Influence of Selective Teaching Models
Approval Standard T3: Knowledge of teaching influenced by multiple teaching strategies. This work attests to my proficiency in the use of teaching models and their appropriate applications. The apt use of a teaching strategy to a specific subject can improve academic performance by mating technique with substance. By understanding these models and their relevance to my students’ abilities, I can have a positive impact on student learning.
Influence of Selective Teaching Models on My Personal Teaching Outlook
The two teaching families that had the most influence on my developing sense of how to teach during the Survey of Instructional Strategies course, are the information-processing (IPM) and social-model (SM) families. Information processing is meant to enhance the mind’s innate drive to make sense of the world through acquiring and organizing data, sensing problems and generating solutions, and developing ways to communicate the information. Social models emphasize working together in groups and developing cooperative relationships. Used together, the model families foster critical thinking in a cooperative, collaborative environment. The scope of technical and communal problems in modern society requires a concerted, applied effort by cooperative groups with mutual goals. The technical issues require critical thinking through information processing and multiple-intelligences to define and solve problems. The synergistic dynamic of a team approach to address the myriad issues inherent in this process are also an intrinsic lesson in the workings of democratic society.
Information processing models include inductive thinking, concept attainment, picture-word inductive model, scientific inquiry, inquiry training, mnemonics, synectics, and advanced organizers. Social models include partners in learning, group investigation, role-playing, and jurisprudential inquiry. The following describes representative models of these two families that lend themselves to critical thinking, problem-solving, and group cooperation, and seem suited to investigate a wide variety of subjects (Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2009).
Concept attainment is an indirect instructional strategy that uses structured inquiry, where students define the attributes of a group or category presented by the teacher. Students compare and contrast exemplars that contain the attributes of the concept, with other examples, building upon their understanding of the concept. Because all examples can be challenged throughout the activity, the method is well suited to classroom use and group activity. The students learn a basic skill of thinking, conceptualization, which can be applied to other subjects or lessons, leading to greater academic achievement.
Scientific inquiry allows students to become directly involved in learning, as scientists conducting investigations in a laboratory, and not merely passive receivers of information. The students become immersed in scientific inquiry, with the hypothesis, method, outcome, and conclusions of the inquiry in their hands, gaining an understanding of the process through their own efforts. This model is effective not only in the science curriculum, but is also helpful for developing problem solving skills and academic achievement in other areas.
The IPM family of learning asks students to investigate and find solutions on their own. The instructional goals are threefold: to develop investigative and problem-solving skills, to experience responsible roles, and to gain confidence in the ability to think, process, and reflect on the information. The learning environment is characterized by openness, active student involvement, and an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, fostering academic achievement (Joyce et al., 2009).
In the social family of models, interaction with others is a key element. The quality of student interaction is just as important as learning the academic concept itself – the process and product are equivalent aspects of group activities. Teachers using cooperative learning and other social family models can also demonstrate how democracy functions through consensus building and democratic decision-making.
Cooperative learning is based upon the idea that people are naturally cooperative, a trait that should be fostered, not repressed. John Dewey promoted cooperative investigation for students to experience the give-and-take of the democratic process and cooperative behavior where they learn and accomplish more when working together (Joyce et al., 2009). The students come to understand how social interaction can enhance learning, acquiring a social skill along with an academic concept. Learning of content and social skills can also accompany a decrease in disruptive or off-task behavior.
The intersection of these two teaching model families, and the ultimate goal of my teaching philosophy, would be to foster an environment of critical thinking in a group setting. These learning models, primarily concept attainment, inquiry-based learning, and cooperative learning, would seem to best lend themselves to engage students and foster achievement through critical thinking.
Paul (1993) states that critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action” that takes place within some domain of knowledge or human concern. Grant (1995) goes on to define critical thinking as centered on the theme of constructive intellectual activity with a purposeful, self-directed reasoning, and proposes that we can best help students develop critical-thinking skills by teaching these skills across the curriculum, within the various subject areas.
Kuhn (2005) maintains that inquiry and argument should be at the center of a “thinking curriculum,” a curriculum that makes sense to students as well as teachers, and develops the skills and values needed for lifelong learning. Activities centered on inquiry and argument – such as difficult issues like capital punishment – allow students to appreciate their power and utility as they become engaged in the issue. To teach critical thinking across the curriculum requires a practical model to simultaneously teach subject matter and critical-thinking skills in a reliable and effective way that will engage students in learning content and process.
Paul, Willsen, & Binker (1993) outline the criteria for such a critical thinking model. First, teachers must be able to identify and teach knowledge that will help students deal with the subject area itself, and can be related to other subject areas and that can be applied to their life experiences beyond the classroom. Second, teachers must be able to teach thinking skills that apply in the subject area and, either directly or through translation, in other subject areas and in their life experiences. Third, teachers must be able to make students aware of the critical-thinking skills they use, and how to assess and improve these skills.
The IPM and SM models can provide the basis for an engaging, class-centered model using critical thinking and cooperation to leverage student achievement and foster a positive learning environment. But there is one aspect of the critical point in a student’s understanding that Bruner (1996) describes, that of creating a compelling narrative as a framework or pattern, that I would endeavor to use in the classroom.
Bruner (1996) discusses the need for science to construct “speculative models,” or narrative forms, using any form at hand, such as intuition, stories, and metaphors, as structures for organizing our knowledge. Higher levels of abstraction are limited by a practical grasp of the problem or context, while using narrative as a mode of thinking can foster or scaffold to a deeper level of understanding. What teachers sometime demonstrate is the finished science, but it’s important to show the messy, intuitive process that leads to the end result.
Bruner relates the story of the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, in developing his theory of complementarity (that you cannot specify both the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously) by relating it to Bohr’s son’s theft of a trinket. His son confessed to his father in an act of contrition, and Bohr realized that he could not think of his son at the same moment, both in the light of love and the light of justice. This led him to think that certain states of mind were like the silhouette picture of a vase, which could also be seen as two faces, but not at the same time. Some days later this path of thinking, of narrative intuitive insight, led him to his theory.
The mathematics was easily resolved, but it was creating the right narrative – constructing the right model from a creative spark – that opened the door. This form of creative narration, using metaphors, myths, and fables, is meant to stimulate the scientific process and should be promoted along with the finished science.
Bibliography
Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Grant, G. E. (1988). Teaching critical thinking. New York, NY: Praeger.
Joyce, B., M. Weil, and E. Calhoun. (2009). Models of Teaching. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Kuhn, D. (2005). Education for thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paul, R., J. Willsen, A. Binker. (1993). Critical thinking: how to prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Santa Rosa, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking.
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