Teaching+Strategies

Think about a teacher you had in middle or high school that you feel was an effective teacher. What teaching strategies did this teacher use that truly engaged the students and made learning interesting (and maybe even fun)? Be brief in your comments and include your name with your post.

My music teacher Mr. Bruno made it a point to have section leaders in band. He made students work together on the music. At first I really hated that idea, because I had too much pride to learn from my peer, but what I realized was that it helped the students to understand music and teaching helped those to also review and learn the beats and counts of music. I enjoyed that class and have a new appreciation for music. -Jacqueline Kim

I would have to say my Pre-Calculus teacher was one of the best teachers I had in high school. She was a sweet old lady that was absolutely in love with math. She didn't just treat us like her students, but also like her friends. She made us feel like we already knew everything she was teaching us, so we were comfortable with the new information. A lot of what she did was study groups in class before a test. We studied together by not only learning from eachother, but teaching eachother different ways of solving certain problems. ---Kathleen Kelemen

My 7th grade History teacher had us read a novel about a samurai to help us understand the historical context we were studying. He made up little rhymes and songs about the events that took place to help us remember them. He also had us make up skits and video tape them to watch in class. They were really elaborate and funny. We played quiz show games to study for tests which was really fun.

- Allyson Simonton

My 8th grade history teacher constructed the class for a lot of group work and creative thinking. The course made the students create several videos, in which the students had to re-enact historical events or situations. The course also constructed many debates in which students would argue their points of view on certain historical topics. The class required a lot of thinking and participating, which created a lot of excitement and fun. ---Jeff Prickett

My 12th grade math teacher would create a huge sheet of formulas and problems that we as a class got to answer. We would go over material that would be written on a large piece construction paper that would be posted on the wall. This would remain up for the entire time the class was on the particular subject. Even when tests where taken the large sheet of problems and formulas would be available for our resource. -- Ryan Rybicki

My 8th grade math teacher was so funny and enthusiastic about Math that he kept us all engaged in unique ways. It may sound corny, but this teacher would make up little songs about fractions and the order of operations and so on...And although this seemed stupid at the time, it got everyone in class's attention and to this day, i haven't forgotten these things because the song is stuck in my head. I think anytime a teacher takes something thats purely logical and gives it a creative spin, always encourages better learning. -Micah Booth

My 11th grade pre-calculus teacher would bring information of how the stuff that we learned in class was applied to the real life situations. She would ask us to solve a real life questions using the knowledge we have gathered thus far hence everybody was appriciating the subject more. --Sarah Yang--

My 11th grade Honors History teacher had great strategies to keep us intrigued. She would get very creative with the assigned projects. She would often assign us projects where rather than writing a research paper, we would have to create "research posters" that clearly reflected what he learned. She wanted us to include drawings (in color), captions, and a works cited page on the reverse side of the poster. -Xavier Diaz

As for the best teaching strategies, I would have to pick my eighth grade history teacher Mrs. Rannela. She used so many different techniques It would take me days to write down each one. Here are some of the highlights. She had us debate as the south and the north over slavery. We performed plays and reenactments of historical events. We made human timelines to study for tests and solidify dates in our minds. We played a game similar to Jeopardy, about historical events and won prizes for points. She was very interactive, and we rarely sat in our seats for lecture. When she did lecture it was usually followed up with an activity of some sort. Her understanding of multiple intelligences was top notch. -- Dana Detterich

My HS physics teacher would make class/learning fun and interesting by making the lessons hands on and interactive and allowing us to apply it to everyday life. The ability to allow us to apply it to our daily situations made it understandable as compared to how the book may have explained it. As well as the projects we had, they were all fun and usually came with some type of competition thus making the classroom a very competitive place amongst your peers. Harold Sloat

Mrs. B, my Government and Economics teacher had the best teaching strategy in the world. For Government we would have to memorize the Bill of Rights, the Amendments, and The Preamble. We started with the Preamble. The moment we walked into class she put on a movie. It was "Schoolhouse ROCK!" and the song for that video was the Preamble. We watched it, laughed at it, and then she made us sing it. We sang it everyday for a month at the beginning of class. It was so fun and funny. We all memorized it and we all passed with an A. -- Kim Tiongco

Throughout the years I have kept a mental log of different teaching strategies, lesson plans, and projects that I have encountered during my high school career. Mrs. Glassen use to do Mind Map. One example is the industrial revolution in which she drew a large train and each part of the train represented a key term that we needed to learn. This was a visual learning tool that really helped me remember key terms and facts to this day. For the 1920s the class got to perform as news anchors and news stories on problems of the 1920s. This was really fun and we learned a lot. For test review she made us a detailed study guide and even wrote out why certain events or terms were significant and how it relates to today. We learned the material and concept solidly because of this. Mr. Morgan let us play world history jepordy for test reviews. He also use to put the class into large circles in which we would have facilitated debates and he would be the mediator. We also did an activity in which he divided us into groups and each groups were different world powers during WWI and we would role play negotiations during the Versaille conference. These are just some of the effective and fun learning tools that I plan to implement in the future. -Phoithien Duong

Ms. Paul liked to use discussion as her primary tool of learning. We read some literature and came to class and for an hour and a half we discussed the piece. It was an amazing experience coming off of 10 years of rote reading/memorization/worksheets to be given the freedom to analyze and evaluate openly. The lack of worksheets, in particular, and her attempts to integrate technology, however simplistic, into her teaching style, was very welcome. We were allowed to, instead of meeting in person and writing down what we thought of a piece, talk over instant messenger and then print out our transcript. But above all it was her enthusiasm for the subject mixed with a respect for the students and an understanding that if she gave us a chance to excel we just very well may. - Ryan Boughter

Mrs. Boulus my Chemistry teacher would ask us questions before starting a lesson to see what we already knew. I don't really remember having to go home and read for her class, or not very much. We had to learn the first couple rows of elements in the periodic table, which she had us make flash cards with the names and the symbols. The vast majority of the class consisted of doing lab experiments. We did lab write ups before class started, forming the experiment and preparing for how the experiment would be done. When we came into class she would quickly demonstrate the lab, showing us not only how it should be done, but also showed us things that should be avoided. We then did the labs, and when the class ended for the day she would bring us back together and we would talk about what we did, learned, and what we would have done differently.---Kristina Goltz

When it comes to teaching strategies, I think I would have to refer back to my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Pangle. He was pretty much unsurpassed in my experience when it came to teaching strategies. Mr. Pangle new how to make learning fun, frequently taught us mnemonic devices to help us remember things, and really showed creativity in his teaching method. He had a varied style of teaching, with many different methods, including straight lecturing, puppet shows, radio stories, music, and so much more. Class was never boring, and what was taught was generally well remembered. - Alejandro Torres

I have to go with Mrs. Shirokawa. I think anyone who had her would pick her for this topic. She was our junior year English teacher and was generally thought of as the hellish teacher you had to "survive" before you got our school's senior-itis friendly senior year English teacher. Mrs. S actually did not assign more work or grade harder than any other teacher, but what scared everyone was that she expected us to memorize 100 vocabulary words a week. As much as we dreaded it, looking back after all these years, it really was "good for us". Yeah, it helped when it came to the SAT, but when I go out with old friends from high school, at some point one of us inevitably uses a big word and we'll stop and laugh at the fact we remember that work. In hindsight, I am glad to have been a student of hers.- Danny Chiang

My 10th grade World history teacher had a great way of teaching history is ways that made it real for us. We would study customs and lifestyle, which would make it come more to life. He would relate history to literature that we were reading in other classes. The great bonus is that he was well-traveled, so he would have stories about all of the places that we talked about and bring it to life through story-telling. To me, he was doing what the History Channel does now, long before the History Channel existed.- Lisa Gaetje

My 10th grade Spanish teacher, Profe Fousek was all about partner work and classroom participation. It was a major part of grade and allowed us a lot of practice time and pushed us to work harder. We also did a lot listening comprehension work in the lab which was realy neat because it allowed us to listen then have conversations in Spanish with one another.

Perhaps the most dry and indifferent teacher I had was my high school chemistry teacher (name withheld) but with that said he came up with some of the most imaginative games and puzzles for us to complete either during, prior or after an assignment. They ranged from crossword puzzles with twists or chemistry hangman along with several other games. He would often have us complete these in groups or sometimes as a class. If he would have shown a little more life he would have been an absolute great teacher. (Christopher Duncan)

The most interesting teacher I may have had in High School was my Junior Science/Chemistry teacher Mr. Gibson. I entered that class knowing that I hated science and math and had almost no interest in the subject or its complicated lab reports and chemical structures and weird mathematical equations. But he was make the subject come alive in every aspect. Every week we had a new experiment that dealt with the unit we were working on and every time he made sure all of the students were involved and participating. I remember some of the more funner lessons were the effect salt has on the tongue, and to demonstrate this he had five students attempt to eat 6 saltine crackers in less than 30 seconds, which was impossible. Or another time he was attempting to explain the effect lactose has on the stomach, and he dared several students to drink a gallon of milk in less than an hour without throwing up. Three or four students tried and failed hilariously. One more time I remember he was lecturing on DNA and the entire time he did the lecture in the voice of Mr DNA from Jurassic Park. It was hilarious, he would have the students ask questions and he would respond to them in that voice. He was one of the examples of a bad subject (of mine) being taught by a great teacher. -Eric Ortega Mr. Davis always came prepared. He started class right away and didn't let the students get distracted by conversation. He kept a positive energy and demonstrated enthusiasm. Mr. Davis had a syllabus and was clear about assignment requirements -Kelly Norris

I had an english teacher who always came up with fun projects. I remember making movies based off of books, which was probably the most fun assignment. She was passionate about what she was doing, and was able to be creative about lessons. Movie clips were incorporated, along with skits, and other things to break up the monotony of school. -Kelly Benner

My senior government teacher did a lot of activities that engaged students and made the subject fun. When we studied for our final everyone had to create a game board that reviewed terms/concepts from the class. We played jeopardy before every test for review. We also had debates on controversial topics. This was great because we all had to do a lot of research and then debate with our classmates. I had so much fun in this class and actually learned a lot about American government. Amy Hill

My junior high school English teacher did not employ creative or innovative projects to keep us engaged. Believe it or not, we did basic studies in grammar, punctuation, metaphors, etcetera, but I really enjoyed her class for the two years I had her. There is something comfortable (sometimes!) in knowing exactly what to expect when you are at that age when so many changes are happening. We did the same routine of drills to start each class, then she would involve us in the large lesson of the day. I don't remember using a textbook, but we mastered the basics and then some. We must have also written essays because I remember having to give oral presentations, which I usually hated, but I enjoyed the class so much I performed relatively well. - Melodee deLeon

My 8th grade history teacher was very effective in getting her class interested in what was going on, even if it was mostly out of fear (she was not one to be crossed). One very effective teaching strategy she used was teaching us how to take notes. This seems like sort of a ridiculous thing to have to learn, but it actually proved very helpful in our other classes at the time, and served as a great foundation for the development of notetaking skills in high school and college. She would print an example of notes on each lecture and project them onto the board while she talked, adding emphasis and/or additional notes when needed. It was a great way for us to start preparing to be better students later on in life. -Danielle Hughes