Teachers are mentors, heroes, and role models who inspire children to learn and expand their minds. A teacher and their skills as an educator determine how much their students will learn and the methods in which they are taught.

Children learn best from teachers who use a variety of teaching tools to convey class material. There are different types of tools teachers can use that fit into five categories of teaching: active, innovative, creative, effective, and fun. These five types of teaching each include methods teachers can use to educated their students effectively and successfully.

Five Types of Teaching and The Tools That Go With Them

The five categories of teaching are basically learning models that give educators a blueprint on how to engage their students in a wide variety of learning activities to promote education and learning. Each category of teaching includes activities that help students to develop skills and learn class material.

Active Teaching

Active teaching is a method where teachers are active participants in engaging their students in activities. Teachers using this method ask their students questions and encourage conversation. Educators interact with their students and work alongside them during the teaching process. Active teaching provides teachers with tools and ideas to create a dynamic classroom environment where students are encouraged to ask questions and seek out answers to solve problems.

Innovative Teaching

A more student centered teaching model is innovative teaching. Innovative teaching means students are encouraged to be independent to figure out their own methods and ideas for solving problems. This model of teaching allows teachers to let their students work more on their own while they take a step back and provide guidance from a distance.

Different students may learn better using a variety of different teaching methods. Innovative teachers give their students the choice to learn according to their own preferences and teachers use different standards to measure learning for individual students. For example: some students learn better using visual aids. These students can be allowed to use videos, pictures, charts, etc. to help them learn. A teacher will then test students using the learning methods that they implemented to originally learn course material.

Creative Teaching

Under the creative teaching model, teachers break out of traditional teaching methods to find new and unique ways to teach students. Creative teachers don't follow a rigid curriculum but encourage freedom and independence. Students are asked to use their imagination and creativity to solve problems or complete assignments. A great example would be a science teacher taking their students on a field trip to a science museum. By getting out of a stuffy classroom they can make learning more interesting and can provide outside resources (tour guides, museum exhibits, etc.) within the museum to help them learn material.

Effective Teaching

Effective teaching is a model where teachers try to provide students learning opportunities where their own experiences in their life can be applied to course material. Effective learning turns life experiences into teaching moments. Teachers provide students with tools and course material to help them understand the world they live in and understand how what they are learning in class applies to them in the bigger scheme of things.

For example: An economics teacher could have their high school students pretend to participate in the stock market by buying stocks with fictional money. Students are asked to keep track of their stocks outside of class to help them understand how the stock market works and practice buying and selling stocks with fictional money and worksheets to keep track of transactions.

Fun Teaching

Students learn best when they are having fun and enjoying their experience in the classroom. Fun teaching methods provide amusing activities within the structured environment of a classroom. Teachers provide students with a planned assignment that is fun but is designed to boost the absorption of content being taught. Fun teaching methods catch students attention and are exciting, but at the same time they help to challenge students with interesting subject matter.

Example of Fun Teaching: A teacher lecturing to students about insects could make the topic more fun by taking children on a nature walk to look at real bugs. Students could be asked to draw different bugs and label it's parts like the eyes and legs.

The Five Teaching Models Promotes Learning:

Children can be curious and these models try to encourage students to be inquisitive. Students are allowed to ask questions, participate in discussions, and play an active role in their own education.
All children are different and may learn best using a variety of different methods. Teachers should recognize different types of learning and use them to help all students by using teaching techniques that work for different types of learners.
These teaching models encourage participation. Students don't always sit behind a desk. They are allowed to move around the classroom, work in groups, and even go on field trips.
All five of these models help students to develop critical thinking skills. Students are encouraged to be creative and use problem-solving skills to learn course materials.
These teaching models all help the classroom to be an interesting learning environment. Teachers promote students work ethic and help them feel pride in the assignments they've completed.

If teachers use these models to help educate their students then they can be more successful educators and can have happier and more engaged students.

Hopefully useful