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Thriving in Academe
Best Practices

Strategies for Improved Student Learning

Teachers who are successful in creating significant learning experiences succeed in part because they creatively used one or more of the following three realms of good practice. 

• Powerful Teaching Strategies. Teachers need to find or create a teaching strategy that incorporates several specific learning activities, arrange so that they build each other and result in significant learning. Two teaching strategies that are well described in the literature on college teaching are problem-based learning and team-based learning. Both strategies use small groups, although in different ways, and have the groups work on major, realistic, complex problems.
• Reflective Writing. To transform the information and ideas they encounter into meaningful learning, students need to engage in recurring and extensive reflection. Reflection can focus on the subject and on the learning process itself. Reflection on one's own learning adds a new and powerful dimension to the learning process. To accomplish this, teachers can use one-minute papers, weekly journaling, learning portfolios, and many other methods. (Zubizarretta, 2003)
• Teaching for Engagement. Implicit in the concept of "significant learning" is the belief that we need to connect learning to students' personal lives, their work lives, and/or some of the many communities of which they are a part: their family, local community, nation-state, religious group, social action group, etc. Involving students in service learning or having them participate in a social action task can do this in powerful ways (Loeb, 1990).

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