Effective teaching strategies

Abstract

We help our students understand engineering concepts and go beyond the knowledge level to higher levels of thinking. We help them to apply, analyze, and synthesize, to create new knowledge, and solve new problems. So, too, as teachers, we need to recognize our challenge to go beyond knowledge about effective teaching. We need to apply these strategies, analyze what works, and take action to modify or synthesize our learning to help our students learn in a way that works for us as individuals and teams of teachers. Helping students learn is our challenge as teachers. Identifying effective teaching strategies, therefore, is our challenge as we both assess the effectiveness of our current teaching style and consider innovative ways to improve our teaching to match our students' learning styles. Much of a teacher's success in the classroom is hinged on their use of teaching strategies, or to put it another way, their approach to their teaching, how they implement instructions, how they teach, how they communicate, and how they deliver information, how they communicate data to students. The different teaching strategies available to the teacher are too numerous to mention all of them here,and indeed, many strategies interlink and may even be used collaboratively within any given lesson.