Effective Teaching

For this weeks weekly investment, we were asked to read a few documents and to answer the question of "What is effective teaching." The document I found the most interesting was The first days of school: How to be an effective teacher.  The first line of the document was "the first day of school can determine the success and failure of the rest of the school year."  At first, I thought that was crazy! But as I read I learned about three ideas of an effective teacher:
1. Classroom Management
2. Lesson Mastery
3. Positive Expectations

Establishing control in the classroom and being consistent is huge with classroom management. What I learned was control doesn't mean threat or intermediations but to know what you are doing. Make it clear that you know the classroom procedures and stay consistent with them. Especially when it comes to classroom management. A quote that I liked was "you don't discipline a store; you manage it" the same is true in the classroom. Discipline has very little to do with classroom management but being consistent with your procedures and practices.

With lesson mastery that's the student's ability to demonstrate a concept that is learned. I never really focused on the other side of education I only connected education to learning new practices. What I learned is education is not about teaching people things they don't currently know but education is teaching behaviors they don't currently practice.  As a future educator, I think it's important to recognize that. We are in a position where we can change the behavior of our students to maximize their learning.


Positive expectations tell the students that the teacher believes in them and their ability to learn. It's connected to the idea that what the teacher expects from the student is what the student will produce. Remembering back when I was in high school it's a world wind of emotions. Students have to balance a lot and to know that my teacher believed in me definitely helped me out.

These are just some ideas I found interesting through the reading. Moving forward I am excited to learn more about effective teaching and to see it in practice as a student teacher!