A student’s academic understanding results from prior education, and the success or failure of other teachers to confront and remove educational gaps. Teachers are encouraged to assess each student’s prior education, looking for gaps in each child’s understanding and working with children who are further behind than other students. Once assessed, teachers use their understanding of students' proficiency with the course as the foundation to structure the class, designing lessons to fill those academic gaps and build a firm learning foundation while teaching the subject.
Each student is a product of parental guidance, social influences and cultural ideals. One developmental teaching strategy encourages teachers to get to know each student, focusing on the way these influences alter a student’s acceptance of the information. This includes social and cultural perceptions of a subject, such as concerns about a child’s home learning environment or social stigmas preventing a student from advancing academically. Once a teacher understands these elements of each child, she begins developing teaching techniques designed to develop each student’s understanding and encourage each student to work through social barriers to education, such as a misperception of the subject, or to work around negative social influences.
While the developmental teaching approach addresses academic gaps in a student’s understanding, it keeps a strong focus on progressing student understanding swiftly. The goal is to promote positive student progress during the semester, while working to correct the external factors which previously hindered student achievement. For this, the developmental approach suggests building an interest in the student, believing that once students fully understand a subject, the students will want to continue learning, allowing for a quicker learning process later in the semester. This also allows teachers to avoid regular review exercises in future lessons, having already reviewed each student’s previous foundation.
The developmental teaching approach considers the work of the teacher to be another part in the process of development. While working to develop the learning skills and understanding of students, teachers work to hone and develop their own teaching style. This includes reading recent articles in teacher journals, studying new teaching techniques and putting those practices to work in the classroom.