Teaching strategies – Another look at classroom work – Rebeca Anijovich

and Silvia Mora

Teaching strategies are WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THE CLASS. They are OPTIONS and
possibilities for something to be taught. These are creative decisions to share with our students
and to support their learning process. They are a variety of ARTISAN TOOLS that we have to inspire
and inspire a task that will only be successful if we commit ourselves.

How do we teach? – Strategies between theory and practice.

Chapter I

Moment 1 – Opening of class

Anijovich cites the experience of a Language and Literature Professor who began a class
with a text by Galeano, which she assumed would work with her students, but which ultimately
did not work out.

Moment 2 - Development – Between planning and action

How much time do we spend thinking about:

How to teach, find interesting resources, write instructions, organize all the class
sessions, think about the time available and how to evaluate?
Why, despite having an elaborate plan, sometimes things don't turn out the way we had
anticipated? And when it does work, what does it depend on for our teaching program to work?

The class works when all the components of the program (objectives, achievement
expectations, type of content to be taught, depth, teaching moments) are coherent with each
other, valid for the content to be taught, relevant and meaningful for both the teacher and the
students. Sometimes an experienced teacher fails, and another beginner gives a successful class
without really knowing why. It also happens that a teacher has an excellent class and when he
repeats it in another course, he fails.

In order to think about the how of teaching, the author proposes a theoretical journey
through the following main topics:

A) Teaching strategies
B) Activities, interests and routines
C) The new challenges that today's students present to us
D) Good teaching practices
 Teaching strategies:

They are the set of decisions that a teacher makes to guide teaching in order to promote
learning in his or her students. General guidelines on how to teach content thinking *

-What do we want our students to understand?

-Because?

So that?

It is not only necessary to consider what topics to work on with students, but also how to
work on them. For this, strategies are essential.

Teaching strategies affect:

 Contents
 Intellectuality of students
 Work habits
 Understanding of SOCIAL, HISTORICAL, SCIENTIFIC, ARTISTIC, CULTURAL, AMONG
OTHERS content.

Teaching strategies have two dimensions:

 REFLECTIVE dimension: the teacher designs his/her planning.

 ACTION dimension: implementation of decisions made by the teacher.

In turn, these dimensions are expressed in three moments.

 Planning time.
 The moment of the action itself or interactive moment.
 Time to evaluate what has been implemented or think and suggest other ways.

Accompanying the learning process implies a constant cycle of REFLECTION-ACTION-review

or modification of the use of TEACHING STRATEGIES from the teaching point of view.

Activities, interests, routines: a question of meaning

Activities are the tasks that students perform to acquire different knowledge. They are
instruments that teachers have at their disposal to create appropriate conditions for students to
acquire meaningful learning.
 When deciding what tasks students will perform in order to learn, the following factors
need to be considered:

 Learning styles, rhythms, interests, types of intelligence.

 The type of cognitive demand expected from the student.
 The degree of freedom that students will have to make decisions.

In order for students to achieve greater autonomy and commitment to learning, they need
to understand the why and wherefore of that content, and evaluate their own achievements and
difficulties in developing the various activities. Meaning is constructed by considering the values
and representations of a culture, and depends on a social, family and educational context; this
construction occurs through interactions and exchanges.

The idea that activities must be entertaining is widespread and forms part of many of the
myths we can find about teaching, as well as the belief that all planning must be adapted to the
interests of the students.

The concept of interest has always been linked to motivation and entertainment. We know
that boredom, the absence of surprise and the distance from one's own needs are often
associated with apathy and a lack of a positive disposition to learning. But the question will be to
invert the axis of the problem: Are there not interests that, rather than diagnosing, must be
discovered or constructed?

Interests, like tastes and preferences, are shaped by successes and failures within and
outside of school. The purpose of activities may be to generate new interests.

On the other hand, boredom has always been associated with interests and routines. But it
is true that, although routines often lead to mechanization and undermine the creativity of
students and teachers, in some cases they are necessary and educational (building work habits,
respect for schedules and spaces). The challenge is to move from routines imposed by teachers to
routines created by students.

The new challenges that today's students present to us

To define which teaching strategies will be most appropriate for each classroom situation, it
is important to consider the particular characteristics of the students; beyond the specific
peculiarities of each group, we must consider the variables that all students share because they
belong to the generation of the technological era or the information society. These students
present a virtual mind. Some features of this new group are as follows:

 They use a variety of resources to obtain information: web pages, hard drives, cell
phones, etc.
 They decode and use different types of language: animations, graphics,
photographs, texts, hypertexts.
 They create new productions from existing ones (copy paste).
  They are relativists par excellence, with respect to knowledge. The information on
the website is updated all the time, and they consider any information they find to be
valid.

Thinking about today's students also means taking into account their cognitive structures.
We talk about meaningful learning, through learning that relates new knowledge with previous
knowledge. Meaningful learning results from the old theory developed by Ausubel. But what
happens when students do not have the prior knowledge necessary to anchor new learning?

First of all, it is necessary to see if they really are not there, and bring them to light. In any
case, it will not be possible for our students to imagine and make use of metaphors, analogies and
fictions that serve as a basis for the construction of knowledge and understanding. Imagination is a
great ability to think of possibilities, new scenarios, other ways of doing things; we should not just
stick with what the child brings as a starting point.

Moment 3 - Closing – Strategies between theory and practice

Strategies reach their level of concretion through the activities that teachers propose to their
students and that they carry out.

Some principles to keep in mind when planning teaching strategies in order to promote
meaningful learning.

 Agree with the students on the learning goals; the student must become involved and
assume increasing responsibility for his or her learning.
 Propose the production of genuine tasks and real problems specific to each discipline, in
order to promote interaction with the real world.
 Create situations that require specific knowledge of each discipline in different contexts.
 Guide towards the use of varied materials and sources to obtain information and
communicate.
 Challenge students with tasks that go beyond their skills and knowledge.
 Stimulate the production of alternative solutions.
 Promote questioning of established truths.
 Promote continuous assessment, self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher
assessment, whether written or oral.

The Good Questions – Chapter II

Moment II – Development

The questions: their whys and their what fors

 Asking questions is a common practice for teachers. But why and for what purpose do we
teachers ask?

What does the teacher do when he asks? What are your goals and what are the results
you get? What does the relationship between the purposes and results of the questions depend
on?

When we ask questions, teachers do so with different intentions: to awaken students'

interest, to check if they understood, to promote reflection, to stimulate the relationship between
different types of knowledge. Are we clearly aware of what we are proposing when we ask
questions? Some typical questions like “did you understand?”, “does anyone have any
questions?”, in many cases close the dialogue.

Questions must be able to create a space for reciprocity and feedback. This reciprocity favors
the development of reflective processes that generate the construction of knowledge.

Often, the difference between a teacher's intentions, the type of response he or she expects
from his or her students, and the result he or she actually obtains is due to a lack of sufficient
reflection on why the question is being asked and how it is being asked.

We must bear in mind that there are different types of questions depending on the level of
thinking they stimulate:

 Simple questions (short, almost unique answers).

 Comprehension questions (answers of a certain complexity, information
processing).
 Higher cognitive order questions (require interpretation, prediction, critical
evaluation).
 Metacognitive questions (they reflect on their way of learning and thinking).

On the other hand, the questions can be thought of from the degree of freedom and variety
of responses that they allow:

 Convergent thinking application questions (they lead to a single answer, what are
the planets that make up our solar system?
 Divergent thinking application questions (seeking a variety of answers, in your
opinion, what are the causes that originated this problem?

We also observe the presence of open or closed questions. Open classes help students
learn to think. What is the meaning you find in this matter? What did you realize? Say in
your own words, what did you understand from…?

What does the teacher do after asking? And when do students ask questions?

What do teachers do after receiving a question? We try to respond quickly, even when the
student has not yet finished stating his or her idea. For a true dialogue it is necessary to wait. To
engage in dialogue, one must listen with sufficient sympathy and interest to understand the
proper meaning of the other person's position. It is essential to be able to change one's point of
view and express good will.

What does the teacher do when students do not ask questions or when they respond
with ritual knowledge? How can you encourage questioning skills?

Many times students respond superficially, to meet the teacher's expectations, and to "get
away with it", regardless of their understanding of the content being developed.

But in many cases the student's response is not only to continue with the communicative
situation and satisfy the teacher, but also reflects the level of knowledge, their concerns regarding
a topic, their confusions.

It is also necessary to teach our students to ask deeper questions:

 Showing them how to organize information,

 Encouraging students to formulate their own questions,
 Teaching him that there are different types of questions.

Lectures: transmitting information and building meaningful

knowledge – Chapter III

Moment II – Development

Does expository class promote meaningful learning?

The relationship between exposure and the cognitive processes that are activated in the
learning subject

An expository lecture is a direct teaching strategy in which the information provided by the
teacher is organized into a logical and coherent structure to try to ensure that students
understand. Even though the class is expository, the students' minds are not blank. They are active
subjects capable of approaching the information that the teacher will present.

When we talk about an expository class in terms of producing significant learning, we will
position ourselves from a constructivist and not a behaviorist position.

Unlike those classes in which students construct and discover knowledge by themselves, the
expository class requires a significant level of abstraction from students and demands the
activation of a series of complex cognitive processes.
 The expository class will be fruitful when, in addition to the stimuli provided by the teacher,
of auditory and visual types (such as photos or texts), the student builds a network of meaningful
knowledge in a coherent manner from this data.

According to Ausubel, a good tool for an expository class and for activating students' prior
knowledge is to have prior organizers. These organizers can be comparative or expository.

The comparative organizer is one that, through analogies or differentiations, relates the new
content that will be presented with previous knowledge that the students have about it.

The exhibition organizer represents the intellectual scaffolding. It is a teaching and learning
assistant, as it shows the central concept and its subordinates in such a way that the student
understands the logic of what is going to be presented.

Negative aspects of expository classes:

-Encourages students to listen and absorb information from the teacher's monologue;

-It prevents students' understanding from being assessed during class, since communication
is only one-way.

Aspects to take into account when giving lectures

 Present few ideas, but with great clarity
 Reinforce understanding through repetition
 Show concrete examples and experiences
 Use a colloquial style
 Encourage and accept questions
 Remember that attention is limited
 Use visual resources