The 4 Essential Principles to Creating Your Teaching Program

As educators, there are 4 essential principles that I learned from a mentor years ago and are foundational to effective teaching practice, and I recently found a reference to them again as "Responsible Standards" in Teaching What Matters Most: Standards and Strategies for Raising Student Achievement by Richard W. Strong, Harvey F. Silver, and Matthew J. Perini.

These principles are not the "end all, be all" by any means, but they are an essential starting point to building a teaching program with high expectations and standards for achievement for all students.

I'll paraphrase from the book and use my understanding and experience to describe what I've learned as the 4 Essential Principles to creating an effective teaching program.

1. Rigor: All students need to learn to read, understand, and analyze complex texts.

Fundamental to the success of our students is their ability to read, understand, and analyze texts from different disciplines; it is also essential that our students are exposed to a variety of complex texts. Teachers should not underrate the abilities of students to understand and decipher difficult texts, thoughts, and ideas. They must be challenged intellectually and emotionally.

As a teacher, make sure to model good reading skills for your students by reading out loud, stopping to ponder questions and make inferences about the text. Take the time to look up words in the dictionary, decipher the structure of the text, and formulate hypotheses, questions, and analysis of the text.

It's essential that a diversity of strategies, learning opportunities, and assessments be used to teach different, difficult, and diverse content. Learning takes time, investigation, and connection, so offer a variety of opportunities for students to learn and grow.

2. Thought: All students need to acquire the disciplines of learning. This means they must be able to read, write, listen, and speak effectively in all subject areas. As lifelong learners, they will use inquiry, problem-solving, and experience to organize, assimilate, and accommodate learning.

The ability to use different modalities for learning and constructing knowledge begins with curiosity and inquiry to help organize thoughts that lead to knowledge acquisition and problem-solving. As students construct knowledge, they organize, assimilate, and accommodate the new learning by attaching it to prior knowledge. Then, being able to communicate and reflect on that learning allows students to grow; it teaches them to master the art of learning.

3. Diversity: All students need to demonstrate tolerance and acceptance of others; understand their own learning styles, multiple intelligences, cultural heritage, and traditions; and learn to collaborate with others with different perspectives and points of view.

We live in a global society with a melting pot of peoples, cultures, and traditions, and it is important that we value this diversity, as well as respect the diversity of our students and how they learn: different styles of instruction and modes of assessment. 

It's necessary to consider different interests, talents, and motivations, as well as prior knowledge, homelife, and aspirations of our students. Thus, as teachers, we have a responsibility to construct learning experiences that support all students with a variety of strategies, assessments, content, respect, and awareness to other perspectives that allow all students to develop to their full and unique potential. Teachers must adopt the idea that all students can learn, grow, and achieve.

4. Authenticity: All students need real-life learning that can be applied to continued education, work, and life.

Education and learning are not limited to the four walls of a classroom, nor is it meant to be the ability to acquire information to pass a test. For student buy-in, develop a learning program that creates real-world tasks; helps students to acquire skills as investigators, researchers, and problem-solvers; and to develop their abilities to read, write, solve problems, and apply concepts and skills beyond school.

How might you bring the real-world into your classroom? Perhaps you can invite experts to visit and share experiences, offer a job shadowing program, or create role-play examples to engage your learners.

In what ways do you enjoy learning? Yes, enjoy...learning can and should be fun, exciting, and inspiring. As educators, we have the responsibility to introduce and engage our students in a lifelong process.

Use these 4 Essential Principles to create your teaching program by reviewing your state standards, course objectives, and lesson units. Make sure to include them in your daily practice as a master teacher.

Until next time...

Lisa