How to Become Better at Teaching

What Really Works?

It took me five years of teaching to feel like I was doing a good job. My first year in the classroom, the only way I made it through was by telling myself just to make it to the next period. The first few years of teaching are brutal, as any teacher will tell you.

When a person first enters the teaching field, usually they have a degree in Education. In their field of study, they encounter childhood development, classroom management, pedagogy, inclusivity in curriculum, educational law, and other classes. In other words, they study theory.

When they enter the classroom for the first time as a student teacher or a full-time teacher, they realize that theory isn’t helpful in the day-to-day operations of their classroom.

So, the question is: what really works in the classroom?

Signal

Effective teachers are able to control their classroom. They are able to quiet students when necessary. Regardless of grade level, the single most important tool that every effective teacher uses is the signal.

A signal is a verbal cue that instructs students to stop talking and give their attention to the teacher. Many teachers have come up with clever and fun signals, but the type of signal doesn’t matter. What matters is that teachers are consistent and firm with their signal.

The first day, teachers should instruct their students on their signal procedures. When students hear the signal, they should stop their conversations and work and look at the teacher. Only after the teacher has 100% compliance, should they begin talking.

This will take practice. It will not be successful at first. But the teacher should remain firm and demand silence and attention before talking. Do not talk when students are talking.

Spend the first few weeks practicing and reinforcing your signal and plan on reviewing it after weekends and breaks.

When a teacher is able to quiet their class at their will, so much of teaching becomes easier and more enjoyable. Just stick with the signal!

Satisficing

The first few years of teaching are intense because teachers haven’t yet figured out ways of accepting and adopting available options as satisfactory. Le Maistre and Paré call this ability “satisficing,” and they say that a teacher’s ability to “develop temporary but sufficient solutions … enables teachers to survive the early years.” Through their experiences, master teachers have a larger skillset to pull from and are able to better anticipate student problems and figure out solutions. That’s why they’re masters.

Teachers learn quickly that they have to make hundreds of decisions a day before, during, and after class, and not every decision will have the perfect outcome. New teachers have to learn to live with this imperfection, but there is hope.

In their research, Le Maistre and Paré found a correlation between new teachers who were able to simply find a “good enough” solution to various problems in the classroom and teacher satisfaction. Satisfaction leads to retention, and retention leads to better teachers.

The recommendation is to find solutions in the classroom that are quick and sufficient.

Here’s a classroom management example. During the first week of class, a group of high school students talks over the teacher and ignores the signal. The teacher decides to move their seats immediately. Quick and sufficient. As the teacher becomes more skilled, they will be able to see these problems before they start and come up with better solutions. It just takes time.

Chunking

Teachers would do well to establish routines in their lesson delivery. I wrote about that earlier at this link. Teachers also need to understand their students’ cognitive processing capacity (CPC); that is, the amount of information that a person is able to recall after a brief exposure. The CPC will vary from student to student and class to class, but a teacher needs to monitor and adjust (through intermediate closures) their classes’ attention span.

A good rule of thumb is to divide your class into fifteen minute chunks. After each chunk, the teacher should use some type of formative assessment to see who got it, but it also cements the knowledge of the lesson for the students.

Here is a sample chunked agenda that you can use every day with any lesson:

• Bell Work (5 minutes): Preview material with a question. Should not require research.
• Anticipatory Set (5 minutes): Connects subject to students’ lives. Should be fun and interesting. Get their attention.
• Content (15 minutes): Reading. Lecture. Activity. Models. Examples. This is the learning that you want students to know.
• Activity (15 minutes): Time for students to practice and demonstrate--on their own--the learning. Could be individual or cooperative depending on learning.
• Closure (5 minutes): Question that assesses whether students learned the material.

Notice that no activity lasts longer than 15 minutes. For teachers who want to improve their teaching, start with this template and adjust based on how well it goes.

Key Takeaways

• Use a signal in your classroom to get attention. Be firm and consistent in demanding attention, and students will give it to you.
• It takes several years for teachers to become really good at their job. In the meantime, find solutions that are quick and sufficient.
• Utilize chunking to make planning easier. In addition, chunking helps students retain information because they may not be overloaded.