Classroom Consciousness: Ten Steps to Effective Teaching

Ten Steps to Effective Teaching

Michael J. Marotto, Ph.D

This compilation is our thoughts based on our collective knowledge and experience about teaching, including also a distillation of legitimate research and commentary from teachers in the field. Implied in this list is a connected sequential relationship from one concept to the other, leading to Departmental Cross-Grade Communication, and Collaborative Department Teaching. It is our hope that these guidelines help all educators effectively manage the challenges of teaching beyond compliance and beyond the minimum requirements of our work.

1. Establishing expectations with your evaluator

The purpose of establishing expectations with your evaluator is to develop a professional dialogue necessary to improve instruction. This dialogue becomes a discourse designed to delineate in clear language what needs to be accomplished during a given timeframe throughout the school year. These expectations become professional norms that guide the teacher through all aspects of professional performance, moving the teacher to a professional level beyond mere compliance. An essential component of this discourse is the outlining of feedback and follow-through on these expectations that establish a mutual accountability on both teacher and administrator. The result of the process constitutes a professional sharing beyond the limits of routine evaluation conferences.

2. Professional Development

Professional development at its core is an intellectually reciprocal process developed through a dialogue about specific pedagogical topics requiring the teacher to become a participant in this development, rather than a spectator. In order to establish PD that operates efficiently, it should be a directed toward a specific group of individuals who share common learning outcomes, collaborate on similar learning objectives, and design coordinated assessments. Simply stated, professional development engages the teacher in an immediate application of the strategy, implementation, and assessment; the material presented should be immediately applicable to teachers’ classroom experience. A follow up session among teachers to reflect collectively on the experience should be provided.

3. Classroom Management: Distance Strategy

When considering classroom management, an essential component to all classroom professionals, an understanding of the variable connection between academic development and social emotional needs must be taken into consideration in depth. This connection speaks to a knowledge of developmental theory that is determined by the student’s age, the classroom context, the content. Teachers need to be aware that this understanding is fundamental to pedagogical organization and should be a part of communication when effective classroom management is applied to learning objectives. The purpose of this management strategy is, ultimately, to maintain control that blends seamlessly with the learning strategies of the lesson. When this distance is not properly negotiated, the teacher relinquishes control to the immediacy of a student’s emotional need. Although this type of immediate gratification might mitigate the students behavior it often develops a pattern of responses that have a deleterious effect on individual learning and classroom context in general. The teacher must keep in mind that what is demonstrated in the classroom to one student has the effect of potentially influencing the behavior of all students. The appropriate response to a given student's aberrant behavior invariably must be an academic response preferably content based, not a mollifying emotional contingency.

4. Observation ethnographic (recording of a particular context) field notes

Essential to all classroom practice is the process of codified empirical recording of classroom practice for the purpose of reflection. This reflection, ethnographically based, specifically addresses the components of a lesson, the details of its implementation, student responses, and assessment of the completion of objectives. The recording of these notes should be highly individualistic; namely, produced in a format that is comfortable to the teacher's learning style. Two essential personally evaluative questions include the following: What did I like about the lesson? What would I change? Upon review of the notes, the teacher should identify patterns that develop in student behaviors as a result of specifically established learning objectives. These patterns can be a significant empirical source for future planning.

5. Research

Teachers need to investigate and examine relevant research, professional literature, and applied case studies that are directed to their own individual practice, as it informs their own teaching and that of their collaborative peers. To be effective in improving classroom efficiency, content of the research should become a regular part of a general collaborative discussion. Following this discussion is an awareness of how this information applies to and informs instruction. The research also facilitates between teacher, coach, specialist, and evaluator.

6. Reflection journal

Maintaining a professional, reflective journal that combines field notes, research, and summative data is not only a valuable self-monitoring tool but it is also a primary source for a teacher’s annual performance assessment, a valuable document to direct the discourse for end-of-year meetings.

7. Individualized Instruction

Individualized instruction should be generated objectively based on fundamentally established principles of pedagogy and must be combined with anecdotally subjective observations about behaviors and outcomes. Together, when shared collaboratively, present a comprehensive look into direct classroom practice. This process takes the teacher importantly beyond the scheduled cycle of formal observations.

8. Collaboration: Discussion, Observation, Assessment, Feedback, Parental Dialogue

The comprehensive teacher will incorporate in the spirit of collaboration the following: discussion among all those vested in the student outcomes, observations of colleagues who have common learning objectives for their students, assessment from a variety of data sources must be considered and integrated in proper perspective to establish comprehensive student profile, feedback needs to be elicited from peers, coaches, and evaluators, and must be pertinent a clear professional focus that has meaningful implications for the teacher. Additionally, establishing a parental dialogue whose subject is student learning becomes necessary to extend this process to a community-based ideal.

9. Departmental cross-grade communication: strategies, implementation, assessment

Departmental cross-grade communication allows teachers to exchange effective strategies, their implementation, and their assessments as students transition from one grade to the next. This exchange includes discussion about common themes, developmental patterns, effective modes of parental communication, and appropriate relationships with coaches and evaluators.

10. Collaborative Departmental Teaching [CDT]

Collaborative Departmental Teaching is an approach to learning, that when applied to elementary education in practical and innovative ways, takes advantage of the benefits of departmentalization for the purpose of directing learning to individual subject area goals., ultimately improving the understanding of language and numeric-based learning.

The CDT concept will be expanded further in subsequent installments of this Teachers on Teaching feature, including commentary from all professional stakeholders in student learning.

We will frequently recommend to our readers articles that supplement the substance of what we have presented. The article we recommend for this feature is “PLCs in Action: Innovative Teaching for Struggling Grade 3-5 Readers,” The Reader Teacher Vol. 67 Issue 2 (pp.143-151).