Structured Process And Individualized Teaching Approaches

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 59
Comment this article

After graduating from Kenyon College with a degree in English literature in 1974, I found myself unsure about what to do with myself. (Back then, actually having a career plan while still in college was considered to be a bit crass.) To help pay the bills, I spent a few years as a substitute teacher and hall monitor in and around Trenton, New Jersey, and these experiences somehow convinced me that I wanted to become a teacher.

Toward that end I got accepted into the Master of Arts in Teaching program at the University of Chicago, which I began in 1976. During the year I spent at Chicago, I taught in the Pilot Enrichment/Upward Bound program in Hyde Park and did my student teaching at Martin Luther King High School on Chicago's South Side, and then got my first full-time teaching job in 1977 in Westmont, Illinois. Between 1977 and 1990,1 taught in Westmont, Barrington, and Oak Park-River Forest High Schools, all in Chicago suburbs, giving me quite a range of settings for my teaching—especially if Omega Replica Watches you throw in 1983—84 ...
... when I was a full-time doctoral student and substitute taught in about 25 different Chicago public schools to help pay the rent.

At the University of Chicago I learned what Arthur Applebee has called a structured process approach to teaching ("Problems"; see, e.g., Smagorinsky, Johannessen, Kahn, and McCann, in press). My mentor in learning this method of instruction was George Hillocks Jr. In this method the teacher does a lot of work outside class to (1) identify the themes that guide students' inquiries and (2) design and sequence activities that help structure their learning. In class, however, the students do most of the work as they go through the goal-directed, task-oriented activities, often in small groups.

The classroom is highly social and interactive and allows students to explore and play with ideas and language as they consider problems built into the activities and related to unit themes (see, e.g., Ragsdale and Smagorinsky). The themes typically involve students in inquiry into questions that, for one reason or another, engage them with compelling problems. Students, for instance, might define a complex concept (e.g., success, courageous action, progress) and think about the actions of both real and literary characters relative to the criteria of the Omega Replica definition. They typically think about how they would engage with life challenges in light of their reflection on the issues under consideration.