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Five Principles of Teaching

Uploaded by tmjsnbrd95 on Oct 27, 2011

This essay discusses five principles of teaching.

I Introduction

Teaching is a difficult profession, one that relies on developing and implementing standards to help students learn. The standards can also help teachers teach more effectively.
This paper discusses five principles of teaching that apply to a middle-school math class.

II Student Development, Learning and Motivation

What motivates students to learn? If there is one question paramount in teaching, that surely must be it. Motivation makes the difference: students can learn by rote or by sheer repetitious drudgery, but those who are motivated learn much more quickly, and enjoy the experience.
Students are motivated either by intrinsic or extrinsic actors. If the student is intrinsically motivated, he or she learns simply because they love to learn. An extrinsically motivated student learns because doing so will bring some desired result: good grades, or the teacher’s approval, for example. (Lumsden, 1994, PG).
According to Lumsden, there are some interesting differences between students with different types of motivation. Students who are motivated by the love of learning seem to “employ strategies that demand more effort and that enable them to process information more deeply.” (1994, PG). In addition, students with an intrinsic orientation tended to prefer more challenging tasks than students who were extrinsically motivated. This would seem to indicate that intrinsically motivated students will ultimately do better in school, and perhaps in life, than those with only extrinsic motivations.
The challenge then becomes how to provide motivation to the students in the classroom setting. First, the students must feel that the classroom is a safe place. It has to be supportive and caring, a place where everyone feels that they belong. When students feel that they fit in, they will participate more fully in the discussions and that, in turn, will enhance their overall learning experience. (Lumsden, 1994, PG).
Students should also be given problems and tasks that are challenging enough to keep them interested, but no so difficult that they cannot be solved. These tasks should also be relevant to real world situations, though tasks that involve a “certain amount of incongruity” are helpful, because “they stimulate students’ curiosity, an intrinsic motivator.” (Lumsden, 1994, PG).
The teacher might want to consider assigning problems that have short-term goals, so that they can be achieved with some effort, but finally accomplished. Setting problems that the...

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Uploaded by:   tmjsnbrd95

Date:   10/27/2011

Category:   Humanities

Length:   11 pages (2,586 words)

Views:   5668

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