Can teacher directed and child centred classrooms co-exist?
Dr Don W Jordan and Ms Ellen Cornish
Is direct teaching rote learning or can it be something else? What paradigm shift is required to enable teachers to develop strategies that foster Child Centred Learning with a large number of students in enquiry based classrooms?
Direct teaching and enquiry based learning need not be at opposite ends of the spectrum, effective classrooms reflect a variety of ways to organise learning opportunities for all students.
In reality, the majority of classroom activity is teacher directed. The extent of the direction will depend on the outcomes the teacher wishes to achieve. It is equally important for students to feel ownership of a task and therefore take on responsibility for their own learning. Initially, we feared that if we gave too many decision making opportunities to students about their learning, we may lose control over our teaching program. This did not happen as we remained in control of the learning program whilst at the same time giving students the chance to make guided decisions about their own learning opportunities. Direct teaching activities are an important and necessary part of good classroom practice, whether whole class or part of a group or individual activities. Meaningful learning in the classroom is a joint venture between the student and teacher.
Howard Gardner’s (1983) multiple intelligences (MI) theory has been a useful framework to help us understand that our students have different strengths and learn in different ways. MI theory includes the traditional academic intelligences of linguistic and logical mathematical intelligences as well as spatial, visual, musical, bodily kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist intelligences.
Central to MI theory is that each intelligence has a different developmental trajectory and different ways of learning. This implies that students generally may engage higher order thinking and problem solving in an area of intellectual strength and only lower order thinking in an area of relative weakness. For example a student gifted in linguistic intelligence may produce a creative and original piece of writing but may struggle with a task that demands high-level spatial awareness.
Giving our students the opportunity to foster their curiosity and to develop their skills through a collection of guided choices e.g. art/craft drama, music etc. and teacher directed activities, was a powerful way to engage them in learning for understanding, whilst giving them opportunities to develop their multiple intelligences. We always ensured that any such choices were under our supervision, thus ensuring that students were engaged in activities that foster a deeper understanding.
Our classroom experience has shown us that when we combined our classes to include 50 students for a unit of work looking at ‘extinction’ (our planning is included in this article) our most effective strategies were those that took into account the skills, values and understandings we wanted our students to acquire. To achieve this we organised our classroom into;
Whole class teaching.
Whole class teaching formed a very important part of our classroom practice. One example of this was ‘Tuning in’ as a whole class each morning, which helped to focus students on the tasks to be undertaken for the day or week. This was also an opportunity for students to share their work in progress or completed work to the whole class, as well as any interesting resources that they or we may have discovered.
Small groups.
Knowledge is constructed through our senses of, seeing, hearing and our emotional connection as well as touch, taste and smell. We found that when students are encouraged to work and learn together in small groups, a powerful way for them to develop their learning skills is using their senses. Groups were organised in a number of ways according to the unit of work being studied. We found that small groups were most effective when groups of mixed ability, ethnic and socio-economic, gender and age were given the opportunity to explore their ideas with others through dialogue and critical debate, as opposed to the transmission of knowledge in one direction from teacher to student. There is no doubt that teacher to student transmission of facts and ideas has its place, but it is only when students explore and confirm their ideas with others, that learning takes place.
Individual work.
An effective approach for us was to develop a ‘contract’ with students; this was a series of written questions organised on Bloom’s (1956) six levels for organising information. (See below).These questions were structured in such a way as to take into account the thinking of Howard Gardner’s MI theory as well as the hierarchy of research skills outlined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom & Krathwohl (1956). We always encouraged our students to use a range of media including writing, art and craft, music, drama and IT, to demonstrate their understanding. This allowed for student’s different s interest and abilities.
Bloom (1956), identified six levels, from the simple recall or recognition of facts, as the lowest level, through increasingly more complex and abstract mental levels, to the highest order which is classified as evaluation. Examples of verbs that represent intellectual activity on each level are listed below;
1. Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state.
2. Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate.
3. Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.
4. Analysis: analyse, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, and test.
5. Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, and write.
6. Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate. (Bloom & Krathwohl. (1956).
Our evaluation of our students’ individual and group work was based on how well they demonstrated these understandings in their completed work. This included written, oral, graphic and drama presentations, as well as their own evaluation based on the student self-assessment rubrics.
References.
Bloom, Benjamin S. & David R. Krathwohl. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals, by a committee of college and university examiners. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York , Longmans.
Gardner, Howard (1983) Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books.