Journal articleThe essence of teaching is to bring about a change in the behavior, attitude and thinking in the students. The teaching principle a teacher adopts in order to bring about this change matters a lot; this is because students learn most effectively when the learning environment is stimulating and when teaching is lively, interesting and relevant to students’ prior knowledge and experience of the world around them. The teaching principle, to be of value, needs the interaction of sensitive teachers to challenge student thinking, exposing them to new ideas. The vision of a teacher using an effective teaching approach is to develop classrooms where students are helped to make sense of, and reflect on, their experiences, assess their work and set future learning goals. In such classrooms students are always encouraged to articulate how they learn; they should be able to express what the problem is that they are working on, what questions and prior ideas they have, and what their plans are to solve the problem. They should know how they are going to evaluate and present their experimental results. Teaching and learning in these classes should be inseparable, in that learning is a criterion and product of effective teaching. In essence, learning is the goal of teaching, that is to say someone has not taught unless someone else has learned something. So teaching is to try and help someone learn something, or more formally to help someone acquire or change some behavior, i.e. some competencies, attitudes, knowledge and skills, ideas or appreciations (Agbulu & Idu, 2008; Perrot, 1989).