Using teaching strategies

When your teaching is deliberate and strategic it can make a huge difference to your learners’ progress.

When you work with your own learners, whatever the context or subject, you use a range of instructional strategies to develop their knowledge, awareness and their own strategies for learning.

Using good teaching strategies means that you can provide learning and teaching that:

• Encourages your learners to work Independently. This is one the goals of all adult education.
• Is focused, explicit and direct. You need to show your learners what proficient adults know and do.
• Is directed towards specific goals that the learners recognise and understand. These goals should line up with individual or group learning plans.
• Is used consciously and deliberately for a purpose. Our approach to embedding is one in which literacy and numeracy are used consciously and deliberately.
• Provides multiple opportunities to practise. This is so that new learning is reinforced and embedded over time.
• Is part of a wider environment that facilitates learning.
• Is relevant, challenging, interesting and enjoyable for the tutor and the learners.

What if I already do this automatically?

Good teachers and tutors do use teaching strategies automatically. And intuitively.

But when you are aware of the range of teaching strategies you can use, you are better able to provide the kind of learning and teaching that is really going to benefit your learners. And you are more likely to choose the best strategies for your teaching purposes.

It’s this shift from automatic and intuitive to explicit and deliberate that we want to cultivate

Can learners use teaching strategies too?

Here’s something else to think about:

• Both tutors and learners can use teaching strategies.

If the goal of adult educators is to move learners from dependence on the tutor to independence, then to encourage this independence you need to set up activities that require learners to use these same teaching strategies with each other.

One of your roles then is to prepare activities that encourage peer learning and teaching. This is where learners model, question, prompt, give feedback and explain to each other.