Instruction, Teaching, and Learning Across the Content Areas

Round Robin Review Activity

Description: Groups of four students work on a math problem, and when they arrive at a solution, the teacher checks it. If correct, they copy it to a big sheet of paper and put it on the wall.
Explainer Rotation: Two members stay as explainers, while the others rotate to new problems every three minutes, copying the problem and listening to the solution.
Switching Places: After rotators go through all problems, they switch places so the remaining members circle the room, and the rotators explain their problem.
Teacher's Role: The teacher listens to reflections to gauge the students' ability to articulate their ideas.
Reflection: Students become more confident about the problems they presented.
Benefits cited by students:
- Sorting out what they know and don’t
- Getting the problem right on the test.
- Generating memory aids for the problem.

Chapter Overview: Instruction, Teaching, and Learning Across the Content Areas

Focus: Classroom instruction, its history, theories of children’s learning, principles of authentic instruction, and instructional approaches.
Goals: Encouraging effort and persistence, promoting intellectual rigor and democratic dispositions, and helping students see themselves as competent learners.

Historical Perspectives on Teaching

Teaching in the Early 1800s:

Setting: A city school with up to 450 students of various ages in one room.
Teacher's Role: Sitting on a raised platform, directing monitors who instruct platoons of students.
Methods: Students march, listen, and recite under the teacher’s watch.
Motivation: Rewards and punishment, including corporal punishment.
Curriculum: Basic skills: arithmetic, reading, spelling, and penmanship.
Teacher Qualities: Pure tastes, good manners, and exemplary morals.

Teaching in the Early 1900s:

Reforms: “Scientific” and efficient school reforms.
Organization: Pupils divided by age into grades and ability into classes, with 40-50 students per class.
Teacher Training: Special training or normal school, with knowledge of theory and pedagogical skills like drill and recitation.
Curriculum: Uniform, dictated by the principal, with daily lesson plans and time schedules.
Methods: Drill and repetition to build habits of mind; rewards for correct answers, praise, and preferred seating.
Assessment: Tests to measure progress.
Skills emphasized: Analyzing and decoding texts, communication, and persuasion.
Classroom Management: Lining students up and marching them to the blackboard.
Focus: Developing character more than intellect, preparing students for industrial urban life.

Familiar Aspects in Contemporary Classrooms:

Similarities: Individual teachers instructing large groups, students mostly working alone, knowledge transmitted in orderly steps, memorization and recitation, and the persistence of the mind-as-a-muscle metaphor.
Assessment: End-of-unit tests, mastery rewarded, mistakes corrected, and unlearned material retaught.
Control: Reward and punishment, similar to past methods.
Inequity: Low-income students often receive instruction focused on basic skills and work habits rather than high intellectual achievement; segregation between wealthy and poor students.

Alternative Learning Experiences:

Characteristics: Challenging experiences connected to interests and authentic adult activities.
Adult Beliefs: Belief that the student can and wants to learn through observing and participating with others.
Support: Help provided when needed.
Learning Style: Social learning through participation in communities of practice.

Theories of Learning and Their Implications for Teaching

Behavioral Theories of Learning:

*Focus: How stimuli elicit responses and how, if rewarded, those responses become habitual or learned.

Stimulus-Response Theory: Learners are passive; correct responses are rewarded to encourage repetition.
Teacher's Role: Transmitting knowledge in small chunks, providing constant reinforcement, monitoring learning, and reteaching.
Limitations: Explains only a narrow range of learning, but remains central to conventional teaching.

Sociocultural and Constructivist Perspectives as Alternatives:

Goal: To help all students develop intelligence, understanding, and problem-solving capacities for a diverse and democratic society.

Learning as Developmental, Social, and Cultural:

Key Idea: Learning is an active experience where people interact with others to make sense of the world and their experiences.
Role of Teachers: Providing appropriate learning opportunities and productive learning environments.
Key figures: John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky saw engagement within a social environment as the key to learning.

John Dewey's Perspective:

Belief: Education proceeds by the individual's participation in the social consciousness of the race.
Process: Learning shapes individual powers, saturates consciousness, forms habits, trains ideas, and arouses feelings and emotions.
Social Context: Learning tied to the social situation in which children find themselves.
Interrelation psychological and social sides are organically related and education cannot be regarded as a superimposition of one upon the other.

Jean Piaget's Perspective:

Child as Independent Learner: Equipped to draw in and make sense of the environment, including relationships with others.
Learning Style: Children investigate and learn on their own, like “little scientists.”
Cognitive Development: Children think in fundamentally different ways from adults, and their thinking develops as they make sense of experiences.

Lev Vygotsky's Perspective:

Interdependence: Essential and interdependent relationship between child and adult.
Social Participation: Learning and problem-solving occur between a learner and others.
Cognition: Distributed throughout a person’s social world.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): represents the difference between what a learner can do independently and with targeted assistance.
Teacher's Role: Organizing activities and social groupings to keep students stretching productively within their ZPD.

Contemporary Sociocultural Theories:

Emphasis: Social and cultural contexts determine learning, and mental processes are both social and cultural.
Key figure: Jerome Bruner believed people create and transform meanings (learn) as members of particular cultural groups.
Learning: remembering, talking, imagining: all of them are made possible by participating in a culture.
Integration: The impossibility of separating how thinking takes place from what knowledge is available in the context where learning happens.

Intelligence

Intelligence as Acquired and Multidimensional:

Development: People develop intelligence through interaction with others and use of cultural tools and symbols.
Rejection of Single Intelligence: Emphasis on multiple mental capacities and intelligences.
Robert Sternberg: proposes three types of intelligence that vary in strength among people: analytical, creative, and practical.
Howard Gardner: identifies multiple intelligences that include linguistic, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, and interpersonal intelligences.
Cultural emphasis on intelligence: Individuals vary, as do the kinds of intelligence emphasized and valued by different cultural communities.
Ability vs. Competence: People are generally more concerned about whether children develop those particular abilities deemed most important by the dominant culture.
Competence and intelligence: explain little about what those people can and do learn
Context dependence: When people performed poorly in one of our tasks … it was the task and our understanding of its relationship to locally organized activities, not the people’s minds that were deficient.
Relevance for Teachers: whose students may or may not demonstrate the kinds of ability and intelligence that are typically recognized and valued by schools.

Knowledge

Construction of Knowledge:

Constructivist Perspective: Knowledge is not fixed, is not the same for everyone, and varies in different contexts and over time.
Meaning Making: Reasoning and meaning-making are at the heart of constructivism.
Flexibility Needed flexibility, creativity, and learning in context.
- facts—names, events, dates, formulas, algorithms, and so on—are important, but they have meaning (and often are recalled) only when connected to or embedded in ideas, narratives, or experiences that already mean something to students.

Situated student: Learning through authentic task: A rough analogy to learning a second language might be helpful. Learning vocabulary and studying grammar is a less authentic experience for learning a second or third language than immersing yourself in it.

Pursuit of authenticity: push student toward higher level thinking and social competence. Solutions require complexity and multiple perspective. Solutions must be compatible to multiple ideas and knowledge.

Student Active Construction: make sense of new knowledge in relation to the formal and informal knowledge they already possess.

Prior knowledge and experience are valuable curriculum resources, as first-year teacher Ramón Martínez discovered when he began a geography unit with his first graders.

Inclusive and Democratic Principles in Curriculum:

Sociocultural and Constructivist Theories: Invite teachers to place inclusive and democratic principles at the center of their curricula.
Challenge for Teachers: Those not accustomed to more expansive conceptions of meaningful knowledge or departing from textbooks.
Connecting Experiences: Students learn best when they can relate new experiences to what they already know.
Leveraging KnowledgeRamón leveraged students’ individualized and collective knowledge of the surrounding community to teach academic facts, skills, and concepts related to maps, mapmaking, and cardinal directions.

Contemporary Theories in the Classroom

Shift in Relationships: Most teachers seek community-like relationships in classrooms rather than factory-like relationships.
Broader View of Culture: Teachers have a powerful role in providing opportunities for students to learn about, participate in, and benefit from society’s diverse cultures.

Six Principles That Guide Socially Just Classroom Learning Communities

Seeing diversity as an asset and every child as a capable learner.
Setting high expectations and supporting all students to meet them.
Designing and delivering complex instruction.
Assessing learning in multiple ways.
Building caring and interdependent relationships.
Encouraging socially just talk and action.

Seeing Diversity as an Asset and Every Child as a Capable Learner

Learning as a Social Endeavor: Influenced by individual sense or meaning making.
Tailoring Instruction: Benefits individuals and the entire classroom.
Requirements: Professional knowledge, strong personal relationships, appreciation for diversity, and a commitment to social justice.
Traditional Treatments of Difference can work against or foster students’ confidence, hard work, persistence, and learning.

Diversity among students

prior experiences
attitudes and expressions
charm and sociability
shyness and silliness
mastery of knowledge
misunderstanding all vary among the students in any classroom.

students differ in the languages, cultures, and community resources they bring to school. These differences, no less delightful, influence how students approach classroom learning, and yet they bear no relation to whether students are capable learners.

Treating Differences as Problematic: Traditional teaching makes students acutely aware of how their personal characteristics create problems or benefits.
Traditional Assumptions: Assumes that all students should learn the same things in the same way at the same time.

Comparing Students in Traditional Classrooms

Public Learning: Learning and succeeding (or not) can become very public.
classroom status differences: trigger easy social comparisons between students who are perceived as “smart” and those who are not.
*From the start Teachers and students: conclude that some students simply can’t or won’t learn well and to blame students’ differences (intelligence, race, effort, prior schooling opportunities, etc.), rather than faulty instruction or less-than- ideal classroom relationships and routines.
Public Comparison:
Student work stuck on the wall.
Teachers sometimes read scores aloud or permit student helpers to return graded papers to their classmates.
Gradebooks are often open for students to peruse classmates’ grades.
Results of aptitude, achievement, and other standardized tests become public when students or their parents offer their scores voluntarily.
A teacher’s public display of annoyance is noted by all, and signals sent by peers are always salient.
Posted grades and other symbols of students’ progress—letters, numbers, stars, smiley faces—likewise make public comparisons of students.

Effects of Public Comparisons

Learning Effects: Communicate that school is a place where imminent failure is possible for any student.
- conditions do not help students become fully engaged in their own learning or care about others’ success.
Public Comparisons based on Race and Ethnicity: Students, public comparisons are often onerous and rarely beneficial. These comparisons become particularly dangerous when they target students’ race or ethnicity, explicitly or in more subtle ways that reflect deep-seated beliefs and biases and may be enacted by well-meaning classmates and teachers.

Ways That teachers Show Bias towards Others

Microaggressions Daniel Solórzano refers to: Such microaggressions as racially laden attitudes, comments, and actions of peers and teachers who would likely deny that they were prejudiced or acting hurtfully.
Schools Do Not Have To Be Overtly Prejudiced: To perpetuate social stereotypes.
Awareness of Stereotypes: This combined awareness may impinge on the student’s concentration and confidence, despite other evidence suggesting that she is well suited for success.
Stereotypes Affect thinking can affect one’s own thinking and learning too.

Sociocultural Treatments of Difference

Sociocultural Theory: presumes that there is no central “normal” by which others are compared and judged.
Treating Differences as Assets: Teachers make each student’s particular competencies visible and available to others as resources.
Social Interactions: allow students to support or scaffold one another’s learning, positive impact on confidence, effort, learning.

Setting High Expectations and Supporting all Students to Meet Them

Expectation in Student Learning

*Documented: the effect teachers expectations have on students
*Cues: students provide cues regarding the expectations that are put upon them.
*High Vs. Low expectations setting is the result.

Communicate expectations in many subtle ways.
Teachers: specifically in math and science, tend to enact the larger society’s gender stereotypes in subtle ways that, when pointed out, often astonish the teachers themselves. For example, teachers ask boys more questions and allow them to dominate laboratory experiments. When students encounter difficulties, teachers encourage boys to press on and try harder but are more likely to console and comfort girls.

Setting High Expectations:

challenging “normal” procedures that reflect institutionalized low expectations
Emergent Bilinguals
Discussions that Focused on Logic Reason help student make sense of logic and the difficulties provide challenges.

Differentiated Instruction and Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

High expectations by themselves do not generate high academic outcomes, instead teachers must also hold themselves accountable for supporting students to meet those expectations.
Rigorous Learning goal for all students: teachers must provide different instructional approaches with differentiated instruction.
Universal design in education: is geared toward helping teachers design instruction that considers students’ differences from the outset, rather than modifying instruction or making accommodations for students as afterthoughts or interventions.
Assumption learners can and will achieve at high levels if they are supported appropriately.

Key: as a contract between student and teacher that requires of both parties whatever it takes to realize success.

Designing and Delivering Complex Instruction

Helping them develop confidence in their academic abilities.
address a variety of student abilities: teaching rich and complex instruction.

Complex Instruction assignments vs instructions

*Reading and answering
*Low level reading comprehension and memorization of skills. Easy for the teacher to know who will do well.

MULTI-ability are instructional task elements that requite different skillset and that benefits all the students
*Short and simple multi abilities
*Includes hand on activity, book scholarship, research
*The level of complexity allows more student to participate and find strengths

Cohen's Proposal: Address different skill in student weakening status hierarchies

The goal is to Not assign student as good at one thing but help them understand one another contributes and get individual competence within the community.
*The assignment must be credible and genuine. Positive participation and build community.

Providing Opportunities for Active, Multidimensional, and Social Learning

*Teachers need to organize their instruction to control or minimize activity and social interaction

*Research: how active, multidimensional, and social instruction, like the instruction Judy Smith described in the preceding vignette, supports all learners to be successful.

Principles for Promoting Academic Excellence

engaging teachers and students together in the production of knowledge
developing language and literacy across the curriculum
making meaning by connecting school content to students’ lives
teaching complex thinking, and (5) teaching through conversation.
Through theses five points classroom becomes active society the teacher must work to ensure there isnt a divide.

Students Learning Together

*Active and social lessons: following the ideas of Dewey, Vygotsky, and others, many teachers now think of their classrooms as “learning communities.”
*Share authority Appropriately to allow student to grow towards democratic society instead of keeping authority rigid

Traditional Lessons vs Second lessons

the second teacher used the same instructional strategies as the first teacher: lecture and demonstration, question and answer, drill and practice.

joint productive activity

Active participation in social and learning can be found where student are members of that culture that see them selves as math special. Multidimensional task Assessment:embedded within the tasks themselves. Key: as well as Roland TharpMultidimensional task
*It allows all students to succeed by situating new knowledge in relation to what they already know

*It invite student with help from adults
Multitasking: requires teachers to plan things and to be ready on your feet
Multi dimensional task have the ability to chart basic texts, however they can can be enhanced through engagement.
Uni-dimensional task will always only be able to apply a certain area in knowledge. That means less learning can occur for task like memoraztion.

Scaffolded Participation:

Teacher can scaffold student by helping them aquire the skill they need to be successful.
The teacher must be active and depend on lesson plans and knowledge to help student in a social environment.
*The thought is to help the student get the social part internalized.