How to Teach Kids Anything: Create Hungry Learners Who Can Remember, Synthesize, and Apply Knowledge

How to Teach Kids Anything:

Create Hungry Learners Who Can Remember, Synthesize, and Apply Knowledge

By Peter Hollins,

Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

< < CLICK HERE for your FREE 14-PAGE MINIBOOK: Human Nature Decoded: 9 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change the Way You Think. > >

--Subconscious Triggers

-- Emotional Intelligence

-- Influencing and Analyzing People

Table of Contents

Introduction

Understanding the Five Types of Pedagogy

The Constructivist Approach

The Collaborative Approach

The Inquiry-Based Approach

The Integrative Approach

The Reflective Approach

How to Use the Pedagogical Approaches

Chapter 1. Teacher Mindset

The Six Characteristics of a Good Teacher

Chapter 2. General Principles for Teaching and Educating

The Goldilocks Principle

The Heick Learning Taxonomy

Clear Communication and Dissemination

Logical Fallacies and Critical Thinking

Ad Hominem Fallacies

The Strawman Fallacy

False Dilemma Fallacy

Circular Argument Fallacies or Begging the Question

Causal Fallacies

Chapter 3. Visible Learning

Trust Students to Self-Grade

Use the Power of Metacognition

Tackle the Big Problems First

Pitch Lessons at the Right Level

Get Students to Connect

Chapter 4. Student Mindset

Academic Buoyancy

Productive Failure

Freedom from Judgment

Understanding Feedback

Summary Guide

Introduction

In the distant past, intelligent and academically minded people were assumed to be natural teachers. Schoolmasters, governesses, professors, and the like were never specifically trained to be educators; it was enough that they understood their topic. So, before people understood that the act of teaching was itself something to learn and master, teachers were left to their own devices, helping their students arrive at knowledge and skill by whatever method they could conjure up.

Thankfully, if you’re looking for more guidance than this and a more scientifically proven approach to facilitating another’s learning, you have more resources than the early teachers of centuries past. In this book, we’ll be carefully considering what teaching actually is, what learning is, and all the different techniques and approaches at our disposal to guide a student from where they are to where they want to be.

Education as a field has evolved and developed like any other, so expect that some of your cherished ideas about learning and how to support it will be challenged. Nevertheless, if you can follow some of the principles outlined in the chapters that follow, you will undoubtedly cultivate your own teaching prowess—and teaching is a formidable skill indeed.

Understanding the Five Types of Pedagogy

The first thing to understand: there is not just one good way of teaching.

Pedagogy can be understood as the art and science of how people learn, and consequently how we can help them by teaching. Naturally, what you consider to be learning and teaching depends on many things: how you understand the brain and the mind, how you conceive of knowledge, and the models you use to understand the way that those brains and minds interact with that knowledge. What this means is that there are multiple models, styles, approaches, or paradigms you could use.

As a teacher, you have the power to shape and direct the innate learning processes in the children you teach. Though most of us sadly undervalue the significance of a good teacher, it’s amazing when you think that the quality of the relationship and understanding between you and your student literally influences the way they see and move through the world. What could be more important than that? And what could be more worth learning to do well?

The reason for becoming literate in the different ways of learning, as it were, is that you empower yourself with a large toolkit, meaning you are better able to match your approach with your student’s needs. The more effectively you can do this, the better their learning will be, and the more enjoyable the experience. With the right approach, you can expect deeper engagement, more meaningful conceptual understanding, and more robust recall in the future. When you teach well, you are not just teaching the subject at hand, but also teaching your student how to learn—and the value of this skill is hard to overemphasize.

So, let’s take a closer look at some of these approaches, bearing in mind that they are not just sets of techniques, but mindsets, i.e. ways of connecting ideas, attitudes, and techniques. One way to think of each pedagogical approach is to imagine that it’s a learning environment that you construct, inside which the student learns. The more encouraging, stimulating, relevant, appropriate, and interconnected this arena, the deeper the learning.

The Constructivist Approach

If you’ve been to school in the last three decades, chances are that this approach was the one your teachers used, whether they knew it or not. The premise of the constructivist approach is what it sounds like: a student is assumed to learn by way of constructing new knowledge in their minds one unit at a time, not unlike you would build a wall one brick at a time. Starting with what you know, you gradually build and advance, incorporating new information, working methodically through categories of data, organizing yourself in a logical way. The foundations of this building are what you already know and understand.

When you teach from this perspective, then your goal is to make external structures and concepts internal, i.e. to embed them in the student’s mind. As a teacher, you need to understand where your student is coming from (historically, culturally, and emotionally) so that you can assist them in building on those foundations, making connections, and constructing their own larger web of understanding. Students are assumed to take an active responsibility in their own learning, even though the teacher may set out a path for them to make it easier to develop through sequential steps of understanding.

To be precise, the constructivist view doesn’t have teachers at all but facilitators. Your job is not to present your knowledge to a student and download your mind into theirs simply by lecturing or delivering data directly. A teacher instructs and tells, but a facilitator asks questions that suggest, hint, and shape the direction the student is already going in. With questions, dialogues, and problems, the student is placed down in a world and expected to think through learning for themselves. A good teacher supports and guides—and they can only do this if they have a thorough understanding of the path to be taken, and where the student is on that path.

In this approach, structure and context matters. Each new piece of information must be connected to prior pieces in a scaffolding process. Before you can learn about D and E, you need to grasp A, B, and C—and importantly, you need to know how each of these connects to one another, and the larger picture they form.

An example will make this approach clear (and indeed, using examples or analogies to illustrate a concept is a classic constructivist technique, since it uses what the student already knows to help them understand something they don’t yet know). A history teacher might ask his students to make a summary of events already taught, and generate some questions or predictions about what they think will happen next. He can then shape the lesson as a task: the students essentially have to build their own lesson plan by working together to compile a summary or project that is intended to be shared with other students at their level.

Why do things this way round? When the students ask questions, think through concepts and their meaning, follow consequences, make summaries, and connect new information with information they already possess, they are active agents of their own learning. This is always better than being a passive receptacle of whatever the teacher is telling them. The constructivist approach is great for material that has a sequential component, or builds in logical complexity one step after another. Most textbooks imply this, where chapter nine is more difficult than chapter , and builds on the knowledge it assumes you’ve gathered from reading it.

The constructivist approach is not just a practical technique, though, but a set of attitudes—the facilitator in this model of teaching is attentive, supportive, and encouraging of the student’s inbuilt learning drive. If the student asks them a question, they are just as likely to respond with another question, designed to prompt and cue them to the next logical unit they can add to their tower of understanding.

The Collaborative Approach

The collaborative approach is not dissimilar. If the constructivist facilitator is leveraging the student’s innate ability to self-teach, then the collaborative approach takes advantage of the fact that students can and do help each other to learn. The classical approach has one student and one teacher. But think about how learning carries on in the real world, outside the boundaries of formal teaching. The whole is usually greater than the sum of the parts; that is, when groups of people get together, they can often arrive at higher states of knowledge and understanding than if they had been isolated individuals.

The fundamental worldview here is that the human mind is a social object,