7 Principles for Good Teaching Practice
If you haven’t heard about the 7 Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education you should know about them. They were originally published in 1987 by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson. These are widely accepted principles and they have been applied in various contexts. For your review (or if you haven’t seen the original) the link to the original article (reprinted with permission by the Wingspread Journal: Johnson Foundation) is below for download:
Seven Principles for Good Practice by Chickering and Gamson PDF
Good teaching practice, according to the seven principles, emphasizes:
- student-faculty contact
- cooperation among students
- active learning
- prompt feedback
- time on task
- high expectations
- diverse talents and ways of learning
The communication tools that we currently have access to (chat, email, VOIP) as well as web based collaboration/social networking tools for students means that we have more opportunities than ever to be successful in implementing these principles in distance teaching. This has led to considerations about how technologies (including WebCT and Vista) can support the principles originally outlined by Chickering and Gamson:
- Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever by Chickering and Ehrmann
- Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating
Online Courses - The Seven Principles and WebCT
- 7 Principles and VistaPDF
If you are not teaching an online course but are interested in how you might leverage technology to improve your teaching, the TLT Group (Teaching and Learning with Technology) has a public collection of “low threshold” or easy to integrate approaches.