Effective Teaching Methods:

Research-Based Practice

By
Gary D. Borich
 Chapter 2:
Understanding Your
Students
Understanding Your Students
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Teaching is not simply the transmission of knowledge from teacher
to learner but rather is the interaction of teacher with learner.
▪ Not so long ago, students were viewed as empty vessels into which
the teacher poured the contents of the day’s lesson.
▪ These are just some of the individual differences that exist in every
classroom and that can influence the outcome of your teaching.
▪ Adapting your teaching to individual differences will require you to
make many decisions about your learners.
▪ It will require that you become a reflective teacher.
▪ Reflective teachers are thoughtful and self-critical about their
teaching.
▪ That is, they take the time necessary to adapt and differentiate their
lessons to fit their learners’ needs, prior histories, and experiences.
▪ In other words, reflective teachers bridge the gap between teaching
and learning.
▪ They achieve this by actively engaging students in building a
partnership of ideas from lesson content and encouraging them to
gradually accept greater responsibility for their own learning.
Building Relationships
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Not all Learners are Alike
▪ Any observer in any classroom will quickly notice that schoolchildren
vary in experience, socioeconomic status (SES), culture and ethnicity,
language proficiency, and learning style.
▪ In addition, many classrooms have learners with having physical, hearing,
visual, mental, behavioral, learning, communication, or other-health-
impaired disabilities.
▪ As a teacher, you must teach all the students assigned to you, regardless
of their differences or special needs.
▪ Two of the reasons for being aware of individual differences and special
needs among your learners are these:
1. By recognizing students’ individual differences and special needs, you
will be better able to help them use their own experiences and learning
histories to derive meaning and understanding from what you are
teaching.
2. When counseling students and talking with parents about the
achievement and performance of your learners, you will be able to
convey some of the reasons for their behavior.
▪ Researchers have discovered that different instructional methods, when
matched to the individual strengths and needs of learners, can
significantly improve their achievement (Tomlinson, 2014; Tomlinson &
Imbeau, 2013).
Understanding Students
▪
Understanding Your Students
Adaptive Teaching
▪ One approach to achieving a common instructional goal with learners who have
individual differences—such as prior achievement, aptitude, or special needs—is called
adaptive teaching.
▪ Adaptive teaching techniques apply different instructional strategies to different groups
of learners.
▪ Two approaches to adaptive teaching have been reported to be effective.
▪ They are the remediation approach and
▪ the compensatory approach
▪ The remediation approach
▪ It provides the learner with the prerequisite knowledge, skill, or behavior needed to
benefit from the planned instruction.
▪ For example, you might teach listening skills to students low in auditory ability before
using a linguistic approach to reading, so both groups will profit equally from this
instructional approach.
▪ The Compensatory Approach.
▪ Using the compensatory approach, the teacher chooses an instructional method to
compensate for the lack of information, skill, or ability known to exist among learners by
altering the content presentation to circumvent a weakness and promote a strength.
▪ This is accomplished by using alternate modalities (pictures versus words) or by
supplementing the content with additional learning resources (instructional games and
simulations) and activities (group discussions or experience-oriented activities).
Adaptive Teaching
▪
Understanding Your Students
Benefits of Adaptive Teaching
▪ Adaptive teaching works to achieve success with all students, regardless of their
individual differences.
▪ It does so either by remediation or by compensation.
▪ Therefore, adaptive teaching requires an understanding of your students’ learning
strengths and experience with regard to specific lesson content and the alternative
instructional methods.
▪ Some of the most promising instructional alternatives in adaptive teaching include:
▪ Cooperative grouping versus whole-class instruction
▪ Inquiry versus expository presentation
▪ Rule-example versus example-rule ordering
▪ Teacher-centered versus student-centered presentation
▪ Examples from experience versus examples from text
▪ Group phonics versus individualized phonics instruction
▪ Individual responses versus choral responses
▪ Sub-vocal responses versus vocal responses
▪ Self-directed learning versus whole-group instruction
▪ Computer-driven text versus teacher presentation
▪ Each of these teaching methods has been found more effective for some types of
learners than for others.
▪ By knowing your students and by having knowledge of a variety of instructional
methods, you can adapt your instruction to the learning needs of your students.
▪
Understanding Your Students
Differentiated Instruction
▪ While the methods of adaptive teaching can be effective in responding to the whole
class or groups of learners in the same classroom who may differ, differentiated
instruction focuses on the academic success of individual learners or small groups of
learners.
▪ To differentiate instruction is to recognize an individual student’s learning history,
background, readiness to learn, interests, and acquired skill set.
▪ The goal of differentiated instruction is to maximize each student’s personal growth and
academic success by meeting each student at his or her individual level and providing
the needed instruction and resources.
▪ Tomlinson (2014) and Tomlinson & Umbeau (2013) identify three elements of the
curriculum— content, process, and products.
1. Content.
Differentiation can take the form of varying the modalities in which students gain access to
important learning, for example, by:
(a) listening, reading, and doing;
(b) presenting content in incremental steps, like rungs on a ladder, resulting in a continuum
of skill-building tasks; and
(c) offering learners a choice in the complexity of content.
2. Process.
Differentiation takes the form of grouping flexibly, for example, by
(a) varying from whole class, to collaborative groups, to small groups, to individuals and
(b) providing incentives to learn based on a student’s individual interests and current level
of understanding.
Differentiated Instruction
▪
Understanding Your Students
Differentiated Instruction
3. Products.
Tomlinson (2014) and Stiggens and Chappuis (2012) suggest varying assessment methods
by:
(a) providing teachers a menu of choices that may include oral responses, interviews,
demonstrations and reenactments, portfolios, and formal tests;
(b) keeping each learner challenged at his or her level of understanding with content at or
slightly above his or her current level of functioning; and
(c) allowing students to have some choice in the means in which they may express what
they know—for example, writing a story, drawing a picture, or telling about a real-life
experience that involves what is being taught
▪ Most importantly, differentiated instruction provides an opportunity for the teacher to
consider multiple characteristics of the learner simultaneously while choosing an
instructional strategy.
▪ Therefore, differentiated instruction is ideally suited for a diverse classroom.
▪ By varying teaching strategies, the teacher makes sure that each student has the
opportunity to learn in a manner compatible with his or her own learning strengths and
preferences
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Effects of General Ability on Learning
▪ In a practical sense, we associate descriptors such as smart, bright, able to solve
problems, learns quickly, and can figure things out with intelligence.
▪ Both in the classroom and in life, it seems that some have more ability than others.
Misconceptions about Intelligence
▪ One of the greatest misconceptions that some teachers, parents, and learners have
about intelligence is that it is a single, unified dimension.
▪ Such a belief is often expressed by the use of word pairs such as slow/fast and
high performing/low performing when referring to different kinds of learners.
▪ Unfortunately, these phrases indicate that a student is either fast or slow (or high or
low performing) when in fact, each of us, regardless of our intelligence, may be all
of these at one time or another.
▪ Everyone knows from personal experience that the degree of intelligence depends
on the circumstances and conditions under which the intelligence is exhibited.
▪ Observations such as this have led researchers to study and identify more than one
kind of intelligence.
 Understanding Your Students
General versus Specific Abilities
▪ Common sense tells us that some abilities can be inherited while others are
learned.
▪ General intelligence only moderately predicts school grades, whereas specific
abilities tend to predict not only school grades but also the more important real-life
performances.
▪ If we think of school learning as a pie and general intelligence as a piece of it, we
can ask:
▪ How large a piece of the classroom learning pie is taken up by general ability?
▪ So, knowing your learners’ specific strengths and altering your instructional goals
and activities accordingly will contribute far more to your effective teaching. t
▪ However, it may not have a positive impact if teacher categorizes students’
performances in ways that indicate only their general intelligence.
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Effects of Specific Abilities on Learning
▪ Specific definitions of intelligence and the behaviors they represent are commonly
called aptitudes.
▪ As a teacher, you are unlikely to measure aptitudes in your classroom, but you
need to know of their influence on the performance of your students.
▪ Your acquaintance with the division of general intelligence into specific aptitudes
will help you see how a learner’s abilities in specific areas can directly affect the
degree of learning that takes place.
▪ Multiple Intelligences
▪ Many researches, such as L.L. Thurstone, Campbell, Campbell, and Dickinson
and Howard Gardner, conducted their studies on specific abilities using diverse
methods of testing.
▪ Gardner (2011) describes eight different abilities based on skills found in modern
technological society. Gardner’s multiple intelligences are:
1. Linguistic Intelligence
2. Logical-mathematical Intelligence
3. Musical Intelligence
4. Spatial Intelligence
5. Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence
6. Interpersonal Intelligence
7. Intrapersonal Intelligence
8. Naturalist Intelligence
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Multiple Intelligence Theory
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Multiple Intelligences
▪ Some practical classroom applications of Gardner’s theory of multiple
intelligences include the following:
1. Allowing students to take differentiated paths to achieve common goals (e.g.,
using the Internet, reading from text, or talking to experts)
2. Allowing students to display their best, not just their average, performance (e.g.,
allowing multiple tries and recording their best)
3. Providing alternative ways of assessing a student’s achievements and talents
(e.g., allowing students to choose among an oral report, portfolio, dramatization,
or written product)
4. Providing opportunities to add to the student’s self-identity beyond the traditional
logical/ linguistic abilities required by the majority of schoolwork (e.g., allowing
students to show what they know in nontraditional ways by building a scale
model, completing a graphic, or presenting a newscast)
▪ Social-Emotional Intelligence
▪ In addition to Gardner’s contribution, there has been growing acknowledgment of
the importance of emotions in thinking and learning.
▪ This view of ability considers emotions as useful sources of information that can
help one make sense of and navigate a learning environment.
▪ It is believed that learners vary in their ability to process information of an
emotional nature and in the way they use it in completing school tasks
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Effects of Culture on Learning
▪ Researchers have presented convincing arguments that people from different
cultures react differently to the nonverbal and verbal classroom management
techniques of proximity control, eye contact, warnings, and classroom
arrangement.
▪ For example, research suggests that students from Hispanic and Asian cultures
respond more positively to quiet, private correction, as opposed to a public
display, such as listing their name on the board.
▪ There are two ways by which teachers from one culture differ from teachers from
another culture in terms of their interpretation of culture:
1. Reciprocal distancing
2. Reciprocal teaching
▪ Reciprocal distancing
▪ Teachers and students (both consciously and unconsciously) use language to
include or exclude various individuals from the group.
▪ Reciprocal teaching
▪ To capitalize on the positive aspects of group membership and encourage a
sense of inclusion rather than distancing.
▪ Many teachers implement discussion sessions, student teams, small groups, and
the sharing of instructional materials to create opportunities for positive social
interaction among their students.
Effects of Culture on Learning
Effects of Socio-economic Status on Learning
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Effects of Socioeconomic Status on Learning
▪ Researchers generally conclude that most differences in educational achievement
occurring among racial and ethnic groups can be accounted for by social class.
▪ In other words, if you know the SES of a group of students (usually defined by the
income and education of the parents), you can pretty much predict their
achievement with some accuracy.
▪ Information about their racial and ethnic group does little to improve the prediction.
▪ What can I as a teacher do to lessen these differences?
▪ The Effects of Language Proficiency on Learning
▪ Many teachers are now responsible for teaching children with limited or no
English-language capacity in classrooms that include students who may speak
many different languages.
▪ For example, more than 100 languages are spoken in the school systems of New
York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
▪ Researchers point out that if language is used by a cultural group differently at
home than in the classroom, members of that subculture are at a disadvantage.
▪ It has been found that learners who speak another language at home or express
themselves in only “conversational or social language,” referred to as Basic
Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), do more poorly in school than those
who have attained Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which
includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing related to the subjects taught in
school.
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Here are some suggestions for teachers, derived from these models, that can
lessen the relationship of culture, SES, and language to school achievement:
▪ Provide more opportunities for learners to experience self-directed and
constructivist models of instruction, to which they can bring their own
backgrounds and experiences to the classroom.
▪ Maintain high expectations for all learners, regardless of diversity. The overall
learning environment should be leveled up, not scaled down.
▪ Include and inform parents in the planning and implementing of important
changes in curriculum, instructional techniques, and assessment methods aimed
at mitigating differences in performance among learners influenced by culture
and/or language proficiency.
▪ Form groups that include culturally as well as linguistically diverse students.
▪ Learn and experiment with differentiated instructional techniques suitable for
diverse learners, such as varying instructional modalities (listening, reading,
doing), presenting content in incremental steps, grouping flexibly by need (not
ability), and allowing students some choice in how they are to be assessed
(writing a story, drawing a picture, telling about their experiences).
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Effects of Learning Style on Learning
▪ An important aspect of personality that will influence your learners’ achievement is
learning style, which represents the classroom conditions under which someone
prefers to learn.
▪ Some researchers use the terms holistic/visual to describe global learners and
verbal/analytic to describe the opposite orientation.
▪ Still others prefer the term field sensitive to refer to the holistic/visual learning style
and the term field insensitive to refer to the verbal/analytic learning style.
▪ People who are field dependent tend to see the world in terms of large, connected
patterns.
▪ Looking at a volcano, for example, a field-dependent person would notice its
overall shape and its major colors and topographical features.
▪ A field-independent person, in contrast, would tend to look close up and notice the
specific details of a scene.
▪ The individuality of learning styles that can promote higher engagement and
achievement in your classroom.
Effects of Learning Styles on Learning
Effects of Learning Style on Learning
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Effects of Learning Style on Learning
▪ An important aspect of personality that will influence your learners’ achievement is
learning style, which represents the classroom conditions under which someone
prefers to learn.
▪ Some researchers use the terms holistic/visual to describe global learners and
verbal/analytic to describe the opposite orientation.
▪ Still others prefer the term field sensitive to refer to the holistic/visual learning style
and the term field insensitive to refer to the verbal/analytic learning style.
▪ People who are field dependent tend to see the world in terms of large, connected
patterns.
▪ Looking at a volcano, for example, a field-dependent person would notice its
overall shape and its major colors and topographical features.
▪ A field-independent person, in contrast, would tend to look close up and notice the
specific details of a scene.
▪ The individuality of learning styles that can promote higher engagement and
achievement in your classroom.
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Your Role in Improving the Academic Success of All Learners
▪ The classroom is the logical place to begin the process of reducing some of the
achievement differences.
▪ As a teacher, you need to plan for these differences as a daily fact of
classroom life.
▪ You can reduce these achievement differences in your classroom in several
ways.
▪ One of these is your willingness to integrate a variety of learning aids into
your lessons.
▪ To have high expectations for all your students and to reward them for their
accomplishments.
▪ You will need to provide learners the opportunity to express their own sense
of what they know and to build connections or relationships among the ideas
and facts being taught using their own experiences.
 Understanding Your Students
▪ Your Role in Improving the Academic Success of All Learners
▪ Other ways you can reduce the differences among learners in your classroom
include the following:
1. Organize learning and instruction around important ideas that your students
already know something about.
2. Acknowledge the importance of your students’ prior learning by having them
compare what they know to what you are teaching.
3. Challenge the adequacy of your students’ prior knowledge by designing lessons
that create an opportunity for them to resolve conflicts and construct new
meanings for themselves.
4. Provide some tasks that make students confront ambiguity and uncertainty by
exploring problems that have multiple solutions in authentic, real-world contexts.
5. Teach and encourage students how to find their own approaches or systems for
achieving educational goals for which they can take ownership.
6. Teach students that knowledge construction is a collaborative effort for creating a
partnership of ideas in your classroom, rather than a solitary search for
knowledge or an exclusively teacher-controlled activity.
7. Monitor and assess students’ knowledge acquisition frequently and in a variety of
formats (with oral responses, portfolios, demonstrations, and reenactments as
well as formal tests) and provide feedback.
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Teacher and Cultural, Linguistic, and Socioeconomic Bias in the Classroom
▪ Planning to eliminate bias in classroom teaching can be one of the most significant
aspects of becoming an effective teacher.
▪ The way in which you interact with your students in the classroom can have a
considerable influence on their motivation and attitudes toward school.
▪ Many examples of teacher biases have been catalogued.
▪ Wait longer for these students to answer.
▪ Give the answer after a student’s slightest hesitation.
▪ Praise students’ marginal or inaccurate answers.
▪ Criticize these students more frequently than other students for having the wrong
answer.
▪ Praise students less when they give the right answer.
▪ Do not give students feedback as to why an answer is incorrect.
▪ Don’t pay attention to (e.g., smile at) students and call on them less.
▪ Seat these students farther from the teacher.
▪ Allow these students to give up more easily
 Understanding Your Students
▪ The Teacher and Cultural, Linguistic, and Socioeconomic Bias in the Classroom
▪ Researchers made the following suggestions for eliminating bias and increasing
cultural sensitivity in the classroom.
1. Plan to spread your interactions as evenly as possible across student categories
by deciding in advance which students to call on.
2. If you plan on giving special assignments to only some of your students, choose
the students randomly.
3. Consciously try to pair opposites in what you believe to be a potential area of
bias for you; for example, pair minority with non-minority, more able with less
able, easy to work with and difficult to work with, and so on. In this manner,
when you are interacting with one member of the pair, you will be reminded to
interact with the other. Frequently change one member of each pair so your
pairings do not become obvious to the class.
4. Instead of being pulled along unconsciously by the stream of rapidly paced
events in the classroom, you can be an active decision maker who influences the
quality of events in your classroom by continually questioning and monitoring
your interaction patterns with your learners.
Questions to Ponder about