Essential Teaching Strategies to Deliver an Effective Lesson

Teaching is almost as old as the age of human being civilization. As human being civilization, culture and technology have evolved over time, teaching strategies to deliver effective lesson have evolved too. Technology changes have changed the way people teach and learn dramatically. In order to deliver an effective lesson to the students, teaching strategies need to be creative and innovative.

These are 5 essential teaching strategies to deliver effective lesson:

1. Know the students very well.

Students may have different backgrounds, abilities, behaviours, and personalities. Teaching strategies and teaching materials need to be adapted to the students. For example, if most of the students cannot learn too fast, teaching materials need to be delivered more detail, one step at a time and slow.

It will be different for students who can learn fast, teaching materials can be delivered fast and mix it with a self-study method. If possible, personalization teaching to each individual student will be the best way to deliver an effective lesson. Emails and Social Media can help to personalize teachers versus students communication.

2. Utilize multimedia and Technology.

Classroom, whether it is a physical classroom or online classroom, should not be boring for the students. Bored students in the classrooms will not be able to accept teaching materials very well. Multimedia and Technology can help teachers to deliver teaching materials more effective and easier to accept for the students.

Technology-rich teaching materials can make students motivated and engaged longer. Some examples of multimedia and technology utilization in classrooms are an interactive whiteboard, web-based classroom, videos, social media, tablets, virtual reality, etc. Any of these technologies integration in the classroom will bring positive impacts on student learning experiences.

3. Up to date teaching materials.

Technology changes are extremely fast and it changes the way people do things so fast too. As the implication, teaching materials need to be up to date for the students. Out of date teaching materials will not be useful and give values to students. Students will not be able to apply the knowledge they earn from out of date teaching materials in real life.

For example, if we have a classroom on introduction to the computer, we should give the teaching materials in Microsoft Windows operating system environment instead of Microsoft DOS operating system environment, because people around the world have not used Microsoft DOS operating system anymore. In order to deliver up to date teaching materials, the teachers should have enough time daily to learn new things and keep up to date with the recent updates about the topics of the teaching materials.

4. Mix classroom teaching with outbound teaching.

It is very fun and entertaining for the students if we mix classroom teaching with outbound teaching. It can be recreational activities for the students too. Students need to learn from real things outside classrooms.

For example, if the teaching material is about Biology, it is very fun, entertaining, and helpful to bring the students to the forest for an outbound teaching. During the forest outbound teaching, students can see, watch, hear, and touch real things that they can only read and watch on the teaching materials.

5. Cooperative learning.

Cooperative learning will develop students’ self-confidence, communication skill, and critical thinking skill. Students can learn and develop those things when they learn together in a group with other students. Cooperative learning can be done by giving students some projects which should be worked in a group.

By cooperative learning, students will learn how to interact with other people who have different backgrounds, behaviour, and personalities. Students will also learn about leadership in cooperative learning.

As a conclusion, there are no one-size-fit-for-all teaching strategies. Teachers need to improvise these teaching strategies on the execution level.

“ Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach. “ ( Aristotle )