Effective Teaching In The 21st Century Essay

The twenty-first century is a world of technology, social changes and vast knowledge that is always growing. This can be intimidating for those who have witnessed the changes from the 1900 's, but for the younger people in society, this is the norm. Since the world and the way we live has changed so much, so must our teaching methods. In a classroom setting, children and teenagers have shorter attention spans, more distractions and more to learn than ever. So what makes for effective teaching in the twenty-first century? Each teacher has their own methods, but this essay will discuss some key elements in modern teaching. After covering the two basic types of schooling, these will be narrowed down further and some positive methods for effective teaching will be introduced.

When we think of teaching, one of the first things that come to mind is the word 'education ', but what exactly is education? Primary-school children would say education helps them learn, Secondary-school children

Dr Benjamin Bloom was a psychologist that contributed the taxonomy of higher-order thinking in 1956. He began this with the aim to teach students to think in a higher form, such as evaluating and analysing, instead of just teaching students to remember facts (Collins, 2014). Out of the three domains of learning (Cognitive, affective and psychomotor), the one that relates the most to teaching is cognitive, although all three are important to an individual. The six major categories of learning factors were originally written by Bloom, but have been recently updated by Anderson, L and her colleagues (cited in Collins, 2014). These factors are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. If these categories of the cognitive domain are utilised by the teacher and applied in teaching, students will learn more