The Elements of “Great Teaching”

Some may say you only need passions to be teachers, but in actual fact, you need more than that. From pedagogical knowledge to the most effective technique in asking questions, it takes a lot of training and practice, to make one “a teacher” and even deeper understanding on the science of learning and the art of teaching, to make one a “great teacher”.

I recently had the chance to read the Great Teaching Toolkit produced by Prof Rob Coe (Director of Research and Development at Evidence Based Education) and his team members and I thoroughly enjoyed the review. When I saw the title, I was rather skeptical about the word “great”, after all every educator has their own challenges in creating the best environment for their learners to learn. Yet, I was proven wrong and I believe this toolkit should be one of the main references for all educators.

This extensive review on research studies and framework has succinctly provided key areas that teachers should pay attention to when making decisions to improve their effectiveness. Prof Coe and his team summarised four dimensions of Great Teaching. The following section contains some of the excerpts taken from the toolkit.

Dimension 1: Understand the content

Great teachers understand the content they are teaching and how it is learnt.

There are four elements within Dimension 1, which essentially cover what a “teacher” should know in terms of content. The first element is having a deep and connected knowledge in the subject or domain. The second element is pedagogical content knowledge which basically means approaches/ techniques that a teacher has in making connections, sequencing, planning and identifying gaps. The third element is knowledge of curriculum tasks and activities as well as examples, representations to explain hard ideas. It means how well can a teacher “simplify hard ideas” to help students learn. And the fourth element is knowledge of student thinking. “Great teachers design their presentations and learning activities to anticipate and address these misconceptions directly and explicitly, both by exposing and challenging the misconception and by presenting the correct conception clearly and directly”.

This is perhaps why I personally do not recommend teachers to be simply assigned any subject that they are not competent in. The ripple effect is huge as an incompetent teacher can also kill the interests of the students in a subject.

Dimension 2: Creating a supportive environment

Great teachers create a supportive environment for learning.

There are four elements within Dimension 2. The first one is to promote interactions and relationships with students based on mutual respect, care, empathy apart from being sensitive to individual needs, culture and beliefs of the students. It is also important to avoid negative emotions when interacting with students. The second element is promoting positive climate of student-student (peers) relationship guided by respect, trust, cooperation and care. The third element is promoting learner motivation through feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness. The fourth element is creating a climate of high expectations with high challenge and high trust, in which learners are pushed to try their best while giving a safe space for trial and errors. The key is to promote a supportive environment that allows learning to flourish and not shadowed by negativity.

Dimension 3: Maximising opportunity to learn

Great teachers manage the classroom to maximise opportunity to learn

This dimension concerns more on classroom management or learning managing. There are three elements within Dimension 3. The first element is efficient management of time and resources to ensure productivity can be prioritised (reduce waste time). Some examples are setting standard class routine, keeping instructions clear and make use of simple tools. The second element is ensuring rules, expectations and consequences are explicit, clear and consistently applied. This point is rather true, many teachers set rules but they are not consistent, causing students to take the rules lightly. The third element is preventing, anticipating and responding to potentially disruptive incident while reinforcing positive student behaviors. Essentially, teachers should model good behaviour and create awareness of what is happening.

Dimension 4: Activating “hard” thinking

Great teachers present content, activities and interactions that activate their students’ thinking

As mentioned by Prof Coe, this dimension is probably the hardest to learn and master, which is why many teachers just ignore it and tend to go for the superficial levels of “engagement”. There are six elements in this dimension. The first element is structuring — giving students appropriate sequence of learning and scaffolding them systematically. This serves like the “big picture” of a learning pathway. The second element is explaining — presenting and communicating new ideas clearly with appropriate and engaging examples or representations. This element usually distinguishes teachers who really know their students (in terms of ability, interests, exposures to global knowledge, etc) than those who don’t. Those who know would find the best ways to explain something beyond the “standard answer”. The third element is questioning — using questions and dialogue to promote elaboration and encourage connected and flexible thinking among learners. This element also requires training as most teachers do not know how to apply “Socratic questioning” and tend to end up being frustrated by the lack of responses from the students. The fourth element is Interacting — responding appropriately to feedback from the students about their thinking or understanding. Acknowledging their contribution to the learning process by also giving actionable feedback (what can they do next?) to guide their learning. The fifth element is embedding — giving students tasks that embed and reinforce learning. The sixth element is activating — helping students to plan, regulate and monitor their own learning. This dimension is pretty much concern about allowing students to be more engaged cognitively while reflecting on their learning.

The four dimensions of “Great Teaching” is not about turning you into a “superstar” but more of giving you guidance in reflecting your skills and knowledge in teaching. I highly recommend teachers or educators to download the toolkit and digest the four dimensions. You can also get more information from the Great Teaching website at: https://evidencebased.education/great-teachers/