Pedagogy: What It Is & Why Matters?

Your Relationship with Your Students Matters

Forging a positive and professional relationship is an important pedagogical practice. It has a direct impact on your students’ academic success. It also has an indirect impact through influencing things such as students’ self-efficacy, engagement and behaviour.

Clarity & Alignment are Crucial Pedagogical Practices

You need to be clear about what you want your students to learn. It doesn’t matter whether you achieve such clarity through learning intentions, goals, success criteria or some other method. What matters is that you are clear about what your students must know and be able to do to achieve success – and how you will assess that success. See –Teacher Clarity.

Then, you must align what you teach, how you teach and what you get your students doing accordingly.

Either-Or Beliefs Can Be Flawed Ways of Thinking

Quite often, different ways of teaching are presented as polar opposites. For example, teacher-led explicit instruction vs. student-led discovery and inquiry learning. Sometimes, such a comparison is worthwhile as one is clearly more effective than the other. Yet, often, a more nuanced understanding is needed. For example, two seemingly opposing approaches may work well together or may be appropriate at different stages of learning.

See – Finding 2.

Some Teaching Strategies Have More Impact Than Others

Keeping in mind the importance of nuance, sometimes a particular teaching strategy has more impact than alternative teaching strategies. The size of such differences can be measured using effect sizes, percentile gains or months progressed. See 10 Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies and 6 High-Impact Teaching Strategies.

Choosing high-impact teaching strategies is an essential pedagogical practice. However, lower-impact strategies can also be useful when they are easy to implement and used to complement rather than replace higher-impact strategies.

What Your Students Do Matters Too! And, it is a Pedagogical Practice

Pedagogy is about what you do as a teacher. Yet, this includes what you tell your students to do – and what they do matters too. For example, having your students practice new things and spacing this practice out over time has a large impact on their success. So too do other strategies, such as connecting new learning to prior knowledge, identifying similarities and differences and checking their work.

Managing Your Students’ Behaviour Makes a Difference

Managing your students’ behaviour is a crucial pedagogical practice. It affects your students’ learning, as well as your own sanity. Forging positive teacher-student relationships helps. So too does teaching well. But you also need a bank of strategies specifically designed to manage your students’ behaviour.

See – Top 10 Behaviour Management Strategies

Intervention for Struggling Students Helps

Using evidence-based practices in your own classroom helps. But sometimes more is needed. In such cases, working with other people in the school to offer struggling students additional support is an important pedagogical practice. One evidence-based example of such support is Response to Intervention.

Enrichment Programs Work, but Acceleration Works Better

At the other end of the spectrum, you need to make decisions about how to help your high-achieving students to progress even further. It is very easy to let such students coast along, but they deserve as much challenge and support as every other student in your class. Research shows that enrichment programs work. However, accelerating bright students has a larger impact on their learning.

Formative Assessment & Feedback Make a Difference

Formative assessment refers to any form of assessment with the primary purpose of helping students to correct and improve what they have done. It can be as simple as an incidental observation of a student trying to find the area of a rectangle, or as complex as an analysis of a persuasive speech. Whether simple or complex, such formative assessment forms the basis of feedback that you provide to your student. Such feedback tells them how they have done and what they need to do to improve.

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