A lot of the time, when you’re trying to refine the teaching methods that you apply, you might base it on the class that you’re teaching—some might respond to one style better than others, for example. This is an important consideration to make, but it’s also valuable to realize which teaching style best suits you as a teacher.
Where are you most comfortable? Where do you deliver the best results? Answering these questions can even help you to identify weak spots that you can work on, helping you to pick and choose components from various different styles to produce something more personal.
Discussion vs. Work
Something that teachers might disagree on is how much of the lesson should be focused on discussion—you conveying the topics and information to the class against how much of it should be work where the students can apply this themselves. Ideally, you might feel as though a balance is generally the way to go. A whole lesson of back-to-back worksheets might just leave students bored and unengaged, but if you flip the situation entirely, you might find that they’re lacking any opportunity to apply what they’ve learned.
Part of this is about finding the right kind of application. You’ll want something that’s tailored to the specifics of the lesson, but linking in previous lessons can be valuable to establish a continuous education journey. The age of the group matters too, 3rd grade writing worksheets are going to be different in complexity and content to something aimed for even a couple of grades higher, making the specifics important.
The Atmosphere
The question of strictness is a difficult one to answer. Different teachers and even students are going to have different preferences. At first, it might feel as though taking a stricter approach can prevent students from talking or wasting time, but suppressing this too much might only add fuel to the fire in them wanting to do so. On the flip side, too casual an atmosphere might do nothing to deter that kind of behavior when it does arise. To make matters even more complex, it all comes down to the individual differences of any given student or class.
You need to examine your own strengths here. You need to be capable of being firm, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be the sole driver of your teaching style.
How to Convey Information
How you go about discussing the topics at hand is also important. Reading off the screen might not be effective, for instance, as students can simply read it themselves and then find themselves waiting for you to finish. If you’ve written words on the screen, you can use this as an opportunity to add context or clarity, taking questions and filling out the knowledge around what’s written down.
No aspect of your lesson has to be boring, and taking those aspects which are most at risk of being so and breathing life into them might help your lessons to improve on the whole.
