Teaching approaches

You can think of your approach to teaching as a description of how you actually go about teaching your students, explaining what you do when you teach.

Typically a description of your teaching approach would include:

• The mode or manner of your teaching (lecture, tutorial, case studies, self-directed, bedside teaching, laboratory work);
• Reference to what you know about how people learn (learning theory);
• The ways you support students to meet their specific learning needs (provide students with basic facts, relate new knowledge to what students already know, build in interaction, be passionate, be enthusiastic, encourage questions, set formative assessments, provide constructive feedback).

There is no "best teaching approach". Being a reflective teacher and striving for excellence in teaching means considering each aspect of your teaching approach to ensure that you are doing your best to facilitate student learning.

You may like to complete the teaching perspectives inventory to help you reflect on and get an insight into how you approach teaching. 

We are not going to detail the various learning theories in this resource. There are other websites that do this well. For example

• Berkley's Graduate Division of their Teaching Resource Centre offers a very good overview of the most important learning theories 
• Learning Theories provides a less scholarly but still useful summary of the main learning theories.  

Our purpose is just to provide you with a brief summary of three of the main theories. Note also that one can hold more than one theory at the same time. In fact, it is possible to subscribe to all three views, depending on the subject matter being taught to students.

Objectivists conceive of learning as a process in which learners passively receive an objective body of knowledge that is transmitted to them. Teaching should be structured to transmit the required knowledge to the learner.

Cognitivists view learning as a process of in which learners add new components to their cognitive structure - the structure through which humans process and store information - and/or in which learners re-organise their cognitive structure. Teaching strategies should help students to reorganise their existing cognitive structures/acquire new elements in their cognitive structure.

Constructivists believe that learners construct their own reality or at least that learners interpret reality based upon their interpretations of their experiences. This entails that an individual's acquisition of knowledge is a function of their prior experiences, mental structures, and the beliefs that are used to interpret objects and events. Teaching should be structured to help students to relate new knowledge to existing knowledge so that what is learned is meaningful for the learner. When this happens, recall and application of knowledge improves.