| PRED 356 | Methods
of Science and Mathematics Teaching
Chapter 1: Introduction to Course and Effective Teacher |
1.3 Contributors of the Effective Teacher
Teacher Task Orientation
Teacher task orientation refers to the knowledge of planning and delivering instruction and of evaluating learning. The extend and quality of the professional preparation you receive will influence both the quality and the style of your teaching. The more knowledge you have of planning and delivering instruction and of evaluating learning, the better your students learn. Instructors without sufficient pedagogical or teaching knowledge are forced to teach by instinct and are doomed to trial-and-error approaches.
Novice teachers, having little knowledge of pupils and teaching, tend to grow increasingly authoritarian and custodial. They are obsessed with classroom control, therefore they may also begin to plan instruction designed not to promote learning, but to discourage childrens’ misbehavior.
Teacher task orientation is a key behavior that refers to how much classroom time the teacher devotes to the task of teaching. The more time dedicated to the task of teaching a specific topic, the greater the opportunity students have to learn . Some task-related questions a teacher must answer are
- How much time do I spend lecturing, asking questions, and encouraging students to inquire or think independently?
- How much time do I spend organizing for teaching and getting my students ready to learn? and,
- How much time do I spend assessing my learner’s performance?
Classrooms in which teachers-student interactions focus more on intellectual content that allows their students an opportunity to learn are more likely to have higher rates of achievement. A task oriented effective teachers stop or prevent misbehavior with a minimum of class disruption.
Student engagement in the learning process is a key behavior that refers to the amount of time students devote to learning an academic subject. It is related to a teacher’s task orientation to content coverage. A teacher’s task orientation should provide students the greatest opportunity to learn the material.
The time the students actively engaged in learning the material is called the engagement rate. In other words, engagement rate is the percentage of time devoted to learning when the student is actually on task, engaged with the instructional materials and benefiting from the activities being presented. Even though a teacher may be task oriented and may provide maximum content coverage, the students may be disengaged. This means that they are not actively thinking about working with, or using what is being presented.Such disengagement can involve an emotional or mental detachment from the lesson that may or may not be obvious. When students jump out of their seats, talk, read a magazine, or leave for the restroom, they obviously are not engaged in instruction. Correcting this type of disengagement may be much more difficult. It is requiring changes in the structure of the task itself and the cognitive demands placed on the learner.
Useful suggestions for increasing learning time and, more importantly, student engagement:
- Set rules that let pupils attend to their personal and procedural needs about teaching and learning process without obtaining your permission each time.
- Move around the room to monitor pupils' seatwork and to communicate your awareness of student progress.
- Ensure that independent assignments are interesting, worthwhile, and easy enough to be completed by each pupil without your direction.
- Minimize time-consuming activities such as giving directions and organizing the class for instruction by writing the daily schedule on the board.
- Make abundant use of resources and activities that are at, or slightly above, a student’s current level of understanding.
- Avoid timing errors. Act to prevent misbehaviors from occuring and increasing in severity so they do not influence other’s in the class.
Another key behavior is the student success rate which refers to the rate at which students understand and correctly complete exercises. A crucial aspect of the task orientation and student engagement is the level of the difficulty of the material presented.
Low error rates (moderate to high success) are proportional to student, teacher and school allocated time. Instructions producing high success contribute increased self-esteem and positive attitude toward the subject matter and the school.
An effective teacher establishes unit and lesson content that reflects prior learning (e.g, planning lesson sequences that consider task-relevant prior information)
An effective teacher administers correctives immediately after initial response (e.g., shows model of correct answer and how to attain it after first crude response given)
An effective teacher divides instructional stimuli into small chunks (e.g., establishes bite-size lessons that can be easily digested by learners at their current level of functioning).
An effective teacher plans transitions to new material in easy to grasp steps (e.g., changes instructional stimuli according to a preestablished thematic pattern so that each new lesson is seen as an extension of previous lesson).
An effective teacher varies the pace at which stimuli are presented and continually builds toward a climax or key event.
A key behavior for the effective teacher is organizing and planning instruction that yields moderate-to-high success rates and challanging the learner to go beyond the information given.
