DEVELOPING YOUR TEACHING SKILLS
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An over-riding feature of teaching skills is that they are purposeful and goal-directed activities which are essentially problem-solving. At its broadest, the problem is how best to deliver effectively the educational outcomes, in terms of pupil learning, required. More specifically, teaching skills are concerned with all the short-term and immediate problems faced before, during and after the lesson, such as ‘How can I lay out the key points of this topic in a PowerPoint presentation?’, ‘How can I signal to a pupil to stop talking without interrupting what I am explaining to the whole class?’, ‘What can I write when assessing a piece of work by a pupil to highlight a flaw in the pupil’s argument?’. Teaching skills are also concerned with the long-term problems of effective teaching, such as ‘Which textbook series best meets the needs of my pupils?’, ‘How best can I update my subject knowledge?’, ‘How do I best prepare pupils for the work they will be doing in future years?’.
Identifying essential teaching skills One of the major problems in trying to identify a list of essential teaching skills is that teaching skills vary from very broad and general skills, such as the planning of lessons, to very specific skills, such as the appropriate length of time to wait for a pupil to answer a question in a particular type of situation. Overall, in considering teaching skills, it seems to be most useful to focus on fairly broad and general skills which are meaningful to teachers and relate to how they think about their teaching. More specific skills can then be discussed as and when they help illustrate and illuminate how these general skills operate. Nevertheless, given the nature of teaching, it is clear that whatever set of general skills is chosen to focus on, the overlap and interplay between them will be marked, and a good case can always be made by others for focusing on a different set. For example, Hay McBer (2000) identified the following list of teaching skills: ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
high expectations planning methods and strategies pupil management/discipline time and resource management assessment homework.
Over the years there has been a wealth of writing about and use of lists of teaching skills, both by those involved in teacher education and by educational researchers. There is no definitively agreed list. A consideration of the various writings, however, indicates that a fairly typical list of teaching skills can be identified. Such lists of teaching skills have proved to be very useful in helping both beginning and experienced teachers to think about and develop their classroom practice.
The effective teacher Writings on the notion of the effective teacher have also yielded a mass of material on the skills displayed by teachers considered to be effective (Campbell et al., 2004; Kerry