A presentation by Dr. Stephen D. Brookfield (University of St. Thomas) "Becoming a Skillful Teacher" recorded during the Fall Perspectives on Teaching conference held at Western University on August 27, 2014.
Teaching skillfully requires a constant openness and flexibility to experimenting with whatever approaches help students learn. This means we need to build the critically reflective habit into our practice so that we can be as sure as is realistically possible that the teaching actions we take are based on valid and accurate assumptions about how our students learn. We need to know how students understand material, experience classroom activities, read meaning into our teaching actions, and make progress as learners.
In this presentation Stephen Brookfield presents the core assumptions of skillful teaching.
- Good teaching is whatever helps students learn, no matter how outlandish or strange that appears.
- The best teachers are critically reflective - constantly trying to see their practice through multiple lenses.
- The most important pedagogic knowledge we need to do good work is knowledge of how our students are experiencing their learning, week in, week out.
- Context changes everything.