Instructing

Being able to give effective instructions will help maintain a productive, motivated workforce who are able to meet high performance standards.

Effective instruction tips

1. Use comparing, contrasting, classifying, analogies and metaphors

2. Show your ‘students’ how to summarise and take notes

3. Reinforce effort and give praise

4. Provide ‘homework’ and practice

5. Use nonlinguistic representations such as mental pictures and graphics

6. Use cooperative learning approaches

7. Set goals for ‘students’ and provide feedback

8. Have ‘students’ generate and test hypotheses

9. Help ‘students’ find out what they know and what they don’t know using cues and questions, and let them know what they’re going to learn in advance

Types of instruction

Direct Instruction

Types of direct instruction include lectures, didactic questioning, explicit teaching, practice and drill, and demonstrations. Effective for providing information or developing step-by-step skills with rules and examples.

Indirect Instruction

Mainly student-centred with a high level of student involvement in observing, investigating, drawing inferences from data, or forming hypotheses.

Interactive Instruction

Heavily reliant on discussion and sharing among participants. Students can learn from peers and teachers to develop social skills and abilities, to organise their thoughts, and to develop rational arguments.

Experiential Learning

Learner based and activity oriented consisting of five phases:

1. experiencing (an activity occurs)

2. sharing (reactions and observations are shared)

3. analysing (patterns and dynamics are determined)

4. inferring (principles are derived); and

5. applying (plans are made to use learning in new situations)

Independent Study

Encourages students to take responsibility for planning and pacing their own learning, it can be used as the major instructional strategy with the whole class, in combination with other strategies, or it can be used with one or more individuals while another strategy is used with the rest of the class.

This content comes from The University of Essex