Learning To Teach
Richards I. Arends
Brief Contents:
Part 1
Teaching and Learning in Today’s Classrooms:
Chapter 1 The Scientific Basis for the Art of Teaching
Chapter 2 Student Learning in Diverse Classrooms
Part 2
The Leadership Aspects of Teaching
Chapter 3 Teacher Planning
Chapter 4 Learning Communities and Student Motivation
Chapter 5 Classroom Management
Chapter 5 Classroom Management
Chapter 6 Assessment and Evaluation
Part 3
Overview of Teacher-Centered Transmission Models of Teaching
Chapter 7 Presenting and Explaining
Chapter 8 Direct Instruction
Chapter 9 Concept and Inquiry-Based Teaching
Part 4
Overview of Student-Centered Constructivist Models of Teaching
Chapter 10 Cooperative Learning
Chapter 11 Problem-Based Learning
Chapter 12 Classroom Discussion
Chapter 13 Connecting the Models and Differentiating Instruction
Part 5
The Organizational Aspects of Teaching
Chapter 14 School Leadership and Collaboration
Resource Handbook
Part 1
Teaching and Learning in Today’s Classrooms:
Chapter 1: The Scientific Basis for the Art of Teaching
Teaching offers a bright and rewarding career for those who can meet the intellectual and social challenges of the job. Despite the spate of reports over the years critical of schools and teachers, most citizens continue to support schools and express their faith in education. The task of teaching the young is simply too important and complex to be handled entirely by parents or through the informal structures of earlier eras. Modern society needs schools staffed with expert teachers to provide instruction and to care for children while parents work.
In our society, teachers are given professional status. As professionals, they are expected to use best practices to help students learn essential skills and attitudes. It is no longer sufficient for teachers to be warm and loving toward children, nor is it sufficient for them to employ teaching practices based solely on intuition, personal preference, or conventional wisdom. Contemporary teachers are held accountable for using teaching practices that have been shown to be effective, just as members of other professions, such as medicine, law, and architecture, are held to acceptable standards of practice.
As an instrumental art, teaching is something that departs from recipes, formulas, or algorithms. It requires improvisation, spontaneity, the handling of hosts of considerations of form, style, pace, rhythm, and appropriateness in ways so complex that even computers must, in principle, fall behind, just as they cannot achieve what a mother does with her five-year-old or what a lover says at any given moment to his or her beloved.
Carol Ann Tomlinson and Amy Germundson (2007) have also written about the nonscientific aspect of teaching and compared teaching to creating jazz. They write: Teaching well . . . is like creating jazz. Jazz blends musical sounds from one tradition with theories from another. . . . It incorporates polyrhythm. It uses call-and-response, in which one person comments on the expression of another. And, it invites improvisation.
Notice some of the words used by Gage and by Tomlinson and Germundson to describe teaching—form, spontaneity, pace, polyrhythm, call-and-response, improvisation. These words describe aspects of teaching that research cannot measure very well but that are nonetheless important characteristics of best practice and are contained in the wisdom of experienced teachers. This book strives to show the complexity of teaching— the dilemmas faced by teachers and the artistic choices that effective teachers make as they perform their daily work. It also presents an integrated view of teaching as a science and as an art, and emphasizes that what we know about teaching does not translate into easy prescriptions or simple recipes.
“The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes
and leads you onto the next plateau.”
Dan Rather
Historical Perspective on Teaching:
Conceptions of teaching reflect the values and social philosophy of the larger society, and as these elements change, so, too, does society’s view of its teachers. Understanding the role of the teacher in today’s society requires a brief historical review of some of the important changes that have taken place in teaching and schooling over the past three centuries.
Role Expectations in Earlier Times:
The role of teacher, as we understand it today, did not exist in the colonial period of our national history. Initially, literate individuals, often young men studying for the ministry, were hired on a part-time basis to tutor or teach the children of the wealthier families in a community. Even when schools started to emerge in the eighteenth century, the teachers selected by local communities did not have any special training, and they were mainly middle-class men who chose to teach while they prepared for a more lucrative line of work.
Common, or public, schools came into existence in the United States between 1825
and 1850. During this era and for most of the nineteenth century, the purpose of schools were few and a teacher’s role was rather simple, compared to today. Basic literacy and numeracy skills were the primary goals of nineteenth-century education, with the curriculum dominated by what later came to be called the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most young people were not required (or expected) to attend school, and those who did so remained for relatively brief periods of time. Other institutions in society—family, church, and work organizations—held the major responsibility for child rearing and helping youth make the transition from family to work.
Teachers were recruited mainly from their local communities. Professional training of teachers was not deemed important, nor was teaching necessarily considered a career. Teachers by this time were likely to be young women who had obtained a measure of literacy themselves and were willing to “keep” school until something else came along. Standards governing teaching practice were almost nonexistent, although rules and regulations governing teachers’ personal lives and moral conduct could, in some communities, be quite strict. Take, for example, the set of promises, illustrated in Figure 1.1, that women teachers were required to sign in one community in North Carolina. This list may be more stringent than many others in use at the time, but it gives a clear indication of nineteenth-century
concern for teachers’ moral character and conduct and apparent lack of concern for teachers’ pedagogical abilities.
Twentieth-Century Role Expectations:
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the purposes of education were expanding rapidly, and teachers’ roles took on added dimensions. Comprehensive high schools as we know them today were created, most states passed compulsory attendance laws that required all students to be in school until age 16, and the goals of education moved beyond the narrow purposes of basic literacy. Vast economic changes during these years outmoded the apprentice system that had existed in the workplace, and much of the responsibility for helping youth to make the transition from family to work fell to the schools. Also, the arrival of immigrants from other countries, plus new migration patterns from rural areas into the cities, created large, diverse student populations with more extensive needs than simple literacy instruction. Look, for example, at the seven goals for high school education issued by a committee appointed by the National Education Association in 1918, and notice how much these goals exceed the focus on the three Rs of earlier eras:
1. Health
2. Command of fundamental processes
3. Worthy home membership
4. Vocational preparation
5. Citizenship
6. Worthy use of leisure time
7. Ethical character*
Such broad and diverse goals made twentieth-century schools much more comprehensive institutions as well as places for addressing some of the societal problems and reforms that characterized the twentieth century. Schools increasingly became instruments of opportunity, first for immigrants from Europe and later for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other minority groups who had been denied access to education in earlier times. Expanding their functions beyond academic learning, schools began providing such services as health care, transportation, extended daycare, and breakfasts and lunches. Schools also took on various counseling and mental health functions—duties that earlier belonged to the family or the church—to help ensure the psychological and emotional well-being of youth.
Obviously, expanded purposes for schooling had an impact on the role expectations for teachers. Most states and localities began setting standards for teachers that later became requirements for certification. Special schools were created to train teachers in the subject matters they were expected to teach and to ensure that they knew something about pedagogy. By the early twentieth century, teachers were expected to have two years of college preparation; by the middle of the century, most held bachelor’s degrees. Teaching gradually came to be viewed as a career, and professional organization for teachers, such as the National Educational Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), took on growing importance, both for defining the profession and for influencing educational policy. Teaching practices of the time, however, were rarely supported by research, and teachers, although expected to teach well, were judged by vague global criteria, such as “knows the subject matter,” “acts in a professional manner,” “has a good rapport,” and “dresses appropriately.” However, progress was made during this period, particularly in curriculum development for all the major subject areas, such as reading, mathematics, social studies, and science. Also, major work was accomplished in helping to understand human development and potential as well as how students learn.
Teaching Challenges for the Twenty-First Century:
No crystal ball can let us look fully into the future. Certain trends, however, are likely to continue, and some aspects of education and teaching will remain the same, while others may change rather dramatically (see Figure 1.2). On one hand, the tremendous changes occurring in the way information is stored and accessed with computers and digital technologies holds the potential to change many aspects of education. The Internet has already demonstrated its potential of connecting students to a vast array of resources not previously available as well as to other people around the world. Many believe that the Internet will become, if it hasn’t already, the primary medium for information and will
substantially redefine other forms of print and visual publications. Several commentators, such as Friedman (2006), Gore (2007), and Tapscott (2008), predict that the Internet will replace television as the primary means for political and social dialogue and will become the “intellectual commons” for globalwide collaborative communities. Obviously, this has important implications for education and the goals and curricula we devise.
On the other hand, it is likely, at least in the immediate future, that society will continue to require young people to go to school. Education will remain committed to a variety of goals and some new ones may be added, but academic learning will remain the most important. Also, it is not likely that the physical space called school will change drastically in the foreseeable future. Organizing and accounting for instruction will change, online education and virtual schooling will expand, but if history is a guide, this change will come slowly. Schools will likely continue to be based in communities, and teachers will continue to provide instruction to groups of children in rectangular rooms.
Contemporary reform efforts show the potential of bringing new and radical perspectives about what academic learning means and how it can best be achieved. New perspectives also are emerging as to what constitutes community and its relationship to the common school. The nature of the student population and the expectations for teachers are additional factors that likely will change in the decades ahead.
Flat World and the iGeneration.
In a very interesting book, Thomas Friedman (2005) described how technology has flattened our world and reshaped our lives in rather dramatic ways. By “flattened,” he means that technological advances have provided greater access to information and jobs and that information has become global and instantaneous. Worldwide Internet access makes services and products available to just about anyone, anywhere, and events in one place on the globe affect not only that place, but every other place as well.
As U.S. society completes the transition into the information age described by Friedman, teaching and schools will be required to change, just as they did when we moved from an agrarian to an industrial society in the late nineteenth century. Learning in a flat world, according to Friedman, has become easier for students, but it has also made education more difficult and complex. Students today have access to information unknown to earlier generations, and the Internet and social networking Web sites have captured their attention. At the same time, these elements pose difficulties in determining the validity and reliability of information and have caused some students to become completely turned off to more traditional in-school learning. Tapscott (2010) and Rosen (2010) have referred to today’s students as the Net generation or the iGeneration. They argue that tomorrow’s teachers will “need to move away from an outdated, broadcast-style pedagogy (i.e., lecture and drilling) toward student-focused, multimodal pedagogy, where “the teacher is no longer in the transmission of data business, . . . [but rather] in the customizing-learning-experiences-for-students business” (Tapscott, 2010, p. 1). We don’t know exactly how schools will look by the middle of the twenty-first century. Futurists, however, have argued that formal schooling as currently conceived and practiced will be as out-of-date in the system of learning as the horse and buggy are in the modern transportation system. The fact that almost two million K–12 students are currently involved in some form of online education or e-learning is evidence that education is changing.Integrating technology into the teaching of the iGeneration is such a critical challenge for twenty-first-century teachers that we have included a special feature in Learning to Teach labeled Enhancing Teaching with Technology. This feature consists of box inserts in several chapters to help you see how almost everything teachers do today is influenced by technology and how the use of technology can enhance student engagement and learning. The Enhancing Teaching and Technology feature for this chapter provides an overall perspective about technology and the iGeneration. In later chapters, this feature will highlight particular aspects of technology related to the chapter’s content.
Diversity and Differentiation:
One of the most complex challenges facing twenty-first-century teachers is how to transform schools and pedagogy that were created at a time when most of the students had Western European backgrounds and spoke English to the schools and approaches required today to meet the needs of a much more diverse student population. Harold Hodgkinson (1983) was one of the first to point out that
“Every society is constructed on a foundation of demographic assumptions. When these assumptions shift, as they do from time to time, the result is a major shock throughout the society“ (p. 281). Schools in the United States have been experiencing such a demographic shock over the past forty years, and it will continue to affect schools and teachers well into the twenty-first century. The most important demographic shift involves the increasing number of students who have ethnic or racial heritages that are non-European, who learn English as a second language, and who live in poverty. As illustrated in Figure 1.3, the proportion of minority students in schools has increased from slightly more than one-fifth in 1972 to 44 percent in 2007, whereas white students decreased from 78 to 58 percent during that same period. Most of the increase has come from an increase of Hispanic students, particularly in the West, where the proportion of students from non-mainstream cultures now reaches over 50 percent (Conditions of Education, 2002, 2009).
Linguistic diversity constitutes one of the most rapidly growing shifts in education, as an increasing number of non-English-speaking children enter the public schools. As illustrated in Figure 1.4, the number of English language learners (ELLs) has more than doubled, from 3.8 million in 1979 to over 10.8 million in 2007, a rise from 9 to 20 percent (Conditions of Education, 2002, 2009). Today, the majority of children who speak a language other than English speak Spanish (80 percent), but other languages represented include Arabic, Vietnamese, Russian, and Tagalog.
A trend throughout the history of schools has been to extend educational opportunities to more and more students. Compulsory attendance laws enacted early in the twentieth century opened the doors to poor white children; the now-famous Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), extended educational opportunities to African American children. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) brought to an end policies that prevented children with disabilities from getting an education and changed the enrollment patterns in schools. For example, in the mid-1970s, when the Disabilities Act was passed, only about 8 percent of children in schools were identified and served for their disability, whereas by 2005–2006 this statistic rose to almost 15 percent (Condition of Education, 2009). More and more students with disabilities are being educated in regular classrooms rather than special education classes or separate schools. Today over half of all students with disabilities spend 80 percent of their day in regular classrooms, an increase of almost one-third from the 1980s.
Another demographic factor that affects schools and teachers is that many children
who attend public schools today live in poverty. In fact, some observers argue that
poverty and social class have replaced race as the most urgent issue facing the nation
and that poverty is at the core of most school failure (Children’s Defense Fund, 2000; A
Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, 2008). Child poverty is defined as children who live
in families with incomes below the federal poverty level and is measured by identifying students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Figure 1.5 shows students
by race and ethnicity who attended high-poverty schools nationwide in 2006–2007. As can be observed, child poverty is most pronounced among black, Latino, and American Indian children. In 2006–2007, 33 percent of black, 35 percent of Hispanic, and 25 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native students were enrolled in high-poverty schools. This is compared to 4 percent of white and 13 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander children.
These demographic trends have significance for teaching and for those preparing to
teach in at least three important ways.
First, for both social and economic reasons, many people in the larger society will remain committed to providing educational opportunities to all children. Society will
also demand that minorities and students with disabilities do well in school. Some of
these students will come from homes of poverty; others will come from homes in which
parents do not speak English; some will be emotionally or physically different from
their classmates. These students will experience school differently than those whose
parents were educated in our schools and who have prepared their children for them.
Working with youth from diverse cultural backgrounds and with various special needs
will necessitate that teachers have a repertoire of effective strategies and methods far
beyond those required previously. Teachers will also have to be able to differentiate curriculum and instruction to make them more suitable for those who may find school
devastatingly difficult or irrelevant to their lives.
It is likely that schools will continue to be scrutinized for racial and ethnic balance,
although the more traditional means of balancing race, such as having racial quotas,
will likely no longer be used because of the 2007 Supreme Court decisions. In Parents
Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County
Board of Education the Court ruled that the use of race to achieve diversity violated the
equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, teachers can expect
to experience complex social and organizational arrangements in which school enrollment boundaries will be changed, efforts will be made to diversify student population through open enrollment and magnet school programs, and teachers themselves may be moved from school to school more often than in the past, particularly if they teach in schools that have been identified as failing.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the voices of minority and immigrant communities and those who are English language learners will no longer be ignored.
Parents of these children will no longer tolerate schools with inadequate materials and untrained teachers. They will not allow their children to be automatically grouped by ability and placed in non-college-bound tracks. They will demand a curriculum and approaches to teaching that will ensure the same academic and social success for their children as for children in the mainstream. Listening to the voices of a multicultural community and providing effective learning experiences for all students will be the most difficult, but also the most interesting, challenge of your generation of teachers.