50 Teaching Principles

Fifty Teaching Principles

  1. Organise your teaching. Always re-experience your subject; this way it will remain forever fresh, lively and Spontaneous.
  2. Let your teaching be spontaneous, But do not improvise upon your knowledge.
  3. Always start in time and stop in time.
  4. Begin each teaching with an Outline; a lack of vocabulary confuses a students less than a lack of expectation.
  5. Never expect your students to learn or understand anything that you cannot or did not learn or understand yourself.
  6. Never give a teaching unless your knowledge far exceeds the content of your teaching.
  7. Never feel that attention to detail will compensate for lack of perspective.
  8. Never show a student with an exhibition of your erudition; a student is far less interested in what you know than in what he or she can learn.
  9. Do not be proud of knowing more than your students; they did not choose to be born after you.
  10. Admit your ignorance, but know enough to tell whether your importance is just your own or everyone else's as well.
  11. Never equate ignorance or lack of knowledge on the part of your students with stupidity.
  12. Do not memorize your teaching, just understand your material.
  13. Do not teach from notes, except for numbers that you cannot remember.
  14. Never read out your handouts; if the students were illiterate, they would not take your course.
  15. Have notes or outlines handy, But do not use them; a good actor needs.
  16. Avoid overheads: rather have one error and be Spontaneous, that have not error and be dull. A teaching is not a research seminar.
  17. Avoid monotonous delivery: the student's interest should be directed to your subject, not to your voice.
  18. Give your teaching at a deliberate speed: faster, results in confusion while oracular pronouncements lead to boredom.
  19. Do not assume that the mere one-time use of a word or idea "exposes" students to it; appeals to thought and to understanding require substantiation, not intimation.
  20. Never give the same teaching twice. Look at the students to know whether they follow.
  21. The difference between teaching and acting is that in the former the subject comes first and the lines follow; in the latter the lines comes first and the subject follows:
  22. Answer all questions from students the best that you can, since a given a question rarely troubles only one person, a question is not an interruption but a challenge to funnel the answer into the rest of the teaching.
  23. Always teach with the assumption that your students wish to learn, not just to pass examinations.
  24. Never ask examination question on topics that you did not ask students to learn.
  25. Use examinations as a vital part of teaching: the student's approach to learning in a particular course is set quite fundamentally by the type of questions that are anticipated.
  26. Never tell students to be "responsible" for learning a topic: responsibility regards learning as a duty owned to others, rather than as a duty owned to oneself. The line between obedience and self-esteem is thin, but it is clear.
  27. Competence should always take precedence over popularity.
  28. Always praise your students for their accomplishments, never damn them for their failings.
  29. Never tell a joke for its own sake, but only in the service of what you teach.
  30. Never laugh at your Students, but laugh with them.
  31. Never make fun of you students, unless you wish them to make fun of you.
  32. Always take your students as seriously as they take you.
  33. Do not take your teaching too seriously: think how utterly funny it is that students are interested in what you are saying.
  34. Never lose temper in front of the students. Students are not interested in private emotions.
  35. Treat your students with respect, and they will respect you, and with politeness, for they will not confuse it with softness.
  36. Do not confuse familiarity on the part of the student with lack of respect or intellectual disagreement with personal antipathy.
  37. Never assume that yours is the only course that the students take.
  38. Never assume that if a student sleeps he or she is bored or uninterested. He or she may have been up all night preparing a paper for another course.
  39. Never assume that students silence means understanding on their part ; they may be confused.
  40. Every discipline speaks its own language good teaching: teaches languages not just word.
  41. Do not confuse teaching with dictation: the former is a creative process, actively received and worked on by the Students, the latter a mechanical exercise, passively recorded for later understanding.
  42. Never be so simple as to be trivial, or so complicated as to be obscure; a clear teaching need not be simple, and a profound one need not be obscure.
  43. Act out of the conviction that your teaching matters, even though you may not be able to prove this.
  44. Do not leave a teaching without a feeling of exhilaration and exhaustion: without these the teaching is probably not superb.
  45. Intelligence is measured more by quality than by the quantity of learning.
  46. Do not deny Originality born out of ignorance.
  47. The prime Challenge of teaching is to retain the student's enthusiasm in spite of their growing knowledge; a good teacher fosters creativity in the face of information.
  48. Do not expect that your students have an infinite capacity for learning; the limits of saturation of the mind are set more by physiology than by intelligence, (Intelligence is the capacity of maximizing achievement within the physiological givens or constraints of your mind).
  49. Instructors do not ever give grades. Students earn them.
  50. Do not confuse good teaching with good examining, or good examining with good grading (To teach is one thing, to examine another, to grade and evaluate yet another; a good teacher must master all three)

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