Guiding Principles of the Modern Red SchoolHouse Design:
Research-Based Solutions for 21^st Century Schools (continued)
By Sally B. Kilgore, Ph.D.

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What is the role of the teacher in the learning process?

Efforts to transform classroom instruction into powerful education experiences have led theorists of learning to contrast teacher-centered with student-centered instruction. Teacher-centered instruction occurs when instructors lecture in class, organizing the material students need to master in digestible tidbits. Students are viewed as receptacles into which new knowledge is poured. Critics contend that students often memorize tidbits, yet lack the ability to use these tidbits or remember them for long periods of time.

Student-centered instruction begins with the proposition that all learners construct their own knowledge and that the role of the teacher is to provide experiences and activities that allow students to develop their own understanding of how things work. Generally, educators are encouraged by experts to increase the use of student-centered instruction—primarily because of the evidence that students learn best when they actively construct their own understandings. Critics of student-centered learning contend that such learning leads to an unacceptably high number of students who are “off task” (i.e., not engaged), wallowing in misconceptions that are never corrected, and treating differences in perceptions and conclusions as mere differences of opinion.

On the other hand, research evidence is clearly supportive of two principles of instruction associated with student-centered theory: New learning must be linked with prior experience, and students have a deeper understanding of concepts and retain

Teachers must make the link between the new and the familiar.

what they learn longer if they actively organize the material themselves. That said, “prior experience” is a much broader concept than advocates of student-centered theory often allow. It includes prior academic knowledge, social experiences outside the classroom as well as experiments or activities within the classroom. In essence, teachers must link the new with the familiar. Similarly, actively “organizing material” may be strictly an intellectual task that reconstructs or rearranges the “new material” into a meaningful set of connections—using outlines, webs, path diagrams, matrices, or other tools for systematizing and visualizing patterns and relationships.

Research evidence, summarized in How People Learn (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999), supports the critics of both teacher-centered and student-centered approaches to instruction. Lecture-based instruction, where students memorize facts and

Relying on student activities exclusively can be worse than just using lectures. Students, in fact, need help in discerning organizing concepts and making connections.

procedures, tends to produce unwanted outcomes: (a) Students cannot use what they learn in new situations, and (b) Students forget what they learned fairly quickly. Student-centered learning is intended to solve those problems. Research evidence, though, suggests that relying on student activities exclusively can be worse than just using lectures. Students, in fact, need help in discerning organizing concepts and making connections. Moreover, they can, in fact, cleave to misconceptions for years.

Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) argue that if students learning science “are given problems to solve on their own…it is highly unlikely that they would have spent time efficiently.” Instead, these researchers argue, students should work with a tutor (which could even be a computer-based system) “to rehearse appropriate practices” and identify the underlying principle at work.

Teaching strategies that rely upon both methods are more likely to give students the capability of applying what they’ve learned as well as remembering what they’ve learned (Schwartz, et al., 1999). In fact, learning is best achieved with what MRSH developers call teacher-led learning. Studies from the 1980s show that students learn more in classes where they spend considerable time being taught or supervised by their teachers, rather than doing seatwork while the teacher sits at his or her desk, or rather than engaging in discovery learning without benefit of questions or suggestions from the teacher (Muijs & Reynolds, 2000; Lampert, 1988; Galton, 1987; Brophy & Good, 1986).

Teacher-led learning involves six critical actions: engaging students’ interest (discussed earlier); linking new learning with prior knowledge; providing students with “the big picture” and where what they are learning fits into it; establishing opportunities for students to experience, organize, and apply new concepts; uncovering (and correcting) misconceptions students may have about the concepts, principles, or facts; and nurturing their understanding of excellence.

The research shows that teachers must take responsibility for providing students with the big picture—how what they are learning fits into the landscape of that discipline. (Why are we doing this? How does this fit with what we already know?) Experts in any given field have an organized body of knowledge in their discipline. Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) refer to its mastery as “knowing the landscape,” which is to say that an expert knows the relationships among various concepts and pieces of knowledge, and how the big ideas in their discipline fit together in that landscape.

Textbooks, as currently written, can be major barriers to gaining a sense of the landscape. Both the National Research Council and the American Association for the Advancement of Science find that science textbooks, for instance, overemphasize facts (the names of the planets closest to Earth) and give too little attention to the big ideas (such as space and time). When developing a scope and sequence—or reviewing one from a text—educators need to evaluate the degree to which connections are made among various concepts and facts (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).

Wiggins (1993) talks about the need for students to link what they are learning to essential questions. (Is there enough to go around, e.g., food, clothes, water? When is a law unjust?) The National Science Education Standards (NSES) emphasize students’ need to learn unifying concepts, such as change and continuity. Historians often talk about enduring issues, such as individual and community, liberty and order, and diversity and unity. For literature, the landscape includes enduring themes that writers address and genres that emerge in certain cultures and periods of history. Well-written academic standards should provide guidance on the landscape students need to see in order to organize their learning.

Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience is fairly compelling: In order for students to understand, apply, or even just remember something, they need to be able to make sense of it using their prior experiences. Thus, instruction must be student-centered insofar as the prior experiences and culture of students are used to help students make sense of whatever scientific principle or historical issue one hopes for students to master. Fortunately, introducing new concepts in terms of a student’s prior experiences is also a means to increase student interest in learning.

Research also shows that teachers must actively seek to uncover misconceptions. H. Jackson Brown in Live and Learn and Pass It On (2000) entertains us with what children think they’ve learned at various ages. One seven year-old reports, “I’ve learned that when I eat fish sticks, they help me swim faster, cause they are fish.” Research on teaching, especially science, demonstrates how misconceptions, much less humorous than the effects of fish sticks, create barriers to understanding principles or concepts. Teachers cannot teach by just telling students something, or even just demonstrating. Effective instruction must be inquisitive—asking students to explain, clarify, or make predictions about the concept under scrutiny. Only then can teachers uncover the particular misconceptions hiding in the minds of their students.

Traditional approaches to educating children generally keep the criteria for excellence a secret—giving the advantage to children whose parents know the secret. The constructivist approach is generally quite leery of a notion of excellence, interpreting different levels of performance as developmental differences among children. Both approaches create dangerous outcomes.

Simple fairness in opportunity to learn dictates that what constitutes excellence—and even adequacy—be public knowledge in school settings. As evident from the research on motivation, making standards of excellence accessible allows a student to see

Making standards of excellence accessible allows a student to see how his or her efforts should be directed.

how his or her efforts should be directed—buttressing a student’s desire to learn. Posting and discussing rubrics that describe excellence in a generic context (such as writing) or for a specific project or assignment (such as an analysis of Hamlet) allow students to review their own performance against a benchmark of excellence. Teachers can help students use rubrics to evaluate their own performance and make appropriate adjustments or improvements in their work. Developing rubrics as a classroom activity allows students to develop skills in evaluating excellence.

Knowing excellence also includes skills in learning—monitoring what makes sense, considering how new information is consistent with what one has learned in other contexts, and knowing how one learns best and adapting accordingly. Students acquire these skills slowly, but more consistently if educators guide students in this type of self-reflection.

The role of the teacher in the learning process, then, is an active one—not exclusively student-centered or teacher-centered.

In summary, applying research on learning to practice, school improvement efforts begin with what is taught. School-based research allows teachers to identify gaps and redundancies in terms of their state standards and in the current learning experiences of students across grades and subjects. State assessment data are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in student achievement. Using that evidence, MRSH advisors help teachers to develop collaboratively, across subjects and grades, a scope and sequence for learning that aligns with state standards.

Using materials from a variety of sources, educators design instructional activities that meet the profile of teacher-led learning—that is, lesson plans that engage students’ interests, build on students’ prior experiences, provide students with the big picture, and pursue interactions with students to uncover misperceptions. Those lessons also provide strategies to help students organize and systematize new knowledge for themselves and allow students to know excellence as it applies to their work. Students are active learners, but teachers are also active in helping students construct understandings that will be accurate, enduring, and useful.

Designing a coherent and effective instructional program usually requires changes in organizational practice that allow educators to use time differently and to develop appropriate support systems for them as well as their students. Thus, organization and leadership strategies are important to the MRSH design—an issue addressed in this next section.

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Link to References

2 These skills of self-reflection are referred to as meta-cognitive skills by scholars of learning.