Book: Models of Teaching

Joyce, B. R., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2011). Models of teaching. Pearson/Prentice Hall.
ISBN 9780205593453

Chapter 1: Beginning the Inquiry

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How teaching is conducted has a large impact on student’s abilities to education themselves. Successful teachers are not simply charismatic and persuasive presenters. Rather, they engage their students in robust cognitive and social tasks and teach the students how to use them productively.

Effective learners draw information, ideas, and wisdom from their teachers and use learning resources effectively. Thus, a major role in teaching is to create powerful learners.

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Concepts of learning that apply to all models

Constructivism

…one of the long-standing ways of thinking about education crosses a fault line where one side of the line emphasizes what is taught and the other side emphasizes how students learn to work together to reconstruct their current knowledge and basically, to learn to be inquirers and build their learning capacity. Put simply, do we teach content to students (one side of the line), or teach them how to learn the content and how to learn new content?

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In the process of learning, the mind stores information, organises it, and revises previous conceptions. Learning is not just a process of taking in new information, ideas and skills; the new material is reconstructed by the mind.

… the constructivist position is that knowledge id not just transmitted to the student by teachers or parents, but inevitably has to be creates as the child responds to the information in the educational environment. However, teaching through discovery models is not the only way to facilitate the construction of knowledge. Well-designed direct methods can help students build knowledge.

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Metacognition

…is related to constructivism in that the most effective learners are increasingly conscious of how they learn; they expand their tools and monitor their progress. In other words, they develop “executive control” over learning strategies rather than passively reacting to the environment.

As sad as it might seem, some students approach books or other text passively. They work through the material and let what sticks stick, but they are not actively constructing knowledge. Others attack the material consciously, building understanding by organizing information and building concepts as they read.

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Chapter 2: Where Models of Teaching come from

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Learning environments and models of teaching

A model of teaching is a description of a learning environment, including our behavior as teachers when that model is used. These models have many uses, ranging from planning lessons and curriculums to designing instructional materials, including multimedia programs

The information processing family

Information-processing models emphasize ways of enhancing the human being’s innate drive to make sense of the world by acquiring and organizing data, sensing problems and generating solutions to them, and developing concepts and language for conveying them.

Inductive Thinking

The ability to analyze information and create concepts – inductive thinking – is generally regarded as the fundamental thinking skill. …Phonetic and structural analysis depend on concept learning, as do rules of grammar.

Concept Attainment

…is a close relative of the inductive model. Designed both to teach concepts and to help students become more effective at learning concepts…

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The Picture-Word Inductive Model

…designed from research on how students acquire print literacy, particularly reading and writing, but also how listening-speaking vocabularies are developed, the picture-word inductive model (PWIM) incorporates inductive thinking and concept attainment models as students study words, sentences and paragraphs.

Scientific Inquiry

…from the beginning, the student is brought into the scientific process and helped to collect and analyse data, check out hypotheses and theories, and reflect on the nature of knowledge construction. … has a substantial effect on equity in learning, virtually eliminating gender differences.

Mnemonics (Memory Assists)

…strategies for memorizing and assimilating information…. memorization is sometimes confused with repetitious, rote learning of obscure or arcane terms and trivial information…

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Synectics

Developed fist for use with “creativity groups” in industrial settings, synectics was adapted by William Gordon (1961) for use in elementary and secondary education. Synectics is designed to help people “break set” in problem-solving and writing activities and to gain new perspectives on topics from a wide range of fields.

The social family: Building the learning community

When we work together, we generate a collective energy that we call synergy. The social models of teaching are constructed to take advantage of this phenomenon by building learning communities. Essentially, “classroom management” is a matter of developing cooperative relationships in the classroom.

Partners in Learning

Cooperative learning procedures facilitate learning across all curriculum areas and ages, improving self-esteem, social skill and solidarity, and across academic learning goals ranging from the acquisition of information and skill through the models of inquiry of the academic disciplines.

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Group Investigation

…in a democratic society should teach the democratic process directly. A substantial part of the students’ education should be by cooperative inquiry into important social and academic problems. A substantial part of the students’ education should be by cooperative inquiry into important social and academic problems. group investigation has been used in all subject areas…

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Role Playing

…leads students to understand social behaviour, their role in social interactions, and ways of solving problems more effectively.

Jurisprudential Inquiry

The jurisprudential model is designed .. especially for secondary students in the social students, the model brings the case-study method, reminiscent of legal education, to the process of schooling (Oliver and Shaver, 1966, 1971; Shaver, 1995).

The Personal Family

The personal models of learning begin from the perspective of the selfhood of the individual. the attempt to shape education so that we come to understand ourselves better, take responsibility for our education, and learn to reach beyond our current development to become strong, more sensitive, and more creative in our search for high-quality lives.

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Nondirective teaching

…models in which the teacher plays the role of counselor. Developed from counseling theory, the nondirective teaching model emphasizes a partnership between students and the teacher. The teacher endeavours to help students play major roles in directing their own educations…. the nondirective teacher has to actively build the partnerships required and provide the help needed as the students try to work out their problems.

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The Behavioural Systems Family

A common theoretical base – most commonly called social learning theory, but also known as behavior modification, behavior therapy and cybernetics… The stance taken is that human beings are self-correcting communications systems what modify behavior in response to information about how successfully tasks are navigated. … Behavioral techniques are appropriate for learners of all ages and for an impressive range of educational goals.

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Mastery Learning and Programmed Instruction

The most common application of behavioural systems theory for academic goals takes the form of what is called mastery learning (Bloom, 1971). First, material to be learned is divided into units ranges from the simple to the complex. … piece by piece, the students work their way successively through the units of materials, after each of which they take a test designed to help them find out what they have learned. If they have no mastered any given unit, they can repeat it or an equivalent version until they have mastered the material.

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Direct Instruction

… Direct statements of objectives, sets of activities clearly related to the objectives, careful monitoring of process and feedback about achievement and tactics for achieving more effectively are linked with sets of guidelines for facilitating learning

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Chapter 4: Three Sides of Teaching

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The Style of the Professions: The Styles of Individuals

Acculturation is the induction of new teachers into the society of educators and their occupational subculture. Through acculturation teachers acquire stylistic behaviours that are not unique to them as individuals but are shared as the culture of educators is learned and activated in practise.

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Variance: Dispositional Differences

Warmth: …the informal ways [teachers] express warmth toward their students. … they say “good job” regularly in various ways

Gregariousness/Sociability: … teachers differ in the extent to which they reach out to other people, and reaching out to their students is no exception. Some folks just naturally involve others – asking “how shall we do this” while others simply tell the students what they want.

Academic Learning: A startling study by Schlecty and Vance a few years ago indicated that many entering teachers are in the lowest brackets compared to their college classmates academically and only a few are in the highest brackets. These differences affect style in teaching – someone who has struggled as a learner is likely to see learning as a struggle and conduct the classroom accordingly. As an example they are less likely to provide higher-order and open-ended tasks compared to their more confident colleagues.

Conceptual Level: How teachers process information affects how they conduct the management of information in the classroom. Teachers who develop complex networks of concepts tend to invite their students to do so, asking “high-order” questions, providing inquiry-oriented learning tasks, and asking students to reflect on the concepts that are being learned.

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Chapter 5: Learning to Think Inductively

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…students are natural conceptualizers. Human conceptualize all the time, comparing and contrasting objects, events, emotions – everything. To capitalize on this natural tendency, we arrange the learning environment and give tasks to students to increase their effectiveness in forming and using concepts, and we help them consciously develop their skills for doing so.

…focus – helping the students concentrate on a domain (and area of inquiry) they can master; without constricting them so much that they can’t use their full abilities to generate ideas.

A simple example is to present kindergarten or first-grade students with cards containing several letters of the alphabet and ask them to examine them closely and describe their attributes. The domain is the alphabet: letters and their names.

…conceptual control – helping the students develop conceptual mastering of the domain. IN the case of the alphabet, the goal is to distinguish the letters from one another, and to develop categories by group letters that have many, but not all, attributes in common. The students will learn to see the alphabet in terms of similarities and differences. They will also find those letters in words and, when they have made categories of letters with the same shape (as putting a half-dozen B’s together), will learn the names of those letters as we supply them. The letters will be placed on charts in the classroom along with words that contain them.

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…concerting conceptual understanding to skill. In the case of the alphabet , this is exploring letter/sound relationships and how to use them in reading and spelling, where recognition evolves to conscious application in word identification.

The inductive model causes students to collect information and examine it closely, to organize the information into concepts, and to learn to manipulate those concepts. Uses regularly, this strategy increases students’ abilities to form concepts efficiently and increases the range of perspectives from which they can view information.

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Research

…information-processing models has been focused on how to increase students’ ability to form and use concepts and hypotheses…questions reflect a concern that a concentration on thinking might inhibit the mastery of content.

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… the same model of teaching reached all the students… teacher who “reach” the students with poor histories of learning and help them out of their rut also propel the best students into higher states of growth than they have been accustomed to.

Syntax

…syntax depicts the structure of a model – its major elements of phrases and how they are put together.

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• The data collection and presentation phase
• the phase of examining and enumerating data
• the first phase of classifying
• the further phases of classifying
• the phase of building hypotheses and generating skills

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Thoughts on designing the learning environment

The work of Hilda Taba (1966, 1967) was very important to current classroom use of the inductive model. Taba was largely responsible for popularizing the term teaching strategy and for shaping the inductive model so that it could be conveniently used to design curriculums and lessons.

Social System

The atmosphere of the classroom is cooperative, with a good deal of pupil activities.

Principle of Reaction

When using cognitive tasks within each strategy, the teacher much be sure that the cognitive tasks occur in optimum order, and also at the “right” time. … The important task for the teacher is to sense the students’ readiness for new experience and new cognitive activity with which to assimilate and use those experiences.

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Application

The primary application of the model is to develop thinking capacity. However, in the course of developing thinking capacity, the strategies obviously require students to ingest and process large quantities of information. … Inductive processes thus include the creative processing of information, as well as the convergent use of information to solve problems.

The concept formation model can be used with students of all ages… used regularly, the strategy increases the students’ abilities to form concepts efficiently and also to use different perspectives from which they can view information.

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Tips for teaching inductively

1. Practice, practice, practice… build a learning community around the model – designing a weekly lesson plan won’t accomplish that.
2. Study how the kids think – the process gives us a bit of a window into their minds. The better the handle on their minds, the more we can adjust what we do.
3. Keep up front that we are trying to help the kids learn to learn. A common mistake in teaching is to ask questions without teaching the kids how to answer them – or; even better, how to ask them themselves and then seek the answers. … they need models to follow for how we comprehend and make predictions.
4. The inductive process brings kids into the exploration of a domain as a learning community trying to master that domain. … Remember that the customary ways of teaching reading leave 30 percent of the kids virtually unable to read.
5. Expect for very specific concentration on phonetic elements and newly learned vocabulary, words should be presented in sentence that provide context clues and a kind of “cloze” activity carried on to ensure that meaning is established.
6. Use the model in the curriculum areas – to teach substance. Not a rainy day activity.
7. Make sure that the data set has the attributes present, both of concept formation and concept attainment.

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Summary Chart: Indicutive-Thinking Model

Syntax

• Concept Formation
• Enumeration and Listing
• Group
• Labeling, Categorizing

• Interpretation of Data
• Identifying Critical Relationships
• Exploring Relationships
• Making Inferences

• Application of Principles
• Predicting Consequences, Explaining Unfamiliar Phenomena, Hypothesizing
• Explaining and/or Supporting the Predictions and Hypotheses
• Verifying the Prediction

Social System

• The model has high to moderate structure. It is cooperative, but the teacher is the initiator and controller of activities

Principles of Reaction

• Teacher matches tasks to students’ level of cognitive activity, determines students’ readiness

Support System

• Students need raw data to organize and analyze

Instructional and Nurturant Effects

• The indicutive-thinking model is designed to instruct students in concept formation and, simultaneously, to teach concepts. It nurtures attention to logic, to language and the meaning of words, and to the nature of knowledge.

Chapter 6: Attaining Concepts

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Summary Chart: The Concept Attainment Model

Syntax

• the syntax proceeds from presentation of the exemplars to testing and naming concepts to application.

Social System

• The model has moderate structure. The teacher controls the sequence, but open dialogue occurs in the later phases. Student interaction is encouraged. The model is relatively structured, with students assuming more initiative for inductive process as they gain more experience (other concept attainment models are lower in structure).

Principles of Reaction

1. Give support but emphasize the hypothetical nature of the discussion
2. Help students balance one hypothesis against another
3. Focus attention on specific features of examples
4. Assist students in discussing and evaluating their thinking strategies

Support System

• Support consists of carefully selected and organized materials and data in the form of discrete units to serve as examples. As students become more sophisticated, they can share in making data units, just as in phase two they generate examples.

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Chapter seven: The Picture-Word Inductive Model

• Developing literacy across the Curriculum

Contents: Built on the language experience approach, the picture-word inductive model enables beginning readers to develop sight vocabularies, learn to inquire into the structure of words and sentences, write sentences and paragraphs and thus to be powerful language learners.

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Chapter Eight: Scientific Inquiry and Inquiry training

• The art of making inferences.

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Summary Chart: Biological Science Inquiry Model

Syntax

• Phase One: Pose Area of Investigations to Students
• Phase Two: Students Structure the Problem
• Phase Three: Students Identify the Problem in the Investigation
• Phase Four: Students Speculate on Ways to Clear Up the Difficulty

Social System

• The model has moderate structure and a cooporative, rigourously intellectual climate.

Principles of Reaction

• Teacher nourishes inquiry, turning students toward inquiry process rather than identification efforts

Support System

• The model requires a flexible instructor skilled in the process of inquiry and a supply of problem areas of investigation.

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Summary Chart: Inquiry Training Model

Syntax

• Phase one: confrontation with the problem
  • Explain inquiry procedures
  • Present discrepant event
• Phase two: data gathering – verification
  • Verify the nature of objects and conditions
  • Verify the occurrence of the problem situation
• Phase three: Data gathering – experimentation
  • Isolate relevant variables
  • Hypothesize (and test) casual relationships
• Phase four: organizing, formulating an explanation
  • Formulate rules or explanations
• Phase five: analysis of the inquiry process
  • Analyze inquiry strategy and develop more effective ones

Social system

• The inquiry training model can be highly structured, with the teacher controlling the interaction and prescribing the inquiry procedures. However, the norms of inquiry are those of cooperation intellectual freedom, and equality. Interaction amoung students should be encouraged. The intellectual environment is open to all relevant ideas, and teachers and students should participate as equals where ideas are concerned.

Principles of Reaction

1. Ensure that questions are phrased so they can be answered yes or not and that their substance does not require the teacher to do the inquiry
2. Ask students to rephrase invalid questions
3. Point out unvalidated points – for example, “We have not established that this is liquid.”
4. Use the language of the inquiry process – for instance, indentify student questions as theories and invite testing (experimenting).
5. Try to provide a free intellectual environment by not evaluating student theories.
6. Press students to make clearer statements of theories and provide support for their generalization
7. Encourage interaction among students.

Support System

• the optimal support is a set of confronting materials, a teacher who understands the intellectual processes and strategies of inquiry, and resource materials bearing on the problem.

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Chapter nine: Memorization – Getting the facts straight

Memorization has had something of a bad name, mostly because of deadly drills. Contemporary research and innovative teachers have created methods that not only improve our efficiency in momorization, but also make the process delightful.

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Syntax of Memory Model

Phase One: Attending to the Material

• Use techniques of underlining, listing, reflecting

Phase Two: Developing Connections

• Make material familiar and develop connections using keyword, substitute-word, and link-word system techniques

Phase Three: Expanding sensory images

• Use techniques of ridiculous association and exaggeration. Revise images.

Phase Four: Practicing Recall

• Practice recalling the material until it is completely learned.

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Summary Chart: Memory Model

Syntax

• Phase one; Attending to Material
  • Use techniques of underlining, listing, reflecting
• Phase two : Developing connectons
  • make material familiar and develop connections using key-word, substitute-word, and link-word systems techniques
• Phase Three: expanding sensory images
  • Use techniques of ridiculous association and exaggeration. Revise images.
• Phase Four: Practicing recall
  • Practice recalling the material until it is completely learned

Social System

• The social system is cooperative. Teacher and students become a team working with the new material together. The initiative should increasingly become the students’ as they obtain control over the strategy and use it to memorize ideas, words, and formulas.

Principles of Reaction

• The teacher helps the student identify key items, pair, and images, offering suggestions but working from the students’ frames of reference. The familiar elements must be primarily from the students’ storehouse of material.

Support System

• All of the customary devices of the curriculum areas can be brought into play. Pictures, concrete aids, films, and other audiovisual materials are especially useful for increasing the sensory richness of the associations.

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Chapter Ten: Synectics – The arts of enhancing creative thought

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Summary Chart: Synectics

Syntax of Strategy One: Creating Something New

• Phase one: Description of the Present Condition
  • Teacher has students describe situation or topic as they see it now.
• Phase Two: Direct Analogy
  • Students suggest direct analogies, select one, and explore (describe) it further
• Phase three: Personal Analogy
  • Students “become” the analogy they selected in phase two
• Phase Four: Compressed Conflict
  • Students take their descriptions from phases two and three, suggest several compressed conflicts, and choose one.
• Phrase Five: Direct analogy
  • Students generate and select another direct analogy, based on the compressed conflict
• Phase six: reexamination of the original task
  • Teacher has students move back to the original task or problem and use the last analogy and/or the entire synetics experience.

Social system

• the model is moderately structured. Teacher initiates phases, but students’ responses are quite open. Norms of creativity and “play-of-fancy” are encouraged. Rewards are internal.

Principles of Reaction

• Encourage openness, nonrational, creative expression. Model, if necessary.
• Accept all student responses
• Select analogies that help students stretch their thinking

Support System

• no special support system

Syntax of Strategy Two: Making the Strange Familiar

Phase One: Substantive input

• Teacher provides information on new topic

Phase two: Direct analogy

• Teacher suggests direct analogy and asks students to describe the analogy

Phase three: personal analogy

• Teacher has students “become” the direct analogy

Phase four: comparing analogies

• students identify and explain the points of similarity between the new material and the direct analogy

Phase five: explaining differences

• students explain where the analogy does not fit

Phase six: exploration

• Students reexplore the original topic on its own terms

Phase seven: generating analogy

• Studends provide their own direct analogy and explore the similarities and differences.

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Chapter Eleven: Learning from Presentation – Advance Organizers

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Summary Chart: Advance Organizer

Syntax

• PHase One: Presentation of advance organizer
  • clairfy the aims of the lesson
  • present organizer
  • Identify defining attributes
  • give examples of illustrations where appropriate
  • provide context
  • repeat
  • prompt awareness of learner’s relevant knowledge and experience
• Phase two: presentation of learning task or Material
  • present material
  • make logical order of learning material explicit
  • link material to organizer
• Phase three: strengthening cognitive organisaiton
  • use principles of integrative reconciliation
  • elicit critical approach to subject matter
  • clarify ideas
  • apply ideas actively (such as by testing them)

Social system

• Highly structured
  • However, requires active collaboration between teacher and learner

Principles of Reaction

1. Negotation of meaning
2. Responsively connecting organizer and material

Support system

• Data-rich, well-organized material
  • (Caution: Many textbooks do not feature conceptually organized material).

Chapter summaries:

Chapter Twelve: Partners in Learning – From Dyads to Group Investigation (pg 265)

• Can two students who are paired in learning increase their learning? Can students organized into a democratic learning community learning to apply scientific methods to their learning? You bed they can. Group investigation can be used to redesign schools and increase personal, social, and academic learning among all students. And – it is very satisfying to teach.

Chapter Thirteen: The Study of Values – Role Playing and Public Policy Education

• Values provide the center of our behavior, helping us get direction and understand other directions. Policy issues involve the understanding of values and the costs and benefits of selecting some solutions rather than others. In these models, values are central. Think for a moment about the issues that face our society right now – research on stem, cell, international peace, including our roles in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, the battle against AIDS, poverty, and who controls the decisions about pregnancy and abortion. Not to mention just getting along together.

Chapter Fourteen: Nondirective Teaching – The learner at the centre

• How do we think about ourselves as learners? As people? How can we organize schooling so that the personalities and emotions of students are taken into account? Let us inquire into the person who is the center of the education process.

Chapter Fifteen: Developing Positive Self-Concepts – The inner Person of boys and girls, men and women

• If you feel great about yourself, you are likely to becoming a better learner. But you begin where you are. Enhancing self concept is a likely avenue.