10 Highly Effective Teaching Practices for Teachers and Homeschooling Parents

In one of our previous articles, we covered the best classroom management strategies that new teachers can use to take control over their profoundly demanding environment. But, most educators, including homeschooling parents, are also looking for concrete examples of some of the most effective teaching practices that really work. Of course, many will rightfully ask – what is a highly effective teacher or a homeschooling parent, really?

One definition from the Battelle for Kids (BFK) organization states that effective teachers are those whose students have demonstrated high academic growth (relative) for one or two years. And, while this sounds appealing, it’s not an easy goal to achieve, as most homeschooling parents and teachers would surely agree. 

But, there’s still hope! Researchers have been interested in the practices that drive academic growth for many years now. This means we have valuable data and insights into the most effective teaching practices of the most highly-rated teachers and homeschooling parents around the country. By following their footsteps, educators can improve their teaching habits and implement science-backed strategies that work.

So, what highly effective teaching practices do the best educators employ? 

Let’s see. 

10 Highly Effective Teaching Practices for Teachers and Homeschooling Parents

We managed to compose a comprehensive list of some of the most frequently cited teaching practices based on three factors relevant for academic growth. 

These factors include: 

• Teacher’s perception and position – refers to effective teaching practices that stem from the teacher’s knowledge, character, beliefs, etc. The first two practices on our list are related to the educator itself. 
• Teaching methods and resources – refers to some specific ways of organizing the curriculum, and the demands that accompany it. It seems like this factor is the most influential when predicting effective teaching practices as it’s related to five practices on our list. 
• Social interactions – the social factor refers to the overall relationship between the teacher (or parents) and students, the classroom’s atmosphere, the parent-teacher relationships, as well as the teacher’s relationship with other colleagues. The last three practices are related to the interpersonal interaction between teachers, parents, and students.

Passion, Beliefs, and Disposition

Let’s start with the educator. How can teachers or homeschooling parents themselves influence the academic performance of the student? Well, in many ways actually. Educators project their beliefs and passions on the students, which, in turn, affects the student’s attention, effort, interest in the topic, and confidence. All these characteristics are important predictors of academic achievement.  

If teaching is dull and unexciting for you, and you consider it only a responsibility, your students will adopt the same attitude toward the school. Saying that education is important for them won’t really help. Children learn how to interpret the world and attribute meaning to things based on their own experience, not because someone told them that. This is why, the best you can do to promote a positive attitude toward school, learning, and hard work is to be an exemplary model demonstrating passion and enthusiasm. 

Another thing related to the educator’s character is their beliefs in the students’ capacity which modulates their expectations. This can be incredibly motivating or deteriorating, depending on how close it’s to their true capacity. Now, of course, no one knows the actual potential of a child, not even the parent, which is why two practices are of utmost importance. 

1. Carefully observe each student and ask them for feedback while working on everyday tasks to find out whether they’re too easy or too challenging for them. Aim to give students assignments that are a little harder than what they can do on their own – what Vygotsky defined as the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
2. Just because kids are the same age and in the same class doesn’t mean that their development is uniformed. This is why it’s of utmost importance for educators to have individualized expectations that are based on the actual capacity of the student, rather than expectations from the group as a whole. 

To sum everything up, teachers whose students achieve outstanding academic growth are highly involved in the educational process, enthusiastic about the subject, and passionate about teaching in general. They also give assignments that stimulate children’s development (tasks in the student’s ZPD) and have individualized expectations. 

Clear Goals and Structure

Educators influence academic performance with their own performance as teachers (the way they organize the curriculum) and the goals they set. 

What we mean by teachers’ performance is how their teaching is perceived by the students. Many educators deflect this topic by shifting the responsibility over to students and the difficult nature of the content itself, but that’s a weak excuse that doesn’t explain academic performance. The truth is, well-performing teachers have clear goals and a steadfast structure that makes it easy for both students and teachers to rely on. 

Here are a couple of questions that serve as indicators of whether one’s teaching practices have clear goals and a strong scaffold: 

• Do the students know what’s expected from them? 
• Do the teacher (and students) know what’s the goal of the unit/subject?
• Do the students trust that the teacher will follow through with the concept consistently and reliably? 
• Is the teacher clear and easy to understand, using comprehensible language?
• Do the teacher’s presentations help the students better understand the material? 
• Is the pace of the lectures too fast, too slow, or just right?
• Do students have trouble following the teacher’s presentation? 
• Does the teacher encourage asking questions of understanding while it presents the lecture? 
• Do the students feel there are enough opportunities for revising and practice before the teacher moves over to new topics? 

Child-Centered Focus

The individual differences of students are firmly at the center of a highly effective teaching practice. While the teacher should follow a well-defined structure and work toward precise goals, the instruction should be balanced between the content standards and the individual learners’ needs. A good way to find balance and lower the discrepancy is to employ positively-oriented support structures for students who need it. If children are expected to be successful, then they need the right tools and resources through which they can achieve that goal. 

How does this positively-oriented support system look-like? Well, there are a few steps in every successful support system: 

• Step 1: Identification. Constantly monitor and recognize student progress or stagnation in certain areas and make appropriate instructional adjustments.
• Step 2: Moral Support. Praise and reward hard-work, not results. Students need to know you believe in them and encourage them to continue working when they might not believe in themselves. One of the hardest things for everyone, including adults, is to give up when the people we respect sincerely believe we can overcome the obstacles. 
• Step 3: Instructional Support. Utilize different resources, modalities, methods, give your students your full attention, and also organize additional classes for revising the material with tutoring or mentorship programs. 
• Step 4: Supporting Environment. Create a non judgemental atmosphere where children will feel free to ask questions and request a more detailed explanation when they feel they didn’t understand the material. This process is extremely useful for teachers and homeschooling parents as it will give them a more realistic picture of the children’s capacity and thinking process. 

Learning to Learn

One notable characteristic of highly effective teachers is that they teach students how to learn, instead of simply demanding the material to be learned. After all, if we don’t show kids how to learn, we can’t expect them to intuitively know what’s the best learning strategy for different topics they’re encountering for the first time. 

You might have even expected this as this is one of the most prominent teaching practices that slowly becomes mainstream in modern programs. There are many popular books on this topic, like the one of Saundra Yancy McGuire titled Teach Students How to Learn. It emphasizes metacognition, study skills, and motivation. We like it because it successfully identifies and focuses on the key aspects when learning to learn. 

When you teach kids to learn, you should focus on: 

• Developing metacognitive skills – metacognition refers to one’s ability to use prior knowledge to plan an action, control behavior and thinking, and conscious decision-making. In other words, complex cognitive tasks that require self-reflection are considered to be metacognitive skills. Learning metacognitive skills will help children become more aware and gain control over their actions, which is crucial while studying. 
• Studying skills – studying skills consist of a specific set of learning strategies that help students memorize new material or make connections between learned concepts. Teachers and homeschooling parents can help students by explaining these skills and letting them choose what feels most natural. A good example of these skills would be the famous mnemonic techniques for memory improvement. 
• Discipline and self-motivation – the final aspect when teaching kids how to learn is to show them specific methods on how to gain self-discipline and maintain motivation throughout the whole year.

Lots of Discussions

Discussions are always part of the conversation when talking about effective teaching practices and it’s no surprise why that is. Adults love to watch argumentative debates, especially about complex topics related to important issues from everyday life. Have you wondered why that is? 

Well, first, we can’t be knowledgeable in every topic, so through debate, we learn the information central to that topic. Second, we learn to think critically by watching how the debaters critically analyze their opponent’s responses. 

Beyond that, discussions are important in a more fundamental way. We’re social individuals by nature and live in a highly social environment, which is why our quality of life in many ways depends on the successful interaction with the people around us. This is why it’s essential for students to master the art of discussion and communicate with those around them more effectively.

By introducing frequent discussion in your educational program, students will improve their critical thinking, self-confidence, retention of attention, listening skills, focus on the central point of things, and acquire better poise and speech delivery. All these skills will no doubt result in improved academic performance and engagement. 

Finding the Best Resources 

Yet another way teachers and homeschooling parents can improve the overall engagement rate and be able to employ a child-centered focus in their teaching practices is to find a variety of high-quality teaching resources. Not only would these resources be the educators’ best friend, but they’ll also offer students several different ways of approaching a topic, so they can consolidate the acquired knowledge. Of course, under the assumption that the teaching resources will be of different modality and focus on developing specific skills. 

What do we mean by different teaching resources? Here are a few examples: 

• Traditional academic literature (books, textbooks, etc.)
• Study resources (worksheets, flashcards, notes, summaries, infographics, posters, etc.)
• Visual resources (movies, documentaries, educational videos, animations, etc.)
• Auditory resources (songs, music, auditory signals, etc.)
• Kinestheticresources (physical activity, games, play learning, visiting museums, props, practical experiments, etc.)
• Creative (artistic) resources (drawing, painting, clay, wood, paper building activities, etc.)

Of course, each subject will be mainly based on two or three resources (aside from the traditional academic literature), but the more diverse methods you use, the more interesting and meaningful your lectures are going to be. Students love trying out new things and learning through experience, so keep this in mind. 

Our team at KidsKonnect supports teachers and homeschooling parents in these challenging tasks of looking for high-quality, yet affordable teaching resources by offering interactive worksheet bundles, curriculums, and lesson plans designed by experienced teachers. Visit our website to find out more. 

Different Assessment Methods

The traditional way to assess students is through standardized tests at the end of a thematic unit or at the end of one semester. However, this way of evaluating students is being criticized by many that it’s not effective. One test at the end of the course is not sensitive enough to tell us about the students’ progress and performance in detail. So, what’s the solution? 

The solution is to use a combination of formative and summative assessment methods to get the full picture.

Formative assessment comprises a variety of methods that highly effective teachers use to conduct in-process students’ evaluations. In-process means measuring student comprehension, learning needs, and progress as the lesson advances, so they can adjust their teaching pace and methods to better fit the students’ needs. This way, the results from the summative should be a natural continuation of the overall progress that was achieved from one to another formative assessment. 

Summative assessments, on the other hand, are the process of evaluating the outcome of a program/unit/topic. As you can see, it contrasts the formative assessment that aims to evaluate the progress at a certain point in time. As we said, if the summative assessments (SA) truly reflect the students’ progress and achievements, then the results from SA should be close to or identical to the average of the results documented by the formative assessments (FA). 

This is extremely useful for teachers and homeschooling parents because if there’s a big discrepancy between average FA scores and the SA result, it might indicate that the student was nervous and stressed, or might have cheated (in the other direction). All in all, together, these assessments can help you evaluate the students’ academic performance more realistically.  

The Character of the Classroom Environment

A necessary condition for optimal cognitive and emotional development, as well as realizing one’s academic potential is a consistent and predictable classroom environment that’s safe and organized. For homeschooling parents, this also applies, just that the classroom would represent a separate educational space in the home. 

While having a positive classroom environment is the foundation, there are different “flavors” of positive that might be more or less stimulating for students. This is why we don’t just talk about the polarity of the environment (positive vs. negative), but we go beyond that and think of the classroom as something that has its own character. 

The character of the classroom environment depends in some way on everything that we’ve discussed so far, but mainly on the teacher-student relationship. In the case of homeschooling parents, the parent must take on the role of the teacher and build a more professional relationship with the child while homeschooling. 

Highly effective teachers usually consider the classroom environment as a key feature with the power to support learning. So, what do they consider a stimulating environment? 

A classroom or the educational space needs to have well-defined rules, procedures, and routines that meet the needs of all students. Furthermore, building a relationship of trust and respect is always the core of educational environments. Also, a sense of connectivity and belonging among classmates is important. 

The Value of Feedback

One vital way of interacting with students is by giving and receiving feedback. Teachers who consider constructive feedback an important part of the learning process and encourage students to speak up, usually establish a clear and honest communication flow that’s basically essential in achieving many of the previously discussed practices. 

By receiving feedback, teachers can better understand and meet students’ demands. They can prepare and adjust the teaching practices to find the overall level of the students’ comprehension, but also help individual students overcome some difficulties. Through feedback, teachers can also find out what are the universally more difficult topics that might need a different approach than most others. Alternatively, they can also choose to change the curriculum and drop or add some topics, which might help students gain perceptive and master crucial skills. 

By giving feedback, teachers will let students know what they expect, whether they’re making progress, praise hard work, and let students know that they notice when something is wrong, or when they struggle. This will make students feel special and appreciated, which results in more respect and engagement in the school’s matters. 

Building a Network

Finally, the last highly effective practice of prominent teachers is network building. This refers to the teacher’s connection with other colleagues and educators. 

It’s incredibly important for teachers to stay up to date with current practices and effective measures other teachers have found for specific situations and students. No theoretical knowledge can substitute the power of practical experience. But, not just experience, teachers can communicate and share valuable ideas, initiatives, and innovative solutions that benefit students. They can organize and become a lot more resourceful, ultimately improving their own effectiveness and student learning.

Beyond this, having a wide network of connections and close relationships with others who understand teachers and homeschooling parents better than anyone else becomes a valuable source of support. It’s even therapeutic as it allows for teachers to vent and keep their mental health intact even in highly stressful situations, which in a school environment is not uncommon, unfortunately. 

Before You Leave

This was a lengthy guide because we gave our best to include all of the most effective teaching practices that drive academic growth, benefitting teachers and homeschooling parents alike. We’re aware that there are still many things to cover or explain. After all, countless books have been written on this topic. However, when you don’t have time to read thousands of pages, we made sure our article reliably sums up the gist of the newest findings in the field. 

If you implement these practices while teaching, we’re certain that you’ll see amazing results and a positive response from the students (or your child). 

Before we say goodbye, let us remind you to check out our website where you can find high-quality worksheets and other teaching resources, which can aid your journey in becoming a highly effective teacher. 

Also, subscribe to our newsletter and visit our blog as we regularly share guides, tips and tricks, and seasonally themed articles for teachers and homeschooling parents.