1. Orientation
This stage of your teaching will vary depending on whether it is the first time you meet your students or whether the session occurs later in the instructional sequence. At the first meeting, your focus will be on getting to know your students, what their expectations are of the class and their purpose for taking it, giving them schedules and going over your syllabus, etc. If you are teaching online, your basic orientation to your students is encapsulated in your welcome message.
In later meetings, your orientation stage is quite brief and has two purposes: to reach back to the topics and learning that has already occurred and review this, and to reach forward and preview how the past connects with today's present issues and what's coming later.
2. Introduction
After your 5 — 10 minute orientation segment, you want to move into the introduction stage. This is where you guide your students' focus to today's topics and learning objectives. You want to draw as much as possible on their previous knowledge and history because at UCI Extension, all your students are adult working professionals with years of valuable experience. The techniques of teaching adults are often termed "andragogy."
Your introduction stage of teaching will probably take up about 1/3 of the time you have available. In the virtual world, most of the materials for this stage have been created in advance through the instructional design of the course. In your traditional class, you may resort to lecturing as a form of introduction, which in many cases is a quite appropriate method. For descriptions of other techniques, review the UCI Extension New Instructor Orientation presentation. |
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3. Reinforcement
After focusing your students' attention, drawing out their existing knowledge and building on their existing schema, and introducing the new concepts or practices on which you want to center today's lesson, you now move into the reinforcement stage. This is where you want your learners to apply their new ideas, to practice skills, and to transfer the insights they have come to regarding the current topic to other topics.
You have many choices of instructional activities in this section of your class. You may use small group work, discussion circles, case study analyses, individual or group exercises, charts, graphs, and so on.
4. Assessment
The assessment component of a teaching segment can be quite informal. Experienced instructors assess all the time; for example, you can tell a lot about a group's comprehension and attitude simply from noticing their breathing. People who feel comfortable breathe more deeply and slowly that people who feel challenged.
However, you need to make sure that your lesson planning includes some aspect of assessment that leads to feedback to the learners. This is the so-called "formative" part of assessment.
With the exception of non-graded classes (those that do not even give "pass" of "fail" grades), you also need to plan more formal assessment of your students' achievement in your class. This is frequently called "summative" evaluation. Review our policies on Assessing Student Outcomes. |
