This is a paper I turned in for my instructional leadership class taught by Dr. Richard Elmore. I learned more about teaching from spending 2 months in his class than in 2 years on the job. A principal in Boston said it best, "Elmore's class is worth the price of admission alone." This is my theory of the ideal instructional task a teacher can assign. Let me know if you have questions...
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In a cognitive
development seminar in Milwaukee (2009), Dr. Geoff Norman of McMaster
University stated: “What we learn is so strongly influenced by the meaning that
we can put on it…[learning] involves an interaction between existing knowledge
and new information.” Thus,
teaching does not always produce learning and learning does not necessitate
teaching, since learning requires active participation from the student, whereby
the student places meaning upon what is being taught. In other words, there exists a false notion that learning
always happens when teaching happens.
For example, pretend a student takes an anatomy class and learns about
organs for the first time. If a teachers
stands is in the front of this make-believe biology classroom and dictates the
purpose of various organs and a student sits passively at his or her desk
placing no meaning on the ideas being taught, then no learning occurs. Therefore, there can be teaching with
no learning, and learning for no teaching. So how then does a teacher ensure that a student
learns? What type of instructional
task should a teacher assign in order to guarantee – or at least optimize - learning?
I was a teacher
for five years. I taught in two
countries and in three states. In
addition to my own experience, I have participated in countless classroom
observations. Based on these
experiences, it seems that the majority of teaching that occurs in the United
States is teacher-centric - meaning that there is significant empirical evidence
that the teacher learns but very little evidence that students do. University of Michigan Education
professor David Cohen (1988) suggests that much of what takes place in American
and many European schools is, for the student, a “passive process of
accumulation.” Moreover, research
done by professors at Harvard Graduate School of Education (City, Fiarman,
Elmore, Teitel, 2009) supports the idea that the “…culture of American schools,
in its deep structure, is very teacher-centric.” In other words, the teacher is doing the brunt of the learning
in classrooms, since the teacher is the one thinking and controlling while
students sit passively, not placing meaning on what is being taught. This is a concern, since students learn
best when they are heuristically involved with the content. In Maria Montessori’s article The Revelation of the Natural Order in
Children, we find evidence for the aforementioned claim when Montessori
describes a group of children who were given large cut out letters and heuristically
erupted into an “explosion of writing”, whereby they, “covered the floor and
walls with their unrestrainable writing” (Montessori, 1974).
The instructional
core model shows a symbiotic relationship between what David Hawkins (2003)
calls the “I, Thou, and the It” (ie. the student, teacher, and content). In the ideal classroom, therefore, the
teacher links prior knowledge to the content, and facilitates an environment
where students create links between what they already know and what they are learning. Furthermore, the teacher needs to have
a sophisticated knowledge of the content, and the teacher should create the
optimal instructional task for the student to engage in with the new
content. The optimal task is not an
elaborate twenty-minute teacher-centric presentation about the content whereby
docile students sit in rows and listen.
In this scenario it is nearly impossible to find any evidence that
learning takes place, since there is no visible evidence that the student is
interacting with and placing meaning upon what is being taught. We only have evidence that the teacher was
engaged in a task and that the students listened, and in some instances
students are able to reproduce their learning on a test. Nevertheless, the locus of control is
with the teacher. In contrast, a
student-centric task shifts the locus of control to the student; the teacher
should spend a small portion of class time explaining new content and students
should spend the majority of class time problem solving and determining the
linking principle between problems.
“The instructional task is at
the center of the instructional core,” and students need to be the ones
completing the instructional task (City, Fiarman, Elmore, Teitel, 2009).
This begs the
question, what is the ideal instructional task for students to perform? Should they identify concepts? Memorize facts? Apply new content knowledge to word
problems? In Geoff Nomrman’s
presentation on Cognitive development (2009), he tells a story of a student who
memorized all parts of human anatomy and passed the exam with flying colors,
but was unable to apply anatomical knowledge when placed in a clerkship. Why was this student unable to transfer
the information he or she learned in class to the clerkship? Dr. Norman suggests the student was
unable to do so for two reasons: one, the student did not engage in the task of
analyzing anatomical concepts via multiple real life principle-and-example
problems; two, the student was never engaged in anatomical analysis in the form
of an everyday analogy. In other
words, the ideal instructional task presents students with multiple principle-and-example problems as well as everyday analogy problems. This kind of task allows students to organize
information into meaningful ‘clusters’ and gain long-term retention of concepts
(Norman, 2009). What are principle-and-example problems
and why is it important to problem solve multiple ones? Dr. Norman (2009) describes
principle-and-example problem tasks as problems that share a similar underlying
principle. For instance, let’s use
the subject of anatomy as an example.
To complete a principle-and-example task for anatomy, a teacher could
introduce the principle that air pollution and smoke atrophy lungs. The teacher could assign multiple
problems to solve. One problem
asks students to predict which organ needs medical attention for a man who has
been smoking for years and has a cough, and the students would have to explain
their diagnosis. Another problem could
describe a rural town in China that has seen a dramatic increase in used
scooters with clunky exhaust systems.
Then the students would be asked to predict which organs need medical
attention for a population of workers in this town. In both scenarios, the root principle is ‘smoke pollution
atrophy lungs’, and anatomy students could form a diagnosis for both problems
based on this principle. Moreover,
these problems are analogous to real issues that medical and science
professionals face. In other
words, there is a likeness between these problems and everyday tasks. Asking an anatomy student to memorize
causes of lung atrophy is not an everyday analogy assignment. This task is only used in formal
education, and has minimal applicability to a real world problem. That is not to say there is no use for
rote memorization tasks in education.
There could be instances where memorizing information is necessary for
foundational understanding of principles.
Namely, some students might benefit from memorization exercises before
they are asked to apply the knowledge they memorized. However, the ideal
instructional task involves applying a principle to multiple real-life example problems
and solving. And it is important
for educators to remind themselves of this ideal as they design curriculum.
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