How does teaching affect learning

The laws guarantee free, appropriate education for children with disabilities of any kind—whether the impairment is physical, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral. The laws also recognize that such students need special supports in order to learn or function effectively in a classroom with non-disabled peers, so they provide for special services for example, teaching assistants and procedures for making individualized educational plans for students with disabilities.

As a result of these changes, most American and Canadian teachers are likely to have at least a few students with special educational needs, even if they are not trained as special education teachers or have had no prior personal experience with people with disabilities. Classroom teachers are also likely to work as part of a professional team focused on helping these students to learn as well as possible and to participate in the life of the school.

The trend toward inclusion is definitely new compared to circumstances just a generation or two ago. It raises new challenges about planning instruction such as how is a teacher to find time to plan for individuals? The diversity of modern classrooms is not limited to language or disabilities.

Just as important, though, are the educational and philosophical issues that early childhood education has brought to public attention. Some educational critics ask whether preschool and day care programs risk becoming in appropriate substitutes for families.

Other educators suggest, in contrast, that teachers of older students can learn from the flexibility and open-ended approach common in early childhood education. For teachers of any grade level, it is a debate that cannot be avoided completely or permanently. The other end of the age spectrum has also expanded.

Many individuals take courses well into adulthood even if they do not attend formal university or college. Adult education , as it is sometimes called, often takes place in workplaces, but it often also happens in public high schools or at local community colleges or universities.

Some adult students may be completing high school credentials that they missed earlier in their lives, but often the students have other purposes that are even more focused, such as learning a trade-related skill.

The teachers of adult students have to adjust their instructional strategies and relationships with students so as to challenge and respect their special strengths and constraints as adults Bash, But it may also mean that they have significant personal responsibilities—such as parenting or a full-time job—which compete for study time, and that make them impatient with teaching that is irrelevant to their personal goals or needs.

These tools have greatly increased the amount and range of information available to students, even if their benefits have sometimes been exaggerated in media reports Cuban, With the Internet, it is now relatively easy to access up-to-date information on practically any subject imaginable, often with pictures, video clips, and audio to accompany them. It would seem not only that the Internet and its associated technologies have the potential to transform traditional school-based learning, but also that they have in fact begun to do so.

One reason is practical: in many societies and regions, classrooms contain only one or two computers at most, and many schools have at best only limited access to the Internet. Waiting for a turn on the computer or arranging to visit a computer lab or school library limits how much students use the Internet, no matter how valuable the Internet may be.

Even so, single-computer classrooms create new possibilities and challenges for teachers. A single computer can be used, for example, to present upcoming assignments or supplementary material to students, either one at a time or small groups.

In functioning in this way, the computer gives students more flexibility about when to finish old tasks or to begin new ones. A single computer can also enrich the learning of individual students with special interests or motivation and it can provide additional review to students who need extra help.

With ample technology available, teachers can focus much more on helping individuals in developing and carrying out learning plans, as well as on assisting individuals with special learning problems.

But technology also brings some challenges, or even creates problems. It costs money to equip classrooms and schools fully: often that money is scarce, and may therefore mean depriving students of other valuable resources, like additional staff or additional books and supplies.

Other challenges are less tangible. Providing this help can sometimes be challenging even for experienced teachers. Some educational activities simply do not lend themselves to computerized learning—sports, for example, driver education, or choral practice. As a new teacher, therefore, you will need not only to assess what technologies are possible in your particular classroom, but also what will actually be assisted by new technologies. Then be prepared for your decisions to affect how you teach—the ways you work with students.

In recent years, the public and its leaders have increasingly expected teachers and students to be accountable for their work, meaning that schools and teachers are held responsible for implementing particular curricula and goals, and that students are held responsible for learning particular knowledge.

The trend toward accountability has increased the legal requirements for becoming and sometimes remaining certified as a teacher. In the United States in particular, preservice teachers need more subject-area and education-related courses than in the past. They must also spend more time practice teaching than in the past, and they must pass one or more examinations of knowledge of subject matter and teaching strategies.

High-stakes tests may influence grades that students receive in courses or determine whether students graduate or continue to the next level of schooling.

The tests are often a mixture of essay and structured-response questions such as multiple-choice items , and raise important issues about what teachers should teach, as well as how and whether teachers should help students to pass the examinations. It also raises issues about whether high-stakes testing is fair to all students and consistent with other ideals of public education, such as giving students the best possible start in life instead of disqualifying them from educational opportunities.

Whatever your reactions to the first three trends, it is important to realize that they have contributed to a fourth trend, an increase in professionalism of teachers. By most definitions, an occupation like medicine or law—or in this case teaching is a profession if its members take personal responsibility for the quality of their work, hold each other accountable for its quality, and recognize and require special training in order to practice it.

Becoming a new teacher now requires more specialized work than in the past, as reflected in the increased requirements for certification and licensing in many societies and regions. The increased requirements are partly a response to the complexities created by the increasing diversity of students and increasing use of technology in classrooms.

Greater professionalism has also been encouraged by initiatives from educators themselves to study and improve their own practice. I ask these questions because I have spoken with many teachers who wonder if they truly have an impact on the children and adolescents in their classrooms. Doubts about their possible influence are often more pronounced when teachers talk about students who are burdened with learning difficulties -- students who frequently experience school as the environment in which their deficits rather than their strengths are displayed.

Obviously, whether teachers believe they have an impact on the lives of their students is linked to their own self-esteem and their own sense of competence.

When people believe that what they are doing is of little consequence, their motivation and energy will be minimal, and they cannot help but convey this to others. When those others are students, what will result is a school environment devoid of excitement and learning and filled with boredom and perhaps anger. In attempting to examine teacher impact, I have asked teachers to think about one teacher whom they really liked when they were students.

I then ask them to describe that teacher, which prompts such words as "demanding but supportive," "caring," "was interested in us," "was excited about what she taught," "had a good sense of humor.

The question typically evokes some laughter. When asked for descriptions of this teacher, I have heard "intimidating," "demeaning," "boring," "dull," "never seemed interested in us.

Next, I say, "imagine for a moment that I ask all of you to leave and bring in your students and ask them to describe you, what words would you hope they use?

What words do you think they would use? Just as when you were a student, you had an image of your teachers, what is the image that your students have of you? What do you want that image to be? In addition to this exercise, in my all-day workshops I have requested teachers to complete an anonymous questionnaire.

The first question asks, "Please describe briefly one experience that you had with an educator when you were a student that reinforced your self-esteem. What grade were you in at the time?

Similar to the first exercise, I have been impressed with the strong emotions that these questions trigger. Scientists and engineers work mostly in groups and less often as isolated investigators. Similarly, students should gain experience sharing responsibility for learning with each other.

In the process of coming to common understandings, students in a group must frequently inform each other about procedures and meanings, argue over findings, and assess how the task is progressing. In the context of team responsibility, feedback and communication become more realistic and of a character very different from the usual individualistic textbook-homework-recitation approach.

In science, conclusions and the methods that lead to them are tightly coupled. The nature of inquiry depends on what is being investigated, and what is learned depends on the methods used. Science teaching that attempts solely to impart to students the accumulated knowledge of a field leads to very little understanding and certainly not to the development of intellectual independence and facility. Science teachers should help students to acquire both scientific knowledge of the world and scientific habits of mind at the same time.

Understanding rather than vocabulary should be the main purpose of science teaching. Some technical terms are therefore helpful for everyone, but the number of essential ones is relatively small.

If teachers introduce technical terms only as needed to clarify thinking and promote effective communication, then students will gradually build a functional vocabulary that will survive beyond the next test.

For teachers to concentrate on vocabulary, however, is to detract from science as a process, to put learning for understanding in jeopardy, and to risk being misled about what students have learned.

Science is more than a body of knowledge and a way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. It is also a social activity that incorporates certain human values.

However, they are all highly characteristic of the scientific endeavor. In learning science, students should encounter such values as part of their experience, not as empty claims.

This suggests that teachers should strive to do the following:. Science, mathematics, and technology do not create curiosity. Thus, science teachers should encourage students to raise questions about the material being studied, help them learn to frame their questions clearly enough to begin to search for answers, suggest to them productive ways for finding answers, and reward those who raise and then pursue unusual but relevant questions.

In the science classroom, wondering should be as highly valued as knowing. Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers prize the creative use of imagination. Indeed, teachers can express their own creativity by inventing activities in which students' creativity and imagination will pay off. Science, mathematics, and engineering prosper because of the institutionalized skepticism of their practitioners.

Their central tenet is that one's evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and one's experiments will be subjected to replication. In science classrooms, it should be the normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is the evidence?

What is the argument that interprets the evidence? Are there alternative explanations or other ways of solving the problem that could be better? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

Students should experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. This means that teachers must take care not to convey the impression that they themselves or the textbooks are absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. By dealing with the credibility of scientific claims, the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists, science teachers can help students to balance the necessity for accepting a great deal of science on faith against the importance of keeping an open mind.

Many people regard science as cold and uninteresting. However, a scientific understanding of, say, the formation of stars, the blue of the sky, or the construction of the human heart need not displace the romantic and spiritual meanings of such phenomena. Teachers of science, mathematics, and technology should establish a learning environment in which students are able to broaden and deepen their response to the beauty of ideas, methods, tools, structures, objects, and living organisms.

Teachers should recognize that for many students, the learning of mathematics and science involves feelings of severe anxiety and fear of failure. No doubt this results partly from what is taught and the way it is taught, and partly from attitudes picked up incidentally very early in schooling from parents and teachers who are themselves ill at ease with science and mathematics. Far from dismissing math and science anxiety as groundless, though, teachers should assure students that they understand the problem and will work with them to overcome it.

Teachers can take such measures as the following:. Teachers should make sure that students have some sense of success in learning science and mathematics, and they should deemphasize getting all the right answers as being the main criterion of success.

After all, science itself, as Alfred North Whitehead said, is never quite right. Understanding anything is never absolute, and it takes many forms. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear may result primarily from the lack of opportunity many of them have to become familiar with tools in safe circumstances.

Girls in particular suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools.