Response to Strategic Reading Chapters

Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube posit some interesting theories on teaching and learning literacy.  I find it interesting that they are speaking primarily about teaching students to read and be literate but the concepts they share are presented so as to encompass all teaching and learning across content areas.  Perhaps this is because literacy is so fundamentally important to engage in all other teaching and learning.  They say that all teaching should be based on scientific principles and focus on child development and cognitive science.  With this I could not agree more, as well as when they call for teachers to have clearly stated teaching theories that are left open to and welcome constant evaluation and adaptation based on results.    By clearly stating what it is that one wants to achieve as a teacher and the methods by which they plan to do it, evaluation of one’s performance should follow naturally and success or failure should be fairly obvious.  I find this akin to writing clearly defined and measurable teaching objectives.  If the goal or objective is met then the methods used to achieve them are clearly defined and can be used again.  If the goal or objective is not met, adjustments can be made based on what the teacher perceived to be effective and what was not.

            The authors draw on the work of theorists such as George Hillocks and Lev Vygotsky among others.  One of the better points that they make is a statement they share from Hillocks who claimed that teaching is a transitive verb; teachers teach something to someone.  It seems self-evident but is something most people probably do not consider, as I had not before reading this article.  In teacher preparation coursework the focus is on teaching something and, because we do not know exactly who we will be teaching, practices are geared toward a large and generally ambiguous student population.  A lot of effort is put into preparing to teach a diverse group of people with different learning needs but until one has a better idea of the group they will be working with they remain a nameless, faceless generalization.  The authors use Shulman’s knowledge base to explain what is required to teach, that being: knowledge of students, knowledge of subject matter, knowledge of teaching processes, management, and organization, and pedagogical content knowledge.  So clearly, teaching literacy and teaching in general must be multi-faceted and holistic and requires knowledge of the aforementioned in addition to knowledge of curriculum content.

            Another interesting point to consider is the assertion by Vygotsky and Hillocks that anything that is learned must be actively taught.  In the most literal sense this is not true.  People are capable of passive learning just by observation and trial and error alone.  It is my contention that one can learn something new every day simply by being; that the basic and fundamental acts of subsistence engender learning and the amount of new information that the human brain processes daily constitutes learning.  This does require a rich and dynamic external environment in order for new experiences and information to be taken in and processed.  A person in isolation looking at the same scenery day in and day out will learn nothing new.  Having said that, the issue then becomes a matter of quality of learning.  A person can learn something new every day by observation and passive learning.  Active learning, being taught by a professional with clear and measurable goals, is superior in scope, breadth, and usefulness of new knowledge gained.  I was pleased to read that the authors likened teaching to, “guiding students to more competent learning performances,” and to being classroom coaches because that is how I most often think about teaching.  The students are fully capable of learning on their own but it is the teacher’s job to guide them to learn proper and useful new skills and to motivate them to want to be active learners.   

            Reading this piece also raised some concerns for me as a teacher-in-training.  The strategies presented seem like good options that promote active learning and equal participation by teacher and students.  The authors tout such practices as explicit teaching, scaffolding, and communities of practice as strategies that balance the act of teaching and learning equally between parties instead of traditional transmission of information from teacher to students, also known as direct instruction.  My concern is that so much of my chosen field of teaching, history, requires knowledge that lends itself to direct transmission or student-based study.  Cooperative teaching and learning practices such as those put forth by Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube are best used for “doing” history, such as historical analysis, research, working with sources, and writing.  In order to do historical research, students have to have some basic background information about a given period and I am not sure that can be done effectively by the kind of “communities of practice” explained in the article.

            Another concern of mine would be how to identify a student’s zone of proximal development.  Furthermore, and more consequential, how does a teacher keep coursework within students’ zones of proximal development when each student has a different zone?  Also, I am not sure of the adaptability of the inquiry square to my particular subject.  I do appreciate and agree with the notion of creating an inquiry environment to engage students in learning and that is definitely suitable to studying history.  Overall Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube present a lot of useful information in these two chapters, so much so that I am considering picking up the book.