Chapter Summaries

Chapter 5:

Chapter 5 covers the various components of direct teaching and in particular emphasizes how exposition teaching with interactive teaching is the most effective method of direct instruction. Direct Instruction uses deductive knowledge, where the Teacher directs the students to the knowledge they are supposed to uncover. It is a more traditional model of teaching, where the primary actor is the Teacher who either conveys information to the student and checks for understanding through questioning. This varies from indirect instruction in that the later uses inductive knowledge where the student is the central actor unlocking the material.

Direct instruction is better for covering the lower levels of blooms and is very efficient at conveying high levels of information. It is efficient not only in how much knowledge is conveyed in a teaching period, but is also fairly simple to plan for the teacher. The teacher simply has to have a background of the knowledge and be able to show that knowledge to the students in a clear manner. However, direct instruction suffers from weaknesses in that it has the lowest level of retention, and it doesn’t use the critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity of the student. Thus, when the student does not use these thinking skills, the student is often bored and unmotivated. Thus, the student does not retain the material. These shortfalls can be offset through interacting with the students by using effective questioning. However, it still does not produce the same level of retention as indirect teaching.

I find it interesting that at the college level this in the only type of teaching that professors employ. This not only explains why the freshmen year of college is so difficult, but why so many students don’t retain the knowledge from lectures. I can’t remember a single lecture, and the only materials I do vaguely remember were from my essays or I used in presentations and debates. I wonder if either I adapted and started using all these higher processes in my head, or if I could have been much smarter in college if they used these techniques.

Chapter 6

Indirect reading is the opposite to direct teaching in that is focuses on a student centered discovery process while the directed learning emphasizes a more teacher oriented learning process. This means that the student is using inductive reasoning to figure out the learning objectives rather than learning the verbatim of the teacher. This also means that because the student is using higher-level thought processes the student will retain the material at a higher rate than direct teaching and will be more engaged in the classroom setting. Indirect teaching can occur in many different ways including discussions, discovery activities and problem solving. Here the students are using whatever knowledge they already have or is presented to unlock the objectives.

Although inquiry, indirect, inductive learning does lead to a better student interaction with the material and thus a higher retention rate of the material, indirect learning also requires a large amount of creativity on the part of the teacher. Therefore, this might mean a less time intensive workday, this sort of teaching requires much more prior preparation on the part of the teacher to produce the lesson plans for this way of learning. A teacher can simply not be expected to produce this type of indirect knowledge everyday, unless it is a skill that really gets better with time.

I also think that the best sorts of discussion or problem solving start with a limited background. Students need to understand the gist of the material before truly unlocking it in this indirect learning. Therefore, the best way to teach is probably with a combination of both direct and indirect reading.

Chapter 11: The Skillful Teacher

This chapter focused on illustrating various types of models for teaching. A model of teaching is a pattern of instruction that is recognizable and consistent. There are many types of models, from Group Investigation to the Synectics model of teaching, all of which provide different way of indirect teaching approaches. However, I found this chapter much less approachable than the chapters from “Effective Instructional Strategies.” This I think stemmed from both the denser less student friendly voice of the chapter and the fact that they only used geometry as an example for these models. I was lost how to apply these to a class like English, much less a class as ambiguous as Senior Project. As the chapter said on pg 251, models of teaching are not the same as patterns of instruction. Models of teaching are much more theory oriented while the latter deals with in class room activates. Thus, this chapter seems more focused on the theory behind the practical patterns of instruction in direct and indirect teaching. However, since I am doing on-the-job training, I seem much more engaged in the stuff that is directly relevant for me. I don’t want to debate theories in an ivory tower, I want stuff that will help me teach tomorrow, because I need it, and my students need it.

Annotated Bibliography for Assessment and Standard

Greer, L. (2001). Does changing the method of assessment of a module improve the performance of a student? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 141 (2)

This article performs two tasks in that first summarizes past research on the rationale behind assessments in order to create a context, for its second task: the presentation of a study showing that tests which provided feedback lead to higher student performance than tests which did not. Past research has shown that the assessment process can be utilized to serve multiple purposes, including “reporting on student’s achievements, providing feedback to enable students to improve their understanding, diagnosing misunderstanding, expressing clearly the goals of the curriculum, improving the teacher’s methods. This study looks at the second and third of these reasons, as it tries to assess ways in which assessments provide feedback to the students in order to improve their understanding. The study found that students who receive feedback that directly to the mistakes and then were retested on that material did better on the tests than the group, which did not undergo this formative examination.

I think this study proves the point that assessments are more than a fire-and-forget test that students should focus on passing. Tests are a valuable learning experience, and provide both the teacher and the student with clear indications of what the student does not know. However, the test must be structured in a systematic way to ensure that the mistakes are evident to both the grader and the student. If a student fails a multiple choice test, the teacher doesn’t know why the student missed the information, the teacher just knows that the student did not know the right answer. Without knowing the exact mistake, the teacher cannot hope to improve that student’s understanding of the material. This is why tests that force the student to show the work for math and science, or essays for social studies, are a much better way to assess if the student understands the material. However, this does raise the problem of time on the teacher’s part, and determining where 100 students made mistakes will require much more time and effort than simply marking a multiple choice bubble wrong. I guess that’s why they pay us the big bucks though.

Howard, W., Crenshaw, M., No child left behind: a successful implementation. Education, 126 (3), 403-408

This controlled group experiment tests whether a school who implements the policies recommended by No Child Left Behind actually result in an improvement in student performance. This South Carolina study tests whether the NCLB-based model: Turning Good Teachers into Great Teachers: Turning Green Apples into Red Apples can lift a school out of the unsatisfactory rating. The study examines two very similar schools, one who implements the program and one that does not. This model implemented a number of changes including training the principal in effective leadership skills, training teachers to align their curriculum to South Carolina standards, bringing in the community, extending hours to weekends and after school, and introducing new technologies. Following this model, the “experimental school” improved to an average rating, while the control school remained unsatisfactory.

Although this study seems to prove that the model does work to improve schools, it is not specific enough to know which changes lead to the improvements. Since so many variable were changed between the control and the experimental it is hard to determine which is the causal agent. Perhaps the improvement is simply a result of extending the hours, and aligning the curriculum to standards did not change anything. Aligning the curriculum to the standards could have actually decreased the student performance, but all the other changes improved student performance so much that it outweighed the loss. In order to make this study more relevant and replicable it is important to narrow the change variables to just one, or else we cannot make any workable conclusions. However, I also believe that in terms of education reform, there is no one silver bullet to improving test results. In order to turn around schools, a lot needs to be changed, just like this study showed.