The best way to teach is to make sure the ideas are sticky.
Some ideas are very easy to make sticky. They come with dramatic stories, or well-worn examples, or are immediately applicable to students lives.
I teach music theory, so none of the above ever apply. (Well, hardly ever.)
So we find ways to make the material sticky through our teaching.
- Repeated short mantras (I say “Don’t outsource your sense of rhythm” all the time, among other catchphrases.)
- Deliver the idea in character (I have a colleague who has a “wheel of accents” and will thus teach with a Scottish brogue.)
- Wear something silly and reference it (A retired colleague had custom made “Captain Derivative” attire to wear to calculus class.)
- Tell jokes (When I teach relative and parallel minor, I do rapid-fire “What’s the parallel/relative minor of?” drills, and always end with “What’s the parallel minor of A-flat Major?” So I can tell a dad joke.‡)
- Act intentionally crazy. (My AP biology teacher could be heard two halls away in his lectures, would throw chalk at the board to “represent” organelles and sometimes used a taxidermied white rat as a pointer. I remember many things he taught.)
There are ways to teach so that students pass the test and forget, and there are ways to teach so that students will remember things the rest of their lives. Make sure nothing is off-limits in your quest to become the second type of teacher.
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‡ Q: What do you get if you drop a piano down a mine shaft? A: A flat minor. Haha!