The structuralist approach to teaching involves stripping a subject into its base components. The teacher will slowly feed the parts of a subject to the pupils, one part after another. The teacher will show the students the information and relate it to previous lessons, giving the students a well-rounded view of the subject. For example, when learning about ancient civilizations in a classroom, the teacher will separate the whole lesson into small parts, teaching about the agricultural style of the civilization, then the daily life of the common folk and finally the warring habits of the society.
Teaching using the structural method helps children digest the information slowly instead of giving them a jumbled overview of the entire subject. It's like receiving small courses of a larger meal. You get the chance to sample and appreciate each dish separately without finding your table overly cluttered with food, confusing your palate. If you start giving students information on a subject too broadly, they can find themselves confused and potentially flustered with the learning process. The structural method helps alleviate that problem by developing the learning into small, mentally digestible units that a teacher can build on as the children begin to grasp one unit after another.
The structural approach puts a lot of faith in the memory of your students. Unfortunately, the best student can forget facts accrued at the beginning of a school year. A key part of the structural method is relating the new packet of information with the old information. This makes it difficult to relate the information you provide with the previous information in the lesson. Another drawback is that some students do not learn well with the structural method of teaching. Some students need less rigid and more creative teaching methods to absorb information.
When you decide to employ the structuralist method of teaching, you need to commit yourself to repetition. Memorization in the structural method requires you to repeat your curriculum to ensure the students retain information. You can do this through encouraging note taking and studying, by testing and by providing review lectures. Ask questions in class to quiz the students about the information you provide. Revisit old lessons often to keep the information fresh in your students' minds.