Teacher Should Creating An Environment To Help Promote And Structure Students' Learning

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The teacher is thus concerned with creating an environment that helps to promote and structure students' learning toward clear goals related to unit concepts. (Hillocks's original name for this approach was "environmental" teaching [Research], a name that never quite caught on.) Student activity within this structure typically involves discussion of either texts or things, such as news stories on a particular topic or a collection of sea-shells.

Through their interactions they inductively develop processes for how to treat similar types of problems of increasing complexity. Students might, for example, take on the question of what defines "success" in life. To do so, they Cartier Pasha Replica would initially learn to define concepts by considering a familiar question, such as what qualities define a good breakfast cereal or specific kind of musical performance. With procedures established for how to define a contested concept, they could consider a set of problematic examples of people's life accomplishments to generate criteria for what constitutes ...
... "success" in life. From there they could read a sequence of literary works, perhaps leading up to The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, or other work that treats the quality of one's life trajectory. Through their reading and discussion, students could use their definitions to refine their understanding of success, revise their definitions, and consider how they could live their lives to meet the understanding of success that they have developed.

Hillocks's approach employs a form of instructional scaffolding that is task-based and discussion-driven. It is designed to enable students to work toward independent performance on new tasks that employ the strategies and procedures learned through peer interaction on prior, less-complex tasks. My orientation to teaching, then, stressed both social factors and individual students' ultimate appropriation of what they had learned through social interaction. To paraphrase my friend Michael W. Smith's personal observation regarding this approach: People don't learn to write just by writing; rather, they learn to write by talking throughout the process of writing so that their thinking about what they write is continually critiqued and reinforced as it develops.

This view of teaching was at odds with the two other major approaches to teaching that were practiced at the time and that remain in currency. The method that was most popular among academics valorized the individual, as outlined in such best-selling books as Nancie Atwell's In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents and Susan J. Tchudi and Steven N. Tchudi's The English/ Language Arts Handbook: Classroom Strategies for Teachers. Atwell's remarks are revealing in terms of this philosophy: "I mostly teach individuals, moving within the group to stop and confer with one writer or reader at a time. Because kids are writing on topics they've chosen and reading books they've selected, my teaching and their learning are about as individualized as they can get". In the workshop, "Each day writers will Omega Replica Watches have a sustained chunk of time to go their own ways, writing and conferring; each day we'll come back together again at the workshop's end". The classroom, then, served as a gathering place for individuals to work on their projects and then report to the group on their efforts. This approach to teaching, its proponents argue, helps to unleash each child's natural developmental pace and trajectory free of teacher agendas and interference, a belief that I see rooted in the Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.