Teaching Strategies

Historical Contributions to Teaching Strategies

Interest in effective teaching strategies has been a focus of discussion and research for hundreds of years. Perhaps one of the earliest teaching strategies was described by Plato in Socratic Dialogues. Plato described what has come to be known as the Socratic method of teaching, which is a variant of a strategy used by Socrates. Still used today as a teaching strategy, the Socratic method is a dialectic method of teaching that involves dialogue and questioning, emphasizing the exchange of ideas and suppositions that then transforms knowledge itself.

Many significant contributions to our knowledge of teaching strategies have been made in the past two centuries, continuing today with exciting new developments (e.g., brain research). John Dewey was an American psychologist, philosopher, and educator whose contributions to the field of education continue to be evident today in many teaching approaches. Although he wrote extensively on many different topics (e.g., democracy, human conduct, logic), his contributions to the field of education focused on teaching approaches. Dewey felt that content area subjects should be integrated when taught and that experiential education—learning by doing—was the most effective way to teach. He also believed that teachers should emphasize critical thinking as opposed to memorizing facts, and that problem solving and inquiry were two concepts that should be embedded in instruction.

Ivan Pavlov's work in the 1920s and the research of Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner have also had a profound effect on the development of teaching strategies. Pavlov studied stimuli and responses in an effort to understand learning and is famous for discovering classical conditioning involving involuntary responses. Thorndike and Skinner expanded Pavlov's research by examining learned (voluntary) behaviors and were major contributors to the research on operant conditioning. They examined the antecedents and consequences of behavior. Thorndike discovered that any behavior is more likely to be repeated if it results in a positive outcome (the law of effect). Skinner studied the antecedents of behavior, the behavior itself, and the consequences of behavior and is generally viewed to be the founder of behavior modification. These researchers contributed to the foundation of teaching strategies based on the principles of behaviorism.

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