Good Teaching Practices
DESIGNING COURSES AND LESSON PLANS:
Effectively designing lesson plans and developing courses requires on the part of the instructor creativity and openness to new ideas. L. Dee Fink describes in his book Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (Jossey-Bass, 2003) innovative approaches to formulating lesson plans and constructing our courses. He notes that this "design of instruction" is a skillfor which few college-level teachers have extensive training. Some have been fortunate enough to learn about the design of learning experiences because they went through teacher training as an undergraduate, had a course on this subject as a graduate student, or have participated in an in-service faculty development program on instructional design. But most faculty members simply follow the traditional ways of teaching in their particular discipline. They lack the conceptual tools they need to significantly rethink and reconstruct the set of teaching and learning activities they use. (Fink 23)
Fink urges teachers to set learning goals that go beyond the “information dump” model used by many of us—a model that inevitably leads to the “lecture and discussion” teaching activity. His goal in his book is “to offer ideas that can improve the way teaching is normally practiced in higher education. For this to happen, readers who teach will need to see, first that there are ways of teaching that are different, significantly different, from what they are doing now. Second, they will need to be persuaded that these new and different ways of teaching will result in good things happening, both for their students and for themselves (xii).”
Interested in learning more about his approach? The College library has a copy (LB 2331.F495 2003) of Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. You may also want to look at Fink’s web site at http://www.ou.edu/idp/significant/siglearning.htm
Want to find out more about the subject of “Instructional Design?” consult the comprehensive listing at the following site: http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/idmodels.html
TEACHING TIPS:
For an exhaustive collection of ideas for teaching that include such topics as “icebreakers,” “the first day of class,” “motivating students,” “using questions effectively” consult the following: http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/teachtip.htm#firstday
Check out these useful teaching tips from the Instructional Development Program at the University of Oklahoma:
Five (5) Major Functions in Teaching
Getting Ready to Teach
Designing a Course: How to Put Your Course Together
Interacting with Students: Teacher "Credibility"
Specific Teaching Techniques: Suggestions
Evaluation Issues
LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING STYLES:
How do your students learn? How can you best match those styles with your choices of instructional paradigms? One of the best sites of information can be found at: http://www.tlc.eku.edu/tips.htm
To find out more about your students’ current learning styles, consider administering the VARK Questionnaire “How Do I Learn Best?” Available online or in PDF form, the questionnaire helps determine the Visual, Aural, Read/Write and Kinesthetic preferences of your students. Recognizing your own natural predispositions can help you as an instructor design more varied and effective pedagogical approaches to the course topics. http://www.vark-learn.com/documents/general.pdf
MORE RESOURCES:
Consult Craig Nelson’s site at Indiana for a thorough bibliography of college pedagogical topics: http://php.indiana.edu/~nelson1/TCHNGBKS.html