Why is preparation important in teaching

Teaching different types of classes. An effective course design begins with understanding your students; deciding what you want them to learn; determining how you will measure student learning; and planning activities, assignments and materials that support student learning. The syllabus provides the instructor and students with a common reference point that sets the stage for learning throughout the course.

Although courses may vary in size, subject matter or level, a systematic process will help you plan and structure your course and syllabus to effectively reach desired instructional goals. Course and Syllabus Design. A successful first day can be a key component of a successful quarter. You should envision the first day as more than just a time to review your syllabus.

It is an opportunity for you to establish expectations, set the tone and to get to know your students. Preservice Teacher Education The University of the Ozarks Teacher Education Program: A Road to Success As a preservice teacher, I believe that it is imperative to receive a proper education in order to ensure that my future students will receive an astounding, well-rounded education that will carry them toward success.

Teacher Induction Research Paper The selection of the highly effective teachers is vital to the success of a school.

Words: - Pages: 4. Improving Education Research Paper The most important aspect of improving education for all children is multifaceted: 1 To hire the very best people to be their teachers. Words: - Pages: 6. Principal Roles Of The Principal Case Study Directing teachers to coordinate and articulate the subject matter taught on each grade level. My Personal Statement: My Definitions Of Teaching And Education As a teacher, I have the satisfaction and responsibility to help every child in my classroom grow toward becoming a well-rounded student, who feels that he or she can be effective and have that capacity to learn.

Words: - Pages: 8. My Ultimate Goal: Improving Student Learning Teachers must receive initial and ongoing professional development on the new curriculum and instructional strategies for effective teaching, so they are comfortable and confident with the delivery and implementation. Related Topics. Education School Teacher. Ready To Get Started? Create Flashcards. In addition to the working hours of teachers, i. Though there is a planning period given to the teachers in day or boarding school , that is rarely used for planning rather; it is used to catch up on emails or grade papers, contact parents, conduct a conference.

Usually, teachers do the planning and preparation outside the school. Also, they use their weekends, or go to school early and stay late there to prepare adequately. To create an optimal learning environment, they explore options and research new ideas. Instructional strategies, tactics of classroom management, and good content knowledge are required for effective teaching. Sometimes the best-conceived ideas fall apart when put into practice. So some luck and experimentation are also required to deliver well-prepared lessons.

However, if teachers fail, then they should reorganize their approach to attack. The preparation and planning should be viewed as an investment and not as a waste of time. Such investments matter and surely pay-off. Conducting research is a significant part of planning and preparation. Your teaching philosophy gets shaped and defined by studying educational theory and examining best practices.

You will also grow and improve when you study the content in deep. Prospective secondary science and mathematics teachers devote a large portion of their studies to their particular disciplines, but little is known about what students really learn in their subject area courses.

This lack of knowledge about the real value of courses is particularly interesting in light of the fact that students in teacher education spend the majority of their academic time taking courses in the arts and sciences departments.

Ball and Borko et al. Even today, college coursework in mathematics may not stress conceptual understanding of content. Rather, the emphasis is on performing mathematical manipulations in a lecture format.

Science coursework often is similar. Arons pointed out that college science courses, particularly introductory survey courses, focus on the major achievements in an area of science. Then, when prospective teachers of science go on in science coursework—most often some of the same coursework engaged in by science majors—they are exposed to science as a body of facts, not, as Coble and Koballa found more recently , as a way of knowing the natural world through inquiry. Until recently, many teacher educators have taken it for granted that teacher candidates would be knowledgeable about subject matter in the discipline s in which they elected to major.

As early as , Steinberg et al. Undergraduate science, mathematics, and engineering education has begun to change during the past decade in ways that are consistent with the reforms being espoused for grades K Rothman and Narum provide an overview of these changes in undergraduate education and predict the kinds of change that is likely over the next 10 years.

Brown and Borko concluded that teaching mathematics from a conceptual perspective is very unlikely to occur unless a teacher has deep conceptual understanding of the mathematics subject matter at hand. Few parallel studies exist for science education. Carlsen found that teachers with deeper conceptual understanding of science allowed their students to engage in discourse more often than teachers with weaker conceptual backgrounds.

Carlsen also noted that teachers with greater understanding of content asked students a greater number of high-level questions, whereas teachers who did not know the material tended to dominate the classroom discussion. He found that teachers with higher levels of content knowledge integrated pieces of that knowledge more often into their teaching.

These teachers also recognized higher order principles in the discipline, and their instructional strategies reflected this depth of knowledge. Within their specialty, teachers with greater content knowledge wrote examination questions that focused less on recall and more on students being able to apply and transfer information. However, when they were teaching outside of their specialty, these teachers followed textbook chapters more closely and were less likely to recognize or address student misconceptions.

As was noted earlier in this report, some policymakers and teacher educators believe that prospective teachers should emphasize their preparation in subject matter at the expense of preparation in education. Do teachers who were majors in science or mathematics understand the subjects they teach better than teachers who were education majors? Ball and Wilson conducted a study at Michigan State University that examined this question with prospective elementary teachers before and after they had completed their teacher preparation programs.

They looked at two groups, one composed of prospective teachers who had been prepared in a traditional preparation program, and the other composed of prospective teachers who had been prepared in an alternative program. Ball and Wilson found that both groups of teacher candidates lacked understanding of the underlying relationships of mathematics.

At the beginning of their teacher preparation programs, 60 percent of these prospective teachers could not generate a real-world example that would demonstrate to their students an application for the division of fractions. Moreover, they still could not generate an appropriate representation of division of fractions after they had graduated from their respective preparation programs. Ma studied groups of elementary school teachers in China and the United States.

This deeper understanding both of mathematics content and its application allowed Chinese teachers to promote mathematical learning and inquiry more effectively than their counterparts in the United States, especially when students raised novel ideas or claims that were outside the scope of the lesson being presented in class.

Specifically, most of the Chinese teachers only taught mathematics, up to three or four classes per day. Much of the rest of their day was unencumbered, allowing for reflection on their teaching and, perhaps more importantly, for shared study and conversation with fellow teachers about content and how to teach it. Their teaching assignments also permitted them to gain over time a better grasp of the entire elementary. The ability to sequence appropriately the introduction of new concepts; 2.

The ability to make careful choices about problem types to be given to students in terms of number, context, and difficulty; 3. Brief but significant opportunities for students to encounter conceptual obstacles; 4.

Solicitation from and discussion by students of multiple points of view about a problem; 5. Anticipation of more complex and related structures; 6. Powerful and timely introduction of generalizations. None of these features—specialist teachers in elementary schools, time for learning collaboratively with other teachers, and experience at a variety of grade levels—is common to U. Cohen and Hill reported on a large-scale study of mathematics teachers in California who participated in a sustained program of professional development.

Although this study actually focused on the effects of educational policy, it revealed important information about the opportunities that teachers need both to learn and to teach new state-required mathematics content as a means of enhancing student achievement.

Using data from a survey of California elementary school teachers and student scores from the California Learning Assessment System CLAS , this study examined whether students who are taught by teachers with more extensive opportunities for inservice education would perform better than students whose teachers had less extensive opportunities for inservice. Cohen and Hill found that the more time teachers spent in curriculum workshops, including those with opportunities to examine new curriculum with other teachers, the more reform-oriented and less conventional was their teaching practice.

In fact, the difference was nearly 0. These results also appeared to be associated with student achievement. In addition, these teachers were involved in the construction of rubrics for assessing student responses to open-ended kinds of problems. No similar relationship was found for these two variables in schools where teachers engaged in a high degree of conventional practice.

According to Grouws and Schultz, the studies found that providing teachers with knowledge of how students think and opportunities to develop strategies in specific content domains changed teaching behaviors and improved student learning.

Subsequently, these teachers spent more time in their mathematics instruction on problem solving and assessing student thinking than a control group of teachers who received equivalent hours of inservice training. The students of CGI teachers also performed better in some math assessments—higher in problem solving, comparably on computational tasks. In their review, Grouws and Schultz specifically note a certain type of teacher knowledge, called pedagogical content knowledge Shulman, Thus, pedagogical content knowledge is a subset of content knowledge that has particular utility for planning and conducting lessons that facilitate student learning.

All of the studies cited in this chapter, as well as those cited earlier e. However, it is clear that even the best teachers by themselves will be unable to make the kinds of inroads in improving student learning and academic achievement that are being expected across the United States. Their efforts must be supported by school and policy infrastructure, policies, and priorities that offer to teachers opportunities for continuing professional development and growth and that provide the facilities and resources necessary to encourage teaching and learning.

Teachers also need good working conditions in order to thrive as professionals. The next chapter discusses the kinds of recommendations that professional organizations for teaching and in the various science and mathematics disciplines have issued for improving teacher education.

Each new headline about American students' poor performance in math and science leads to new calls for reform in teaching. Education Teachers of Science, Mathematics, and Technology puts the whole picture together by synthesizing what we know about the quality of math and science teaching, drawing conclusions about why teacher preparation needs reform, and then outlining recommendations for accomplishing the most important goals before us.

As a framework for addressing the task, the book advocates partnerships among school districts, colleges, and universities, with contributions from scientists, mathematicians, teacher educators, and teachers.