Reddit mentions of What the Best College Teachers Do

>Or is there some sort of training I can undergo to learn effective teaching methods?

Yes.

>Or am I just overthinking this and all it is is breaking down concepts and clearly explaining things?

No.

There is a TON of research out there on what effective teaching looks like. I'll put a couple of resources to get you started at the end of this comment, but it is far more than just explaining things -- knowledge is not something that gets transmitted from your mouth or a piece of paper directly into someone's brain. Instead, the learner takes in the new information and interprets it in light of what they already know, connecting it to the knowledge they already have. If you want the learner to understand the new information correctly, it is vital that you first assess what they already know and understand about the topic at hand, including what misconceptions they may already hold about related topics.

Directly asking a student what they already know is a bad technique because most students are not very good at self-assessment. It's very common for someone to overestimate their own knowledge, thinking if something is familiar that they already "know" it (i.e., the difference between recognizing a correct response vs. having to generate a correct response from scratch). It's also very common for students to not be able to describe what they are struggling with. "What part don't you understand?" "Everything." Good teachers develop an arsenal of ways to test the learner and get them to reveal what they're really thinking and multiple ways of presenting and explaining the content so you can do it in the way that makes the most sense to the learner.

An example: a friend of mine had just started tutoring a student in chemistry and was focusing on a couple of basic principles of chemistry. My friend gave her a quiz on Principle A and a quiz on Principle B and the student aced both, which made my friend really confused why the student was doing so poorly in class. I told her to give the student ONE quiz that mixed problems that used Principle A and Principle B (and maybe throw in a few that didn't use either principle or both). And sure enough, the student bombed that quiz. Because the student had been using the structure of the quizzes as a cue for what principle to apply. She did not understand the principles well enough to recognize when each should apply from the questions themselves.

People new to teaching are frequently afraid to let their students struggle with hard questions. It's a common teaching mistake to do all the mental work for the student by breaking hard problems down into an easy-to-follow procedure or to inadvertently create patterns that students can leverage to get good grades without truly understanding the content, as in the example above. One thing to keep in mind is that it's not enough to teach content, you generally also have to teach practices -- things like stopping to analyze a problem before attempting to solve it or what questions to ask yourself to ensure you really understand something.

Resources:

• Why don't students like school? A short article by a cognitive psychologist that goes over some basic principles of learning. There is a book by the same author (with the same title) that expands on these ideas.
  
• What the Best College Teachers Do. Another book on how good teachers approach instructional design and evaluate their own teaching. If you Google, there are notes out there that summarize the the key points of this book.

I work at a community college, and we definitely have a significant number of students who are people of color and/or live in economic precarity. So, it sounds like we are interested in working with similar populations of students. Here are a few resources I've found helpful:

Reading on critical pedagogy for a theoretical framework. Freire and Giroux are where I'd start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy

The idea of backward design for semester-length planing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_design

I'm having trouble finding a good resource to link to quickly, but the idea of transparency in lesson design seems important to me.

"How Learning Works" and "What the Best College Teachers Do" for more day to day things:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Learning-Works-Research-Based-Principles/dp/0470484101

https://www.amazon.com/What-Best-College-Teachers-Do/dp/0674013255/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=F2A8M8CSVQKDBS14P2QC



"In The Middle" for a good outline of a workshop approach to teaching writing

https://www.heinemann.com/inthemiddle/

I haven't found a good single book that talks about teaching active reading, but there are a lot of resources online, and I've found teaching it explicitly and modeling it for my students as part of a whole class discussion to work pretty well.

As far as the critical theory aspect of reading (which I do think should be taught early on and even to people who are just beginning to read at the college level) I like "Texts and Contexts" and "Critical Encounters"

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Encounters-High-School-English/dp/0807748927

https://www.amazon.com/Texts-Contexts-Writing-Literature-Critical/dp/0205716741

Hope that's helpful! Good luck to you!

In this book the conclusion I remember is that the best college teachers show their students why the material is important, interesting, and where it fits with everything else. This leads to intrinsically motivated students, where focusing on grades leads to extrinsically motivated students.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Best-College-Teachers-Do/dp/0674013255

I suggest you check out the book What the Best College Teachers Do

there are a few instructors that regularly post here with good material on teaching but they tend to be short snippets of advice rather than a comprehensive resource on communication, progression, curriculum design, teaching methods, etc.

there's one instructor (sonicbh) who has some really advanced methods for teaching and creating feedback loops with students. it's clear he's done his research on teaching

if you're looking for resources, i recommend looking at teaching resources outside of the martial arts community. what good teachers do has little to do with what they're teaching. sonicbh recommended reading make it stick, which is really really good. also check out https://www.amazon.com/What-Best-College-Teachers-Do/dp/0674013255

podcasts like ted, finding mastery are good but you need to sift through a lot of material. even freakonomics and worklife by adam grant have some good material on productivity and designing environments to promote creativity and learning

I definitely was! I came straight out of my undergrad into teaching, so I wasn't that much older than my students! Part of it is just remembering that you have control over the room - and have colleagues/peers come watch you teach for helpful tips! I am really trying to improve as a teacher. This book has been a really helpful resource to me as well.

That's awesome that you want to go to grad school! What are you planning on studying?