ABSTRACT
What is the range of teaching methods available? How do you decide which teaching methods to use? Are some methods better than others, or just more fashionable? Some people who are relatively new to teaching become frustrated by the fact that no one seems prepared to give them an instruction manual with definitive answers to these and similar questions. ‘Surely’, they might say, ‘there are optimum conditions for learning, derived from psychological research?’ Or again, ‘why can’t someone just tell me how to do it?’ These and similar questions (or feelings) are quite common, and in large part they stem from the real anxiety felt by virtually anyone confronting a new and complex task, yet they are also the product of the nature of professional knowledge, discussed in Chapter 7 of this book. The popular image of the discipline of psychology is unhelpful here, in that it seems to promise ‘the answers’ (via a definitive knowledge about ‘what makes people tick’) whilst in reality it shares the limitations of most other fields of knowledge.
