BEST Teaching Methodologies and Techniques

BEST teaching Methodologies

                                                                        Author: Shahin & irfan

The word BEST is defined in the dictionary as ‘the quality of being most excellent or desirable type’.

As a teacher do you want to be the Best teacher?

Do you want your students to be the Best students?

Becoming a ‘best’ teacher have to go through a process of becoming a learner first. Learn the art of teaching with easy techniques in this article. The ultimate goal for a teacher must be that the students begins the journey of joy of learning.

Attention is the mother of teaching and maximizing the learning. Let me share with you the secret of the best teaching methodology without building much anticipation.

The acronym “BEST” stands for

B= Brain Gym to activate the readiness for learning

E= Emotions to connect, relate and store information into Brain

S= Strategies of learning techniques

T= Time to process information into memory

Brain Gyms are kinesthetic smart moves which helps to stimulate the left and right part of brain. It leads to increase in the creativity, logical and analytical thinking. Few brain gym exercises are lazy eight, thinking caps, brain button and cross crawl.

The brain gym is an effective way to helps the student to focus on what the teacher is going to teach.

Emotions are memorable. Do you remember your emotional moments in life like your birthday celebration or your favorite movie. When we connect our emotions to the moments of our life then that moments get recorded in our brain as long lasting memory. Same is true for remembering the scholastic concepts and lessons.

E.g., teaching in an out-of-classroom experience, or a teacher showing extra care and love that makes the student emotionally attached to the subject as well.

Dramatizing could be one of the best technique to make the lessons an emotionally memorable. The research says that the performance of the student improves if the student is praised with positive attributes and strength is highlighted.

Strategies of right learning techniques according to the grade of the students and complexity of subject could be effective in improving the performance of the student.

Every student is unique and has different learning style. Some student learn by auditory, some by visual and some by kinesthetic style. Understanding the strength of your student and knowing the learning style is very vital for a teacher to plan the teaching methodology for the class.

A pleasant environment makes the student comfortable and keep them focused and motivates them to keep returning to classroom every day. The teachers can also use humorous way of teaching to inculcate the positive bonding between students and create happy environment.

The starting point must be introduction of the topic and the learning objective. It must be made clear to the student on what is the goal to be achieved at the end of the class period for the topic. The students must be encouraged to quiz “What I know about the topic of learning?” “What I want to know?” and at the end “What I learned today?”

There is a misconception that effective learning can only be achieve by animated videos or physical model. Effective learning can be achieved by use of graphics organizer like circle pattern (life cycle), linear charts, story based teaching etc.

Real life examples create good connection to the topic and ease the student memorize the concept.

Another way of teaching technique is “collaborative way of teaching” by forming teams to make the passive listener into active participant and learner.

Time to be provided after the class gets over with a THINK TIME so that the students can process the information into learning for life in calm environment.

 The teacher should probe and analyze the learning outcome by questioning the students on the topic of learning. But questioning should be cordial and not intimidating. The students can be probed with interesting teaching technique like passing the ball, guessing games, quiz or chit pick from bowl.

In each end of class the learning objective should be repeated and the outcome must be summarized in 2 -3 sentences.

At last the teacher need not wait for the official term exams results to provide the feedback but rather can help the students by providing time to time valuable, constructive and specific feedback before exams.