There are many ways to improve teaching, but in my experience when enhancing my own teaching or mentoring other teachers, there are three paths that are most likely to lead to improvement.

1. Covering too much

We commonly try to cover too much for students to digest, especially when we first start teaching a topic and we don’t yet know how long it takes to cover the material. For example, our lecture might be so full that we have to move to the next powerpoint slide before students have a chance to read it, let alone to understand it.

Path to improvement: Cut what you include so you only cover the essential and fundamental material. Make sure you give students enough time to understand what you say (which takes much longer than the time required to say it).

2. Mismatch of expectations

What we want from our students is often different from what they expect to do, and what students expect from their teacher is often different from what we are offering. For example, students expect to be given the lecture slides before the lecture, but the lecturer doesn’t want to do this; students expect to do less readings than the lecture expects them to do; students expect to be told the right answers, while the teacher expects independent critical thinking. Incompatible expectations like these often underlie troubles in teaching, though they are not always apparent. For instance, you might think your students are unprepared or lazy, but actually the problem is that they expect to be able to silently listen to a lecture while you expect them all to contribute to class discussions.

Path to improvement: First, find out what students expect. For example, their complaints and requests written in evaluation questionnaires are often a good indicator of their expectations. Second, judge whether giving them what they expect will help their learning. If it will help their learning, for example getting more feedback, then find a way to give them what they want. If it will not help their learning, then convince them why your way is better. It is not enough to tell them why you are not doing what they expect, you have to win them over so they see the merit in your approach.

See my other post, Disciplined learning, for more ways to motivate students to do what is good for their learning, even when they are reluctant to tackle these learning tasks.

3. Our teaching doesn’t work for these students

Sometimes how we teach, or the way we explain something, fails to work for our current students, even though it normally works, or it worked with a different group of students in a different context. The problem is a mismatch between our teaching methods and our particular students,  because we don’t know these particular students well enough. See my other post, Teaching is about who you know, for more on why knowing our students is necessary for teaching.

Path to improvement: First, find out more about your students so you can judge what is likely to stimulate their learning. Find out about their interests, plans for the future, prior learning, expectations of the course, etc. See my other post, Getting to know your students, for more on how you might get to know your students before you teach them.

Second, regularly check what your students understand so you can judge if your teaching has worked, or if you need to modify your approach. For example, ask multi-choice questions during class, or ask students at the end of your lecture to write for you what they now understand, and what they don’t yet understand. If most of your students give the wrong answer, or most students don’t understand something you have taught, you know that your approach to teaching this material was not effective for these students. You then need to reteach it for your current students, and teach it differently for the next group.