Teaching Techniques for Instructional Goals: A Partial Review of the Literature.

Over the past decade and a half, well over 100 teaching techniques have appeared in the literature on teaching sociology. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that most instructors still rely predominantly on the standard lecture-discussion format, with minimal opportunity for active involvement by the students in the classroom. Two possible reasons for this discrepancy may be 1) that teachers lack an easily remembered model for making instructional decisions, and 2) that little order has been created out of the plethora of existing teaching techniques. This paper addresses both reasons through a partial review of the literature on sociology teaching techniques within the context of Bloom's taxonomy. Using this well-known model of instructional objectives and the organization of teaching techniques provided in this paper, sociology teachers should be more able to choose active-learning teaching styles to meet specifically determined objectives.

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