Becoming a Skillful Teacher

Abstract

Skillful teachers attempt to find out how students experience learning and then use that information to make good pedagogic decisions. Without some knowledge of how our students are learning, the choices we make concerning how and what to teach are stabs in the dark. Teaching skillfully involves us deliberately placing ourselves in the role of student and reflecting on the experience of how we, and they, confront difficult and intimidating learning. In this speech, Stephen Brookfield will draw on his autobiography as both learner and teacher to show how this frames four core assumptions of skillful teaching: that good teaching constitutes whatever helps students learn, that the most effective teachers reflect critically on their assumptions, that the most important pedagogic knowledge we need is an awareness of how our students learn, and that context changes everything.