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Which teaching approach is right?

To teach well requires a personal and reflective didactic-methodological repertoire. We concur with research findings that a didactic-methodological monoculture is unable to meet the challenges which modern pedagogy places on good teaching. A single and solely didactic concept for the entire instructional aspect of a class fails to prepare the students for life in a society which demands entirely different skills and abilities. Consequently, this book describes the most important didactic-methodological approaches and argues for integrative, multi-facetted didactics.

Every teaching practitioner must find an optimal proportional mix between the various dimensions. It is a question of balance between teacher guidance and student self-determination on the one hand, and on the other, a balance between a teacher-centered and discovery-based instructional approach.

The following graph presents the didactic approaches discussed in this book as an orientation system, locating on the horizontal axis the various approaches between teacher guidance and student self-determination, and placing on the vertical axis the approaches of teacher-directed instruction and autonomous discovery (from instructional to explorative).

It is interesting to note the widespread opinion that self-directed and explorative learning forms are fundamentally better than teacher-directed and instructional learning methods. This quote by Goethe “Die Jugend will lieber angeregt als unterrichtet sein” (youth would rather be excited than taught) already refers to such common beliefs about apparent student desires; however, it is based entirely on individual, isolated factors of teaching and their resulting outcomes, considered in isolation, and it places the students front and center in terms of learning objectives and content, as well as instructional organization and work methods. Correspondingly, a social trend has dominated the educational landscape for two to three centuries and shaped, most of all, the demands of educated families: alternatively-organized instruction, oriented along elements of reform pedagogy that borrows from Montessori, Steiner or Freinet enjoy popularity, precisely because it functions exclusively in a self-determined and explorative fashion, with promises to meet the students precisely where they ostensibly are. The number of such private providers has never been so great as today and offers to some extent a rollback and a counterbalance to the standard output orientation of the public school systems in Europe.

Are self-determined and explorative forms of learning indeed so much better? We do not share this opinion and concur with the findings of the empirical education researcher Frank Lipowsky, who summarized his conclusion briefly and succinctly as follows: “Open learning situations per se are not superior nor inferior to traditional learning situations. The quality of instructions cannot be tied to its degree of openness and freedom of choice.”1

How is this book structured?

Simply good teaching provides suggestions about the most important characteristics of good teaching and presents various didactic approaches and specific teaching methods in a conceptional and practice-oriented manner – knowning that each teacher needs to develop a combination that suits the topic, the class, as well as themselves.

Following the introductory first chapter, the subsequent seven chapters are devoted to one concept or method, respectively. Considerations on assessment, planning, and reflection, which are useful for all didactic approaches and methodologies, conclude the suggestions of this handbook.

The first chapter presents the framework for the general characteristics of good teaching as they are known from common didactic and teaching research. References to the individual subsequent chapters thereby provide forward-looking textual points of reference to the various didactic concepts and teaching methods. The chapter sequence follows along the polarities of teacher-driven versus self-determined and instructional versus explorative learning and begins with direct instruction. The subsequent chapters increasingly loosen up the teacher-oriented dimension and proceed from cooperative learning in chapter three to dialog-based learning in chapter four, to various other student-oriented forms of instruction, such as working with weekly plans, workshop instruction, studio education, and main lesson blocks in chapter five. The highest form of student centeredness as well as explorative learning, learning with projects, appears in chapter six. Chapter seven, as the last pillar of the didactic concepts and teaching methods, presents learning through play, a form which may oscillate between teacher-oriented and student-oriented and between instructional and explorative, depending on the use and function of play. The framework which the introductory chapter opened is closed successively in the last chapters. Thus, chapter eight deals with the question of learning process assessment and assessment of student performance. Chapters nine and ten provide suggestions and possibilities for structured instructional planning along the presented concepts and methods, as well as a collection of possibilities for a differentiated reflection on and continued development of one’s own teaching.

How are the chapters structured?

All chapters are identically structured. As a reader, you are being prompted in the first part of every chapter captioned by “These are your tasks …” to deal with your own experiences in school and instructed to record your previous experiences and insights with learning (your subjective theories) and to discuss them with colleagues. In the subsequent prompt, “You must know this …”, you receive important information and learn about actual theoretical key points. In the prompt, “How to apply this …”, you will find out how to implement these theoretical insights into practice. The last part of every chapter provides concrete examples under the heading “practical exercises and examples”.

This procedure is similar to the didactic model of dialogic learning presented in the fourth chapter. Dialogic learning is a first step – on a singular level – a personal dialog with the material (1). The optic reads “I see it this way!”. The required activity is reflection. Subsequently, a dialog with the material is required on a regular level (3). The optic here reads: I acquire an overview and a perspective based on theoretical insights. The required activity is breakdown and structuring. Between these two phases lies a divergent phase, in which the personal viewpoint is complemented with those of others (2). This phase is related to the question “Aha, is this how you see it?” or the statement “This is how you see it!” Of importance, finally, is the connection of the regular phase with a new singular phase, a phase during which the first answers based on knowledge gain and increasing recognition are self-critically examined and questioned concerning their practical application possibilities (4).

There is an important reason for the fact that every chapter begins with a critical examination of one’s own learning and teaching experiences, which transcends our dialogical learning-inspired understanding of learning. One of the big pitfalls of teacher training is that what is taught is not applied in practice in the schools. It is assumed that one of the main reasons for this discrepancy between quality aspirations and instructional reality is the fact that teachers do not teach as they were taught to teach, but like they were taught themselves or, according to Howard Altman: “Teachers teach as they were taught, not as they were taught to teach.”2 For teachers, the acquisition of expertise in educational methods is a long process in which learning by imitation appears to play a significant role. If the variety of teaching methods is not experienced by the students but only taught as an academic subject within the framework of teacher education, rather than experienced as a didactic-methodological reality, the independent realization of this demand – especially in the first year of a teacher’s professional work experience – may fall victim to excessive demands and overload, and may lead to resignation and retreat to the already experienced examples as a student. The overwhelming dominance of actual experiences threatens to be perpetuated. To break this cycle, we deem it of greatest importance to make us aware of our own experienced classroom teaching and to analyze it critically. Only this way can the preconditions be created for the still not easy process of gradually building a varied personal repertoire of methods.

What does it mean to teach well?

What do you say to this demand: “The first and last goal of our didactics shall be to discover and explore the teaching practice whereby teachers have to teach less, the students nevertheless learn more; and whereby there is less noise in the schools in favor of more freedom, pleasure and real progress.”3

This demand was published more than 350 years ago. It was written by the Czech theologian and educator Jan Amos Komensky, who under his Latin name Johann Amos Comenius achieved worldwide fame. In his Didactica magna (Great Didactic or Great Art of Teaching) published in 1657, he promises that the world’s entire body of knowledge can be taught to all of mankind completely and comprehensively. Comenius’ pointed criticism of the prevalent conditions of the schools and his proposals for improvement still fascinate today. Comenius criticized the lesson organization of his time with a scathing judgement (“It is a torment for young people to be smothered by dictations, exercises, memorization ad nauseam, even to the point of mental confusion”), the lesson content (“What is connected by Nature is not being treated together, but separately”) and the teachers (“The fool does not teach the children as much as they can comprehend, but as much as he can possibly stuff into the children”). In contrast, Comenius demanded that pupils’ readiness to learn be awakened and maintained, namely by renouncing coercion, through pleasant methods (such as parables, fables, mysteries, discussions), and through learning by doing rather than mechanically applied rules, and with the choice of attractive learning topics. Comenius demanded the attainment of vivid and sustained learning outcomes with activation of all senses, the connection of the senses with the intellect and through a coherent, connected treatment of things that belong together. He wanted to prevent excessive demand and learning difficulties by way of a natural allocation of teaching time and a natural beginning of the school year, the reduction and structuring of the subject load, through the path from the general to the particular, and through compact, uninterrupted learning.4

In our opinion, the quote, the criticism and the demands by Comenius have some merit today. Not only in his spirit and in agreement with many historic figures in pedagogy, but also with prominent teaching researchers of the present, we plead

•for flexible and creative classroom teaching, and

•for didactics by which significant things are taught and learned,

•for a methodology that seeks to avoid boredom, and

•for a teaching atmosphere in which learning is not equated with blood, sweat and tears, but pleasure, laughter and relaxed concentration.

A book with the title Simply good teaching may also incur the risk of misunderstandings, however. The opinion that instructors should simply teach well, and that everything else is secondary, enjoys a certain popularity. It is argued that teachers should follow the curriculum, the written and unwritten rules of their profession, the mainstream educational policy. We do not share this opinion and agree with the view of Thomas Kesselring: “Those who think like this run the risk of confusing the targeted situation with the present situation, the desired with the existing as-is-situation.”5

General didactic places its focus on questions of good teaching. The tasks of teachers, however, demand an examination of broader issues which transcend teaching in a narrow sense and which, not without reason, are considered even more important by many educators: How can I, as a teacher, contribute to a class climate that promotes mutual respect, consideration and appreciation? How can I implement these principles of satisfactory interpersonal relationships also in terms of contact with colleagues and with parents? What can I contribute so that the children or adolescents who are entrusted to me can lead a fulfilling life, feel confident and up to the tasks and challenges that life imposes, and lead an enjoyable existence? All these questions are obviously related to good teaching, but their solutions require discussions which transcend the scope of the discussion in this publication. Last, but not least, they require educators who promote the further development of the school in our democratic society in a constructive, forward-looking and critical manner. Without a public education system which promotes and further develops an open, liberal-minded, democratically legitimized school, any didactic-methodologically sound teaching approach, no matter how well thought out, remains only patchwork.

1

Lipowsky: Zur Qualität offener Lernsituationen im Spiegel empirischer Forschung, 2002, p. 126

2

Altmann: Training foreign language teachers for learner-centered instruction, 1983, p. 24

3

Comenius: Grosse Didaktik, 2007

4

Berner: Didaktische Kompetenz, 1999, p. 32, 33

5

Kesselring: Handbuch Ethik für Pädagogen, 2012, p. 14