What Good Teachers Have in Common

If you want students to think about meaning and remember content, Willingham does not recommend making the content relevant to a student’s interests. After all, we can attend conferences and lectures about topics we find interesting, but we can also be bored to tears by the lecturer.

Don’t forget, when organizing your lessons to help your students remember content, you also have to pay attention to the different aspects of its meaning, a subject I mentioned in the previous post.

For example, discussing cell phone minutes to illustrate an example for a math class (after all, what could be more relevant to a teenager than cell phone minutes?) might cause the student to think about the minutes he/she currently has and not the math.

Many consider teaching style to be a major factor in helping students remember content. Quite often, a teacher who is funny, a good storyteller, or a showman can make boring material interesting. But this is only part of what makes teachers effective.

As you know we have class evaluations. Concerning these Willingham states, “A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?”

The evaluations show that “the emotional bond between student and teacher – for better or worse- accounts for whether students learn.” I think we all know this to be the case. No student will work for a teacher he doesn’t like or thinks doesn’t like him.

So “Effective teachers…are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in such a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.”

This is what good teachers have in common.