TODAY’S INNOVATIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES
Mechelle M. Halili
Teachers need to teach in a classroom that is dynamic, one which brings together students from different backgrounds with various levels of intellectual abilities and personalities. Being an effective teacher requires good pedagogical skills and personal attributes that would bring together effective and innovative teaching strategies to serve the individual needs of students.
Since there is no really ‘one size fits all’ solution in a classroom, one needs to have a range of effective teaching strategies that can be used to invigorate your teaching practice. Here are just a few of those strategies.
By differentiating your approach, you are ensuring that you reach every single student in your class. This means raising the bar for students who have higher academic capabilities and also giving the necessary support to students who struggle and need that extra boost. A teacher can either hand out work sheets with varying levels of complexity or creating work stations with various assortment of tasks in different levels of difficulty where students are free to choose the tasks. Then we have role playing. This innovative approach is becoming a common addition to many classrooms where students become more intellectually and physically involved in learning activities to learn a new concept. Activities may be organized in such a way that students take the role of different characters or objects to demonstrate a situation, a concept, or an issue. Visualization can also be very useful in bringing dull academic concepts to life with visual cues and presentations that help students understand school concepts and how they apply in the real world. This approach is helpful for students to interact with concepts in a more visually organized and structured way. There are many templates to represent data according to the topic that is being handled. A common format for a graphic organizer may contain branches and sub-branches of ideas. Sequences or processes use arrows that direct the flow of ideas or steps. Charts can include drawings, diagrams, and pictures to assist theory and interconnections of ideas.
One of the best-loved activities in the classroom is story-telling since everyone loves to hear stories. Teachers can explain the facts of lessons or certain principles or events in the form of stories. It is a known truth that people learn events in a story far better than when they are presented as just plain facts. A teacher may use a story to present the whole concept just use stories to open or end the session. Hands-on learning is a great way to use in presenting concepts to students, especially in the teaching of science, language arts, fine arts, music, mathematics, or virtually any subject. It involves the active participation of students in acquiring the concepts as compared to just having them view it being done by others. Many schools provide apparatuses and equipment that help students to have that hands on learning experience. Or you can be creative: it can be a string telephone to teach about sound and communication, clay sculpture to show 3D structures, Styrofoam balls to teach about planets, sticks or branches to teach about measurements or anything similar. Your imagination is your only limit.
Another creative strategy to help young learners to experience the language of your subject is thru games. Hangman, Pictionary, Bingo, Scrabble, Odd One Out, Charades, Trivial Pursuit etc. are common games students enjoy. Playing these games using the terms you have discussed in class helps the students to work closely with different hard to understand words and use them fluently in their subject. You can also use social media platforms and services to make your lessons fun and engaging. For example, students can be asked to follow a famous scientist or personality on Twitter and share his/her new thoughts and findings in class or to Facebook and/or YouTube in improving their presentation of their play or research projects. Students can also use free blog sites to publish and share their written work online. Doing this opens the possibilities of peer editing and critiquing of work. In critiquing, students can visually represent thought abstract thought processes, and better organize their learning thru mind maps or thinking maps. There are a wide variety of thinking map patterns that can be chosen to represent a particular topic. There are maps that teach relationships between ideas, maps to break larger concepts into smaller parts, maps that show the sequence of events or changes in time, cause-and-effects maps to show causality concepts, tree maps to show classification and relationships, and more.
There are many other methods and approaches in driving innovation in teaching. These are just a few of the practical things that one may use in making the classroom fun and engaging for students.
The author is Teacher
--oOo-
III at Lourdes Northwest Elementary School