My Conception Of Effective Teaching Into The Classroom

Rather than any research or classes I may take, teaching will be where I make the biggest impact in my time at University of Akron. I am given the privilege to teach people what may be one of their first college classes. Looking back to my freshmen year of college, one of the biggest reasons I developed a passion for Psychology was through an engaging teacher. My responsibility for the students is to enable them to thrive in and out of the classroom. I may not have the means to change their lives completely, but I can help them learn the material and help them begin healthy habits for learning and studying. The idea of teaching effectively can be tough, abstract, used loosely. I have summarized my notion of effective teaching into 6 personal

To introduce each subject material, starting off with some sort of reflection on their life experiences is a helpful way to activate the schemas that they already have in order to make new connections (Carmichael & Hayes, 2001). In this way, students can connect information that is relevant to their own lives leading to deeper processing and improved recall (Klein & Loftus, 1988; Symons & Johnson, 1997). In my classroom, I plan to use group discussion and brainstorming to begin new topics, depending on the

This piece of the framework serves many functions. It creates a bridge between the reflection on their experiences and the new material. They are challenged to think of new examples, relevant to their own lives bringing about more neural connections (Symons & Johnson, 1997). The other function of practice in the classroom is that they have the opportunity to try out new information in a friendly feedback environment and this helps prevent the illusion of understanding (Svinicki & McKeachie, 2011). I plan to implement practice through the push questions provided by Dr. Elicker in the class design notes. Students will have push questions to work through during class and often afterwards. In class they will work in pairs to solve the questions and we will discuss immediately after each set of questions. Formative Peer instruction and group problem-solving leads to a better mastery of the material (Crouch & Mazur, 2001; Svinicki & McKeachie, 2011). Not only will it lead to more effective learning and retrieval, but it will also enable me to track my students’ learning. Formative learning helps me plan what material I need to review and of what material students’ have a proper grasp (Arter, 2003). The introduction of the experiential learning framework was incredibly helpful for me to get a grasp of how I