Successful teaching

Nearly all graduate students of education come to class with either a tentative or calcified formulaic belief on how to teach students. This comes from their being parents, elder siblings, company bosses, church leaders, and so on. The issue thus is not whether education graduate students have a teaching formula or not. The issue rather is whether one has a clear mental picture of his/her teaching formula. If one has one, I assume that it's already a product of careful and lengthy reflection. 

I believe that most forms of teaching require certain elements. It's not easy to name all of them as teachers have different ways of teaching. But I think all teachers would agree that the following are requisites of good teaching: (1) attention from students; (2) sustained attention (if not interest) from students; (3) emotional security with the teacher; and (4) academic connection. I believe that they should all be applied following such order otherwise one’s teaching will most likely fail. To me, the value of this formula is obvious. The teacher must catch first the attention of the students before he/she starts working on sustaining their attention. Simple as they may seem, both phases almost always pose a real challenge. The next phase is getting the students to feel emotionally secured with the teacher. This, too, may not be easy. This can’t go first with any of the previous phases which are like ice breakers whose purpose is basically to disarm and open up the students. When these three phases have already been established, only then should the teacher make a move for sustained academic connection with the students. I think it’s often unwise to just run the students through with academic teaching without securing first their attention, interest, trust, and confidence. While the elements in this formula are necessary conditions of successful teaching, still there are other important considerations, like classroom arrangement and other teaching policies whose purpose is to establish a culture (i.e., sustained and patterned behavior) of academic excellence. I hope I could say more about this matter in the future.

"Problem"

What kind of problem do we have in mind when we teachers say that the goal of science and math education is to produce effective problem solvers? Are we not supposed to qualify our use of the word "problem" here? I mean, problems solvers where? In what area of human activity? I'm raising this question because many of us seem to ignore the fact that life problems could not be divided into scientific and mathematical problems alone.  Obviously, there are other problems that could not be answered satisfactorily using mathematical or scientific thinking alone. Some of such problems, I must say, could even be more important than the problems one had been asked to solve in physics or advanced algebra. Here are some examples of such problems: (1) Should I terminate my pregnancy? (2) Should we implement again the death penalty? (3) Is abortion immoral? (4) Should we legalize same-sex marriage? To address these questions, one can't just do mathematical or scientific reasoning. What is needed here is rigorous or disciplined evaluative reasoning, which, unfortunately, is not taught the way scientific and mathematical reasoning are taught in basic (primary and secondary) education.