Disputes About Best Practice

By Author: Arsenalo
Total Articles: 116
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Eight years into my secondary school teaching career, I began my doctoral studies, again under the mentorship of Hillocks. I realized that I needed to resolve the tension I felt in balancing attention to what people think individually as they work and how that thinking proceeds in relation to the social context in which it takes place. I was spurred in this effort by what struck me as a paradox in Hillocks's claims about effective teaching (Research). In his comprehensive review of writing research conducted between 1963 and 1983, he used statistical comparisons of research Tag Heuer Replica and concluded that the approach he had taught me and many others had greater effects on students' writing than any other method. Based on this finding, he made a "best practice" claim on behalf of the structured-process or environmental approach to teaching I have described.

And yet many teachers in the field, voting with their wallets, were making Atwell's individualized approach the clear favorite and, by my informal count, the most widely referenced pedagogy in English ...
... Journal articles. If one approach worked best and another was more widely practiced (or at least read about), something had to give. Interrogating this seeming paradox struck me as critically important as I tried to make sense of my field during my doctoral studies and subsequent career.

My reading of Lev S. Vygotsky and his modern interpreters helped me to understand this conundrum. Hillocks's attention to the environment focused on students' work in social activities designed and put into motion by teachers. What was missing from his formulation, however, was a consideration of the degree to which any teacher might embrace this pedagogy or have the capacity to design and implement activities in the labor-intensive manner described by Hillocks and his students (e.g., Hillocks, Narrative, Teaching; Hillocks, McCabe, and McCampbell; Lee; McCann et al.; Smagorinsky, Teaching English by Design). Further, his approach did not initially take into account the broader context of teaching that might or might not support the sort of process-oriented, and thus time-consuming, instruction he advocated. Ironically, then, while the social environment of students' learning was central to his approach, the social context of teachers' lives and work was given less attention. Although Hillocks later analyzed the testing environment that shapes writing instruction (Testing), his earlier work could not account for the fact that what emerged as a "best practice" in his teaching and research was not widely practiced by the majority of teachers, including those with choice in the matter.

Indeed, it's likely that what Hillocks identified as the "best practice" in teaching writing was, at best, the third most widely used approach to teaching writing. The default means of teaching writing was what he termed "presentational" teaching: a teacher positioned at the front of the room and taking an authoritative role in dispensing knowledge. Such teachers typically use model essays, often consisting of five paragraphs, to reveal to students the end-product of their efforts, focusing on this final form and attending less to the processes involved in producing it. This product-oriented approach was (and remains) well-established in textbooks, was familiar to teachers through their experiences as students, was entrenched in many high-stakes writing assessments, and was otherwise well-woven into the culture of secondary school English instruction (see Johnson et al. for a review of these issues).

As a teacher both in high schools and ultimately in university teacher education programs, and as one with a great interest in this seemingly illogical situation, I faced a conundrum: If a review of 20 years of experimental research demonstrated Hillocks's (Research) environmental approach to be the most Tag Heuer Replica Watches effective way of teaching writing, followed by the individualistic, general process approach advocated by Atwell and others, followed with a considerable lag by a presentational approach that relied on product models, why was their actual usage in classrooms likely practiced in the reverse order?

Within this broader contention, my experiences as a teacher from 1976—90 had led me to accept Hillocks's approach as what worked best for me, even in schools in which the other major approaches were available and widely practiced around me. I thus began to search for explanations that were not tied to a notion that one thing may work best on all occasions and for all purposes for all the many personalities, goals, histories, and other factors that come together in particular classrooms.