The 12 Hallmarks of Effective Teaching and Learning

Sound, effective educational best practices share certain characteristics regardless of the educator's pedagogical approach to teaching and learning.  To this end, we have identified twelve of these hallmarks, listed below:

The Hallmarks:

• Fun

• Project Based Learning

• Ownership

• Engagement

• Cooperative Teaching and Learning

• Citizenship

• Mastery of Curriculum

• Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Technology

• Leadership

• Personal Responsibility

• The Teachable Moment

  The 12 Hallmarks of Effective Teaching and Learning:

Hallmark 1: FUN - First things first.  As a 4th grader concisely put it some years ago, "Teacher John, if it ain't fun, why would we do it?"  School and  Fun?  While the terms are usually perceived to be in diametric opposition to each other, students having FUN within the framework of their school-based activities is an integral aspect of Effective Teaching and Learning and, with Project Based Learning are the overarching links that facilitate academic and civic success. 

Hallmark 2: PROJECT BASED LEARNING - We believe that Project Based Service Learning is the most effective pedagogical strategy for ALL students to achieve rigorous academic and civic success across all grade levels and regardless of demographic variables.  The Project based methodology is also the overarching portal to realize the other Hallmarks.Projects: 

 

• Effectively account for the needs of students who have a wide array of individual learning styles.
• Offers the teacher the opportunity of differentiating instruction based on those individualized learning styles.
• Addresses students’ multiple intelligences (body, kinesthetic, verbal, etc).
• Employs multiple modalities where many senses are involved in the learning process, thereby increasing the learner's ability to retain knowledge.

Hallmark 3: OWNERSHIP - When students are interested and invested in the completion of a school-based project, they begin to own their educational processes.  With ownership, all aspects of their school career, including mastery of curriculum become important to them. With ownership comes:

• Personal responsibility.
• Employment of strategies like critical thinking, hypothesis, extension of learning becomes commonplace.
• Motivation to succeed.
• Facility to achieve mastery of curriculum

Ownership starts with YOU, the teacher!  Get invested in the processes of PBSL.  Initiate projects with your students that interest you, so you can authentically model ownership.

Hallmark 4: ENGAGEMENT - Ownership and engagement are essentially 2 sides of the same coin.  When students take ownership and personal responsibility for the successful outcome of their project, it follows that they are engaged and interested.  Any good Service Learning project will present students with many opportunities to think critically, make hypotheses, and extend what they have learned.  Engagement is the door to performing these important skills, which in turn, engender academic and civic success.

Hallmark 5: COOPERATIVE TEACHING/LEARNING - Teacher collaborations present powerful opportunities for educators to learn from each other, which can increase the strategies available in their pedagogical toolboxes.

Students working cooperatively in small groups to achieve project-based goals is a powerful strategy to achieve curricular and standards based objectives.  Moreover, when students are focused on the goals of a project, they are more inclined to negotiate with their peers and make persuasive arguments to get their point of view adopted by the group.  The cooperative nature of small groups working together for successful completion of the project has an extremely positive effect on the classroom climate and behavior issues are significantly mitigated.

Hallmark 6: CITIZENSHIP/COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS - Development of good citizenship skills as part of the fabric of teaching and learning is critical to the long term, real-life success of our students.

• Civic skills give greater depth, context and meaning to student mastery of curriculum and standards.
• Integral to a Service Learning project is the inclusion of Community Partnerships. 
• Professionals who freely give their time and expertise to benefit students are models of good citizenship.
• Community Partners model good citizenship in action.

Hallmark 7: MASTERY OF CURRICULUM - The primary rationale to employ the Service Learning is, in fact, as a tool for student achievement, both academically and socially.  A project's success is ultimately determined by whether the project-based activities are connected to grade appropriate curriculum and state standards and more importantly, whether these connections enable students to achieve mastery across a range of academic disciplines.  We have seen that when students work within the Project Based methodology they own their educational processes, are engaged in a project's activities, work cooperatively to achieve success, and see citizenship modeled by the Community Partners, then mastery of curriculum becomes more likely because the students are more self motivated achieve success in all aspects of their scholastic experience.

Hallmark 8: HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS (HOTS) – Universal access to the internet by our students has changed the equation of how they learn, whether we, as educators, are ready for this change or not.  Unlike the traditional teaching and learning experience, with the Project Based methodology students are gaining knowledge experientially. Rather than feeding the students disconnected facts to be regurgitated on a test, Project Teachers coach the students to apply that knowledge to real world situations which engenders Higher Order Thinking Skills like evaluation, synthesis, and analysis.  Many of the videos on the Guerilla Educators blog authentically demonstrate HOTS in Action.

Hallmark 9: TECHNOLOGY - Technology is the #2 pencil of the 21st century.  As such, any good Service Learning project will be embedded with a wide array of real-world technology-based applications.

Hallmark 10: LEADERSHIP -

• Ironically, one of the key components of effective leadership is having the humility to know what you don't know and having the ability to listen and learn, from those who do.

• Leadership involves having the inner strength to make decisions and to take personal responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.

• Leadership is enabling those whom you lead to be innovative problem solvers without feeling threatened by their success.

• Leadership is being able to buffer and protect those you lead from distractions and impediments so they may carry out their responsibilities unimpeded by those distractions.

• Leadership is the ability to turn mistakes into "teachable moments" rather than "blamable moments".

• Leadership is knowing when to step back to give opportunities for those in your charge to take the lead, while understanding that ultimate responsibility rests with you.

• Leaders understand that leadership is a way of life and therefore unbound by the time constraints of the school or business day/week.

Hallmark 11: PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY - It is incumbent upon us as educators to instill in our students that, as much as the teachers have a responsibility to present information in interesting, informative, and innovative ways, students also have the personal responsibility to make sure that they have mastered the requisite information.  If students need help comprehending the information to achieve such mastery, they need to have the tools to appropriately make inquiries in order to understand and manipulate what is required of them.  Ultimately, one of our most critical functions as educators is to inculcate this sense of personal responsibility in our students.

Hallmark 12: THE TEACHABLE MOMENT - Agile educators who nimbly take advantage of those "off the curriculum grid" spontaneous opportunities when they occur are powerful moments for effective, authentic teaching and learning to take place.  Being able to identify and use real-time teachable moments is one of those transcendent qualities that good educators possess.  Click here to see two examples of the teachable moments in real-time.

To see powerful, authentic demonstrations of the Hallmarks in action, take a look at this "Seeds to Trees" horticulture project...

and click on our Service Learning video Compilation, as well.  Let us show you how to incorporate the 12 Hallmarks into your teaching/learning program.  Our Professional Development Workshops demonstrate in a practical, hands-on way how educators, using the Hallmarks as touchstones, can be more effective.  Contact John Sole at: tcherjohn@aol.com for more info.