Teaching for Student Learning

Becoming an Accomplished Teacher

Dick Arends, Ann Kilcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135239978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Teaching for Student Learning: Becoming an Accomplished Teacher shows teachers how to move from novice to expert status by integrating both research and the wisdom of practice into their teaching. It emphasizes how accomplished teachers gradually acquire and apply a broad repertoire of evidence-based teaching practices in the support of student learning.

The book's content stems from three major fields of study: 1) theories and research on how people learn, including new insights from the cognitive and neurosciences; 2) research on classroom practices shown to have the greatest effect on student learning; and 3) research on effective schooling, defined as school-level factors that enhance student achievement and success. Although the book's major focus is on teaching, it devotes considerable space to describing how students learn and how the most effective and widely-used models of teaching connect to principles of student learning. Specifically, it describes how research on teaching, cognition, and neuroscience converge to provide an evidence-based "science of learning" which teachers can use to advance their practice. Key features include the following:

Evidence-Based Practice – This theme is developed through: 1) an ongoing review and synthesis of research on teaching and learning and the resulting guidelines for practice and 2) boxed research summaries within the chapters.

Instructional Repertoire Theme – Throughout the book teaching is viewed as an extremely complex activity that requires a repertoire of instructional strategies that, once mastered, can be drawn upon to fit specific classrooms and teaching situations.

Standards-based School Environments – Education today is dominated by standards-based school environments. Unlike competing books, this one describes these environments and shows how they impact curriculum design and learning activities. The objective is to show how teachers can make standards-based education work for them.

Pedagogical Features – In addition to an end-of-book glossary, each chapter contains research boxes, reflection boxes, itemized end-of-chapter summaries, and end-of-chapter learning activities.

Website – An accompanying website contains a variety of field-oriented and site-based activities that teachers can do alone or with colleagues.

1
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN TODAY’S SCHOOLS

At Southside High School teaching is no longer a private activity. Improving instruction is an ongoing goal, and there are many opportunities for teachers to share and help one another. Through the use of peer visitations, examining student work, study groups and reflective dialogue, teachers at Southside work and learn together. Monthly teachers use peer visitation to observe two of their colleagues. Over the course of a year, each teacher will participate in 18 classroom visits. A different subject area is featured each month so all teachers open their doors to their colleagues. Teachers also participate in study groups that meet once a month. Each group determines the topic they will pursue. One group is participating in a book study, reading Alfie Kohn’s What Does it Mean to Be Well Educated? Another group is using action research to study the effects of different motivational techniques. A third group is designing the process that will be used for the school’s senior project, and a fourth is examining samples of student work.

School-wide, a new teaching strategy, identified by various departments, is introduced and discussed at the first faculty meeting of the month. After experimenting with the new strategy, teachers reassemble in small groups to share how they used the strategy and how it worked for them. Finally, Gail Kennedy, the school’s principal, leads the faculty in a reflective dialogue once a month. An article is distributed a few days in advance, and different protocols are provided to structure the reflective dialogue sessions. Southside High School is a different place than it was a few years ago. A true learning community has been created for teachers and for their students, one that helps them meet the many and varied challenges of teaching in twentieth-first century schools.

Teaching in today’s schools is complex and challenging, and it requires developing a learning community that supports teacher learning like the one we just observed in Southside High School. Expectations for teachers are high and responsibilities are demanding. Teachers must not only focus on the day-to-day learning of an increasingly diverse student population, but they must also make sure students achieve success on high-stakes accountability measures. Additionally, society expects all students to acquire complex intellectual skills needed to be successful in today’s knowledge society; unequal student outcomes are no longer acceptable.

This book is about what accomplished teachers do to meet today’s challenges, and ensure that all students are achieving at high levels. On the surface the relationship between teaching and student learning may appear to be obvious and quite simple. In practice, however, effective teaching is not as straightforward as some would like to believe. Instead, helping all students learn turns out to be an undertaking that is difficult and complex. Fortunately, we know much more today than we did a few decades ago about how students learn and what teachers can do to affect their learning. At the same time, some aspects of teaching and learning remain a mystery, and unfortunately, some of what we know remains unused. We invite our readers to join us in an inquiry about what is known about teaching and learning, learn how to use this knowledge and these practices effectively, and become involved in a mutual quest to uncover more. Becoming an accomplished teacher is a life-long journey; providing leadership for improved instruction is every teacher’s challenge.

We have written Teaching for Student Learning for teachers who have successfully navigated the initial induction period. You have mastered the fundamentals of teaching, and you are quite confident in your interpersonal skills and in classroom management. You are now ready to concentrate on both refining your skills and adding to your repertoire of effective teaching practices. You are committed to understanding more deeply the relationship between your teaching and student learning. You are eager to investigate differentiation and to concentrate on engaging each and every student. You are ready and willing to provide leadership by extending your influence beyond the confines of your classroom into the school, community, and the profession.

This book’s primary purposes are to help teachers move along the continuum from novice to expert status and to become more confident in their abilities to help all students make appropriate progress in social and academic learning. We take the perspective that teaching cannot be separated from learning. Indeed, teaching is the “art and science” of helping students learn. We define learning as change in the minds and intellectual character of students. We summarize much that is known about the science of teaching and learning and encourage you to work with your colleagues on refining and continuing to compose the art of helping students learn. We also believe that those who are committed to teacher learning—mentors, coaches, staff developers—will find this book and its companion Fieldbook a useful resource in their work.

We want to accomplish several goals in this introductory chapter. First, we will describe our views about what it means to teach today in what we (and others) have labeled a standards-based environment, one best characterized by externally imposed standards and accountability. We will provide a short history lesson on how we got to where we are and describe the challenges posed by this environment. We will also discuss the increasing diversity of students in classrooms and the press for instructional differentiation to meet varying needs. We acknowledge the geo-economic and technological advances that have flattened the world and created a global community.

Second, we will focus on the importance of teacher development and learning. Today’s environment requires that teachers keep up with new and ever-changing conditions and challenges and devote a significant portion of their time to learning new and more effective ways of teaching. We will describe what is involved in developing understanding of different kinds of knowledge, attaining expertise, and acquiring an ever-expanding repertoire of effective teaching practices. Our discussion about teacher development and learning in this chapter will serve as an introduction to a much more thorough discussion of this topic in Chapter 15.

Third, we believe that many of the shortcomings in today’s schools can only be solved through teacher leadership, and that many of our readers are ready to provide this leadership not only for instructional improvement in their own classrooms but also beyond—in the school, community, and the profession.

Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief tour of the book and highlights some of its unique features. You will see that we have written Teaching for Student Learning primarily for teachers. We believe that experienced teachers will be reading this book as part of a college class or with colleagues as part of a study or improvement group in particular schools. We believe our readers are teachers who are interested in gaining new knowledge, reflecting on their work, examining the work of their students, and studying the relationships between teaching practices and student outcomes. In both instances we believe that this book, and the Fieldbook that accompanies it, can serve as a guide for discussion and experimentation. We also believe these resources can assist teacher and school leaders, particularly those who coach and support teachers as they work toward improving classroom practices.

So, we invite our readers to come with us on a journey aimed at discovering and improving professional practice, to use each chapter to learn individually, but also to see each chapter and corresponding activities as opportunities to learn and to work collectively with colleagues.

REFLECTION

Consider for a moment why you are reading this book—part of a class; workshop; school study group? How might you use this experience to improve your teaching practices? The practices of your colleagues?

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TEACHING

The schools in which many of us now teach are not the schools we attended in our youth. New realities exist today that were not present a few years ago. Three of these realities have created the conditions for teaching and learning in the twenty-first century: societal press for standards and accountability, increased student diversity, and fundamental changes in technology and globalization. Below, we discuss these realities and suggest how they impact teachers and leaders in today’s schools.

Standards-based Education and Accountability

Over the past two decades, a new system of schooling has emerged. Called standards-based education, the system rests on several core beliefs: (1) that an agreed upon set of standards can be designed to guide teaching and learning; (2) that every child and youth should be held to high expectations for meeting these standards; (3) that all teachers can achieve high standards by using evidence-based practices; and (4) that educators should be held accountable for student learning, currently interpreted to mean acceptable student academic achievement as measured by standardized tests.

How did we get to this conception of schooling? Some aspects of the standards and high-stakes testing movements that characterize today’s schools date back to the early part of the twentieth century. Several elements, however, gained new urgency and momentum in the 1980s and 1990s as more and more citizens and policy makers became convinced that the public schools were failing and that the reason for this failure was education’s lack of external accountability. In 1983, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Educational Reform (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) was unveiled. This report, commissioned by the Reagan Administration, offered a myriad of recommendations:

• increase core course requirements for high school graduation;

• set higher and more rigorous standards at all levels of education; and

• implement the use of standardized tests to measure student achievement.

A decade later, under a different administration, Congress passed the Goals 2000 Act of 1994. This legislation promised that by the year 2000 several goals for education would be achieved:

• All students in America will start school ready to learn.

• The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.

• U.S. students will be first in mathematics and science achievement.

While the recommendations outlined in A Nation at Risk and the goals of Goals 2000 were never realized, they did bring about a fundamental change in the way we thought about education, and they served as preludes for the continuing development in the United States of federal involvement in education and the passage of No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002. As our experienced teacher readers know, NCLB required alignment of classroom instruction to state-prescribed standards, yearly testing to hold schools accountable for ensuring that all students meet these standards, and sanctions imposed on schools that failed. Although NCLB is unique to the United States, similar regulations currently exist throughout North America, Europe, and some countries in Asia.

This view of schooling differs in some important ways from the textbook-based and norm-referenced perspectives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Theoretically, it alters what students are expected to learn and the proficiency levels they are expected to achieve. Instead of working “for a grade” or to pass a particular course, students are expected to meet agreed upon standards and these standards are meant for all students rather than only the most capable. This view of schooling requires new and different practices for teachers. As Schalock, Schalock, and Girod (2007) have pointed out, this system of schooling demands “the alignment of instruction with standards; the integration of curriculum, instruction and assessment; and the differentiation of instruction to accommodate the learning histories and needs of individual students …” (p. 2). Alignment, integration, and differ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 TEACHING AND LEARNING IN TODAY’S SCHOOLS
• Part I FOUNDATIONS FOR STUDENT LEARNING
• Part II METHODS AND MODELS OF TEACHING
• Part III SCHOOL-WIDE CONDITIONS FOR STUDENT LEARNING
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• Author Index
• Subject Index