Notes for Acts of Teaching: Chapter 11
Professional Skills and Abilities of Effective learning.
Teachers
Focusing and Engaging Students Attention
- Effective teachers are able to get students'
attention at the beginning of a lesson and to hold
their attention throughout the lesson.
Establishing Set
- by providing a context for the lesson and the
instruction.
a. Capture students' attention or provide them with
a framework for the lesson.
b. Help students relate new material or
information to what they have previously learned.
c. Determine students' entry-level knowledge
prior to introducing new content.
* Set Induction providing advance organizers or
lesson entry.
* Orientation Set - purpose is to engage students
attention in a new instructional activity.
* Transition Set when the primary goal of the set
is to help students understand how the new material
relates to what they learned previously.
* Evaluative Set to establish what the students
already know about the topic.
Using Variety
- Educators have long known that variety increases
students' motivation and learning, and researchers
have supported this belief.
- It is the second strongest predicator of teachers
effectiveness.
*Instructional Activities and Materials
- Get the students attention by presenting novel
situations or problems.
*Interacting with Students
- Varying the ways teachers interact with students is
important.
- Teachers should also vary the ways in which they
reinforce or praise students for desirable
performance or inform them about their progress.
Using Instructional Time Efficiently
Optimizing Time
- Time on task is consistently related to increase
- When students and teachers spend more time
actively engaged in academic tasks, students learn
more.
a. Mandated Time
- It is the formal time scheduled for school or
academic activities.
- The length of the school year, day, and periods
determine the maximum time available for
instructional activities.
b. Allocated Time
- It is the amount of mandated time intended or
scheduled for academic activities.
c. Academic Instruction Time
- It is the amount of allocated time during which the
teacher is actually conducting instructional
activities.
d. Academic Learning Time (ALT)
- It is the amount of academic instruction time
during which students are actively and successfully
engaged in learning.
- For academic instruction time to be considered
"engaged," or academic learning time, given
learners must be actively engaged in meaningful
academic tasks at which they are mostly successful.
Maintaining Momentum
- Momentum - the flow of activities and to the pace
of teaching and learning maintained in the
classroom.
Making Smooth Transitions
- Instructional transition - points in instructional
interactions when contexts change.
- Major transitions - take place between class
meetings or lessons, between lessons in the same
room, and between different instructional activities
within the same.
- Minor transitions - occur within a lesson when the
speaker moves from one aspect of the topic to
another, when the speaker pauses, or when the
speaker changes.
Conducting Interactive Instruction
Using Questions
- Effective teachers establish and maintain highly
interactive classrooms - classrooms characterized
by student-student and teacher-student dialogue on
Notes for Acts of Teaching: Chapter 11
content rather than simply teacher talk.
- to actively process information and compose an
answer.
How to Ask Questions
- be sure to phrase questions clearly and concise.
- Questions should require students to process or
think about what they are learning and to compose
an answer.
- 'When teaching toward lower-order objectives,
lower-order questions make sense.
- When your objectives include higher-order
processes or when you want to promote students'
critical thinking, you must integrate higher-order,
divergent, and process questions into your lessons.
*Sequence of Questioning
- Respond, react, redirect, and so on
- Pause
- Student responds to question
- Call on student
- Pause
- Ask a question
Obtaining Good Answers
- after teachers have developed and phrased their
questions, they must get students to respond to
them.
Following up Students Responses
- After a student has responded to your question,
you must respond or react to the reply.
Probing
- means asking additional questions of the
responding student to help expand or raise the level
of the response.
- It is often intended to focus attention on important
aspects of the question that enable the student to
improve the response.
Redirecting
- It is another way of following up an incorrect
response.
- The teacher asks another student to answer the
same question.
Rephrasing
- simply means restating the same question in
different terms.
- When students fail to respond to a teacher's
question, it is often due to poor phrasing of the
initial question.
Providing Clear Instruction
*Instructional clarity - teacher's ability to provide
instruction that helps students come to a clear and
accurate understanding of important ideas or
concepts.
The specific behaviors involve:
(1) preparing and entering the lesson.
(2) introducing and emphasizing content
(3) elaborating on important ideas or concepts
(4) monitoring students' understanding and
remediating when students fail to' understand.
Monitoring Students' Progress
- carefully and continually assess students'
performance and progress and check for
understanding in a variety of ways.
- You can monitor student understanding in
numerous formal and informal ways. Tests, quizzes,
homework, and projects are examples of formal
monitoring.
Providing Feedback and Reinforcement
*Feedback
- sometimes called knowledge of result.
1. Inform students about the quality and accuracy of
their performance
2. Help them learn how to monitor and improve
their own learning.
- Effective feedback includes: information about
(l) the criteria used to evaluate performance.
(2) how the students performance relates to the
standard
(3) specifically how the performance can or should
be improved.
*Principles Effective Feedback
1. Provide feedback as frequently as possible-every
day for every student, if possible.
2. Provide feedback as soon after performance as
possible.
3. Make your feedback specific rather than general.
4. Focus feedback on the quality of the student's
performance, not on his or her intentions or
Notes for Acts of Teaching: Chapter 11
motivations.
5. Design and use feedback that teaches students
how to gauge their own progress and performance.

*Reinforcement
- is intended to strengthen and increase the
frequency of a desirable behavior or response,
usually by providing some type of reward.
Some Final Thoughts