Teaching Techniques... How Important They Really Are

Last year, when I was still studying at the University of Innsbruck, I had teachers who were...well let's say... not as dedicated as the teachers I have this year. In the last couple of months I've realized how important it is to have teachers who actually care about your progress and who use good teaching techniques.
In Innsbruck, my teachers told us which vocabulary books we'd need and for the final exam we had to study the vocab in those books. I can tell you- those books were the worst English books I've ever seen! There were no English defintions of words, not enough and not very good exercises and not a single example sentence. In the end I had a looooong list of words that I should know and only ONE german translation for each word. No one ever showed us how to use those words or gave us more than one meaning. So I knew a lot of English words, but I couldn't use most of them. So it's no wonder that 80-90% of the students failed the final exam. I studied really hard and in the end I passed the exam, but to be honest I had forgotten most of the words after the summer break. I think this is because I only learned the words by heart. If you don't know how to use a word and if you don't know common collocations and various different meanings you don't actually KNOW the word. That's like: how big of a help is a pencil if you don't know how to write?
So this was one way of teaching that I experienced in my first semester in Innsbruck. And I consider this way of teaching as not advisable..

In Graz, on the other hand, our teachers give us very helpful glossaries for each exam. In the glossaries they list various meanings of words, strong collocations and an extra "attention!" section (e.g. for commonly made mistakes). Also, we are provided with very interesting websites on grammar, history, geography etc. (that's how I learned all of the 50 US states :P ). It seems like the teaching techniques used here are just much more efficient. I think it's better studying less words and in the end being able to USE them,  than studying a huge number of words that I can't use and that I will forget as soon as the exam is over. It's very interesting to compare those two universities (although the fields of study are slightly different) and to figure out what I think is the best way of teaching. And since I would love to teach languages someday, I am glad to have the opportunity to experience how teaching should or should not be done.