First-Order Principles for College Teachers: Ten Basic Ways to Improve the Teaching Process

Based on his many years of teaching, training, and writing, the author has developed ten basic principles that together form a foundation for effective teaching. These unique and interrelated principles are empirically tested and address attitudes as well as actions. Practicing the principles can bring faster success to classroom performance, can generalize to other tasks such as scholarly writing, and can provide a basis for making better use of traditional advice about teaching improvement. With the first-order principles, teachers learn to relax and manage their jobs and their own growth as teachers. This is a valuable resource for both novice and experienced teachers.

The first-order principles, each building on the last, are:
1) Moderate classroom incivilities with prosocial immediacies
2) Wait
3) Begin before feeling ready
4) Work and teach in brief, regular sessions
5) Stop
6) Moderate overattachment to content and overreaction to criticism
7) Moderate negative thinking and strong emotions
8) Let others do some of the work
9) Welcome learning and change
10) Build resilience by limiting wasted efforts

Boice describes each principle and provides practices to achieve it. In a separate section, he provides fundamental strategies for efficient writing and correlates the writing and teaching processes. This is a valuable resource for both novice and experienced teachers.

Robert Boice is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at SUNY–Stony Brook.