The 8 Best Ways to Practice Next-Generation Teaching

What are the defining characteristics of next-generation teaching? What does it look like in practice? How best can we make the shift to this style of instruction for the benefit of our learners, ourselves, and the whole of education? Educator and author Andrew Churches from our very own team here at the GDCF has the answer.

Andrew is a classroom teacher and an ICT enthusiast working at Kristin School on Auckland’s North Shore. He passionately believes that to prepare our students for the future, we must prepare them for change by teaching them to question and think, and to adapt and modify.

Michele Haiken wrote about her experiences at ISTE 2017 in the article One Teacher’s Take on ISTE 2017 and Its Education Trends. It was there she caught up with Andrew and learned from him about the 8 habits that represent next-generation teaching:

"Let’s eliminate the saying '21st-century learning.' What does that mean, anyway? It is 2017, and we are almost 20 years into the 21st-century. Here are eight habits of next-generation teaching as defined by Andrew Churches. How would you rate yourself?"

It's time to think about how we can move from the 21st-century terms to thinking in terms of the generations to come. Each will be defined by their own unique attributes and mindsets, as our were and as today's are. However, the time for ensuring their outlook is as healthy as possible begins with us right now.

8 Effective Practices of Next-Generation Teaching

Here are what Andrew describes as the 8 best practices of next-generation teaching, as they appeared in Michele Haiken's article:

1. Adapting the curriculum and the requirements to teach to the curriculum in imaginative ways.
2. Being visionary and looking at ideas and envisioning how they would use these in their class.
3. Collaborating to enhance and captivate our learners. We, too, must be collaborators; sharing, contributing, adapting, and inventing.
4. Taking risks, having a vision of what you want and what the technology can achieve, identifying the goals and facilitating the learning. Use the strengths of the digital natives to understand and navigate new products, have them teach each other.
5. Learning and continuing to absorb experiences and knowledge to stay current.
6. Communicating and fluent in tools and technologies that enable communication and collaboration.
7. Modeling behaviour that we expect from our students.
8. Leading is crucial to the success or failure of any project.

How we teach, what we impart, and in what ways we choose to empower our learners today will affect the future in ways we can't imagine. Practicing next-generation teaching habits is the best way to ensure the road we pave is a positive and constructive one.

Read more about these insights and others on next-generation teaching in One Teacher’s Take on ISTE 2017 and Its Education Trends on the Classcraft Blog.