The 5 best teaching strategies

Teaching is hard. It not only requires full knowledge of the topic: presenting it in a clear manner, summarising important information, and making it attractive to spark students’ curiosity is just as important!

Many different teaching strategies exist, but each one works in different contexts and with different students. Sometimes they have to be combined to be effective and reach the best possible results. Here’s an overview of the most useful teaching strategies to adapt your lessons to every student profile.

Key concepts

The strategies introduced in this article are based on two key aspects:

• Active learning, which puts students in the driver’s seat. They actively participate in the learning process, as opposed to other traditional methods where students listen and remember knowledge and content in a passive way;
• Blended learning, which has become popular in the past years, and consists of combining face-to-face lessons with distance-learning (online).

Modern teaching has evolved a great deal from the traditional ways –one teacher talking for an hour to a classroom full of students sitting on school benches. The following strategies will help you adapt your classes to this new context. You will find ideas to share your content in fun and effective ways, in order to foster involvement within your classroom and help your students improve and develop new skills more easily.

5 modern teacher strategies

There are many methods and resources to modernize your teaching strategies, and some are more efficient or practical than others. Here’s a list including some of them for you to find inspiration. Don’t forget you can combine several of these strategies to come up with the perfect match that fits your style as well as your students!

Use quizzes

This very popular teaching strategy consists of testing students’ knowledge and content memorization or understanding directly during a lesson. The mechanisms involved in memorization make it easier for someone to remember information if they interact directly with it; therefore adding quizzes to your lessons is highly recommended to improve the teaching rhythm and student engagement.

Using Wooclap is a good way to do so. Its many types of questions allow you to find the ones that are best adapted to your lesson and to each situation (open questions, multiple choice questions, polls, etc.) –be it face-to-face teaching or online through video conference!

Gamify the learning process

Besides quizzes, there are other fun ways to learn, and that’s precisely an excellent way to grab your students’ attention and encourage their learning (especially those younger students). Generally speaking, adding interactivity to your lessons (animations, multimedia content, etc.) and making the process gratifying is a great way to make a lasting impression on students. This, in turn, helps them remember knowledge in a more efficient way!

Seek inspiration in games! In lack of ideas? Here are some of ours! For example, set up a reward system, hand out points for experience, or give them missions to complete (like a quest or a challenge), in order to motivate those students who have a penchant for play!

Gamify your classroom with Wooclap

Design interactive flashcards

Widely used during the revision phase, flashcards can also be upgraded for a better learning experience. Those little cards are very useful to break up a lesson into chunks that are easier to study, and they help students focus on the concepts they struggle to learn. So why not step up your teaching game by proposing online interactive flashcards to your students? This will allow them to become more active in the learning process, anytime, anywhere (in school, at home, at work, etc.).

Wooclap includes features to create flashcards, thanks to its online tool called Wooflash. Furthermore, its AI features allow you to quickly and easily design not only your flashcards, but also multiple choice questions to assess your students.

Seek student feedback

Why not include your students actively in the process of improving your lessons (in terms of content, teaching strategy, resources…)? After all, they are the most concerned. Take time to collect their feedback, especially when you introduce new concepts or use new teaching styles. It’s the perfect occasion to encourage them to ask questions about the lesson, share valuable ideas and clarify aspects they still struggle with.

Many different online presentation tools (web-based or face-to-face) include poll features. Wooclap, for example, allows you to create polls to collect your students’ opinion. Wooclap includes a rating question feature, specifically designed to allow students to rate your class and share their opinion on different aspects of your course.

Try out collaborative teaching

Collaborative teaching is the perfect example of how much teaching and active learning have evolved recently. This method promotes cooperation between teachers and students to obtain new learning ways that get the most from everyone’s skills and competences.

Collaborative teaching implies that students become active in the learning process. It can be done in different ways: working in groups, for example, allows classmates to help each other and fill each others’ gaps respectively; or students can cooperate with the teacher to prepare tasks adapted to the learning goals on-the-go. This method encourages teamwork, communication, and it boosts classroom engagement.

Collaborative teaching works in a classroom, around a table, but also online, through platforms that offer tools such as white boards or message boards to help working in groups and encourage interaction between the students (be it online or face-to-face). Wooclap features all these tools and even more to implement high-quality collaborative teaching!

Wooclap: a valuable tool for teachers and students

In a nutshell: Wooclap’s numerous features help teachers accomplish their teaching mission. In a world where technology and society require teaching to evolve, these tools allow for a seamless, efficient transition.

Whether you need to create quizzes or polls, to provide online resources to your students, or to implement collaborative methods in your classroom, Wooclap adapts to all aspects of modern teaching.

Try it for free and see if it answers all your needs: it surely will!