is, when a student learns something to study, they will have achieved the learning target at the end of the study. Otherwise, the student will do poorly in their studies. Of course, learning effectiveness is usually founded on the instructor’s teaching efficiency, in other words, professional skills, which also enable them to help students learn more. These professional skills are more open to improvement than personal attributes.
They can be organized into four aspects of instruction.
(1) Engaging and maintaining students’ attention Well-skilled teachers engage students’ attention and maintain their interest and motivation by establishing a set at the start of the lesson and incorporating variety in their lessons. There are three major types of set: orientation set engages students in a new instructional activity; transition set helps students see the relationship between past and present earnings; evaluation set launches what students may already know about a topic. The beginning of the lesson is critical — it should involve students’ interest through an interesting or provocative problem, establish an interactive climate or tone that encourages students to participate, and make students aware early in the lesson of the major topics, objectives or tasks for the lesson and make clear the relationship between the current lesson and previous lessons. Effective teachers use a variety of nonverbal behaviour, instructional approaches, types of assessment and a host of other areas. This variability increases learning by helping students remain more interested and engaged.
2) Optimizing the use of instructional time The three factors most closely related to the efficient use of instructional time are time on task, momentum and smooth transitions. Time on task refers to the amount of time students are actively engaged in academic tasks. In general, the more time students spend on academic tasks, the more learning they will have. However, only a tiny percentage of available time is actually used for educational tasks. Momentum means the flow and pace of classroom activities. Keeping momentum helps maximize academic learning time by maintaining a brisk instructional pace that still allows students to be successful.
Carefully enough, momentum must be adapted to the student’s needs and the difficulty or complexity of the required tasks. In the main, teacher-directed instruction allows greater control of momentum and instructional time. Instructional time is enhanced whenever teachers plan for and implement smooth transitions. Such transitions are points where students’ attention is refocused to new topics or activities. On the other hand, teachers should work to minimize the number and length of transitions and to make them as organized as possible by developing routines and procedures for frequently occurring transitions; they should inform students what they are to do ahead of time, and they should monitor the transition.
3) Promoting meaningful teacher-student interaction Efficient teachers keep students involved in their lessons through questioning, instructional clarity and monitoring of understanding. Questioning includes not only asking good questions but also knowing how to obtain answers and react to students’ responses. The most effective questions need students to process information and formulate the correct answer. Closed-response questions should be avoided or minimized as much as possible. Questions ought to be phrased clearly and concisely in direct, natural, unambiguous language and should vary in form and cognitive level depending on the objectives of the lesson. Teachers can enhance the effectiveness of questioning by using wait time and maximizing student participation to think about the question or response, where wait time refers to the pauses teachers place between the question and a student’s response or between a student’s response and the teacher’s reaction. Ideal wait time must last between 3 and 5 seconds. And teachers had better address questions to all students, not just volunteers. This keeps the class alert, makes everyone participate, and permits the teacher to monitor the success of instruction better. After a student’s response to a question, the teacher’s reaction is critical. Possible responses include probing, redirecting, rephrasing or giving the student the answer. Here, probing means asking the student additional questions to expand or raise the level or accuracy of the response. Redirecting includes asking another student to answer the same question. This should be mostly avoided. Rephrasing refers to rewording the original question to make it clearer. This should be done only after the student has unsuccessfully attempted to respond.
Teachers whom students find most enjoyable and helpful provide instruction which leads them to a clear understanding of the learning material. Instructional clarity tends to be achieved through logical organizing, identifying and reinforcing main points, using good examples to elaborate, monitoring and correcting. Clear teachers inform students of the lesson objectives early in the lesson and present the content, thus making students see the relationships between concepts or ideas. They help students identify and reinforce essential aspects of the lesson by noting and repeating major points and writing them on the board. Reviews and summaries are put throughout the lesson to draw broader conclusions. Also, clear teachers elaborate on important ideas and concepts by using concrete, verbal or written examples and explicitly showing how ideas, concepts and tasks are similar to and different from one another. They monitor and quickly correct students’ misunderstandings by assigning questions and application exercises during the lesson so as to make students clarify their own misconceptions. Efficient teachers carefully and continually assess students’ comprehension through good questioning and establishing an open interactive classroom climate in which students are more likely to ask for help.
4) Providing effective feedback and reinforcement Efficient teachers provide students with frequent feedback and reinforcement for their academic performance in that they are designed to achieve different ends. Feedback is primarily informational and intended to help students improve their performance. This is probably more important than reinforcement in promoting learning. The most useful feedback includes the standard performance being judged against how the student’s performance compares with that standard and especially how the performance can be improved. Feedback should be given frequently as soon as possible after performance, focusing on the quality of student performance rather than their intentions or effort. Reinforcement intended to strengthen or promote desirable behaviour provides some type of reward directed towards motivating students. So, it is most beneficial at points where students are most likely to become frustrated and give up, notably less able students. Reinforcement in the form of verbal praise is only marginally effective. The most effective reinforcement is specific to the behaviour being rewarded, contingent upon the desired behaviour or performance and believable or genuine.
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