rk ae TANG ace FIFTH EDITION BRUCE JOYCE | NT i 4a= Eee MODELS OF TEACHING. Ti] Date, Bruce Joyce \ Marsha Weil Le Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited New Deni - 110 of 2003faaidi | D. This Fifth Indian Reprint—Rs. 195.00 (Original U.S. Edition—Rs, 1006.00) MODELS OF TEACHING, Sth Ed. by Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil Sade hy Prentice-Hall, Inc.. (now known as Pearson Education, Inc.), One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, U.S.A. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprodineed in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the publisher. Credits are on p. 476, which constitutes a continuation of the copyright page. ISBN-81-203-1174-4 The export rights of this book are vested solely with the publisher. G's Eastern Economy Eston is the authorized, complete and unabridged photo-offeet reproduction of the latest American edltion specially published and priced for sale only in Bangladsen, Burma, Gambodia, China, Fij, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, FI Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Fifth Printing (Fifth Edition) ce = June, 2003 fiublished by Asoke K- Ghosh, Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, M-97, Connaught Circus, New Delhi-110001 and Printed by Jay Print Pack Private Limited, New Delhi-1 10018°CONTENTS Foreword, Robert J. Schaefer xv part | FRAME OF REFERENCE 1 Drawing on the knowledge base and our own inventions, we begin the inquiry into the nature of learning and teaching. CHAPTER 1 BEGINNING THE INQUIRY Tooling Up the Community of Learners 3 ‘Teaching well means helping students learn well. Powerful learners have expanded repertoires of strategies for acquiring education. Models of teach- ing are designed to impart these strategies while helping students develop as persons, increase their capacity to think clearly and wisely, and build social skills and commitment. Teaching is the process of building communities of Jearners who use their skills to educate themselves. CHAPTER 2 WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? How Are They Used? ret Well-developed models of teaching are the products of long periods of inquiry into how stucents learn. Over the years, four families of models have developed, each emphasizing particular aspects of learning, but all sharing the fundamental purpose of increasing capacity for self-education and the personal construction of knowledge.CONTENTS CHAPTER 3 TEACHING AS INQUIRY Taking Off from the Research Base 27 We are never finished with the study of learning and teaching. The research on models of teaching is in continual change as teacher-researchers refine the models and create new ones. Building student capacity for learning is the theme as we review the research and study the effects to be expected when we add various models to our repertoires and those of our students, CHAPTER 4 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE, METACOGNITIONS, AND CONCEPTIONS OF INTELLIGENCE 49 As teachers we continually construct skills and knowledge, and the effective learner does the same. In both cases, thinking about how learning takes place—the metacognitions of learning—has a central role. Current inquiry has led to multidimensional concepts of intelligence and to the belief that a major outcome of education is increases in intelligence. CHAPTER 5 TEACHING AND EQUITY Gender, Money, Race, and Culture 55 Education is in a war against cultural stereotypes about learning capacity. Research on teaching and learning supports the position that equity can be achieved for men, women, races, socioeconomic groups, and cultures. A mojor reason is that learning capacity can be improved so that apparent ini- tial disadvantages disappear. PART I I THE SOCIAL FAMILY 63 The social family capitalizes on our nature as social creatures to further learning and to expand our ability to relate productively to one another. The models range from the simple processes of organizing students to workCONTENTS vil together to elaborate models that teach democratic social organization and the analysis of major social problems and critical social values and issues. CHAPTER 6 PARTNERS IN LEARNING From Dyads to Group Investigation 65 ‘The simplest forms of cooperative learning organize students to help one another respond to the cognitive and social tasks of the information-process- ing models of teaching. Widely used today through the efforts and research of Robert Slavin, David and Roger Johnson, and their colleagues, coopera- tive learning positively affects academic learning, social development, and the self-esteem of the learner. John Dewey proposed that group investigation should be the basic model for social and academic learning in a democratic society. Recent research and practice by Shlomo Sharan and his colleagues affirm and illuminate this broad, complex, and powerful model. CHAPTER 7 ROLE PLAYING Studying Social Behavior and Values 89 Fannie and George Shaftel have designed a process to help students under- stand and develop their social values. Role playing of problematic situations is used to open up discussions of values and how they operate in our daily lives. The mode! permits values to be studies as a core of the growing self— the place where social norms and personal identity and sense of meaning come together. CHAPTER 8 JURISPRUDENTIAL INQUIRY Learning to Think about Social Policy 109 Making social policy is a fundamental need in small groups, communities, nations, and even the internation. Built around the analysis of case studies containing problems that can only be solved by clarifying values and resolv- ing conflicts and competing demands, the jurisprudential model introduces policy analysis. Developed by Donald Oliver and James Shaver, the model can be used to design entire social studies courses or to illuminate policy questions within other curriculum areas from science to athletics.viii CONTENTS: CHAPTER 9 ADAPTING TO INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Conceptual Systems Theory 129 How do we plan for students who are at different stages of development? Largely by planning to increase their development. We use David Hunt's modifications of conceptual systems theory to study our students and modu- late teaching to increase their productivity and development. part IIIT THE INFORMATION-PROCESSING FAMILY Learning to Think by Thinking 141 een While research on how students learn to think is by no means a completed Science, a variety of models can increase students’ ability to seek and master information, organize it, build and test hypotheses, and apply what they are learning in their independent reading and writing and their exploration of themselves and the world about them. Some of these models induce the stu- dents to collect information and build concepts. Others teach them to profit from direct instruction through readings, lectures, and instructional systems. CHAPTER 10 THINKING INDUCTIVELY Collecting, Organizing, and Manipulating Data 145 Classification is believed to be the fundamental higher-order thinking skill, and analytic and synthetic skills depend on the discriminations made through classification. Drawing on the work of Hilda Taba and others who have concerned themseives with the development of thinking processes, we Present the basic classification model. This model begins with concept for- mation and proceeds to the development of generalizations, hypotheses, and inferences about causation. CHAPTER 11 ATTAINING CONCEPTS The Basic Thinking Skills 161 Concept attainment helps students learn categories and study how to lean and apply them. The model also provides teachers with an alternative to induction, enabling them to control data sets and help students develop pre- cise knowledge of concepts.CONTENTS, ix cHapTeR 12 SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY AND INQUIRY TRAINING The Art of Making Inferences 179 ‘The focus is on learning how the academic disciplines construct knowledge and how to join the inquiry, We use the example of the Biological Sciences Study Committee biology program, developed under the leadership of Joseph Schwab. Then we concentrate’on a program, first developed by Richard Suchman, to train students to engage in causal reasoning, The training is built around sets of puzzling problems that the students attempt to solve by collecting and verifying data, developing concepts, and building and testing hypotheses. cHapterR 13 MEMORIZATION Getting the Facts Straight 209 Recent research on memorization, especially on the use of “link words” to facilitate associations, has produced some dramatic effects on the rate at which students can acquite information and concepts. In some applications the instructors generate the mnemonics. In others the students develop their ‘own. In both the students are organized into learning communities that pos- sess knowledge about how to acquire, store, and retrieve information. Research by Levin, Pressley, and their colleagues has stressed the impor- tance of providing students with cognitive control over learning strategies—the “metacognitive” dimension of being a student. In other words, the students are not taught simply to engage in a learning activity. They are taught how to learn and how to use knowledge of learning to increase their effectiveness. cHapter 14 SYNECTICS Enhancing Creative Thought 233 It can be argued that the ability to go beyond the known and synthesize fresh ideas and solutions is the ultimate information-processing skill. It can also be argued that possessing the freedom to create is one of the peaks of personal development. William Gordon has developed a procedure to help people break set and generate fresh solutions to problems, generate more lucid writing and speaking, and coalesce groups around creative problem solving. Rather than conceiving of creativity as an isolating, inward process, it is developed in groups and increases cohesion and empathy among group members.CONTENTS: CHAPTER 15 LEARNING FROM PRESENTATIONS Advance Organizers 265 David Ausubel’s model facilitate learnings from lectures, readings and other mediated presentations, and courses by increasing the cognitive activity of the students. The model lets the students in on the intellectual scaffolds of the disciplines and teaches them how to use those frameworks to guide their inquiry. CHAPTER 16 THE DEVELOPING INTELLECT Adjusting Models to Cognitive Development 279 Jean Piaget and his colleagues developed a model of intellectual develop- ‘ment that we can use to organize the information-processing models to facilitate cognitive growth. We select and modify the models to help students increase their levels of conceptual activity. We give special attention to Lawrence Kohlberg's framework for facilitating moral development as we teach, PART IV THE PERSONAL FAMILY ~ Focus on the Person 293 The personalistic models focus on the development of the integrated feeling, thinking self—the personal identity. They shape the environment around the capacity for self-education and the need to develop self-awareness and understanding. CHAPTER 17 NONDIRECTIVE TEACHING The Learner at the Center 295 Carl Rogers was the leading spokesperson for teaching oriented around the student's perceptual world. The teacher operates from a counseling stance, helping the students understand themselves, clarify their goals, and acéept responsibility for their growth and the direction of their lives.CONTENTS. xi Designed to enhance the growing self, the model helps us reach into the psy- chological space of the students and enlist them in the learning-teaching partnership. a 6he CONCEPTS OF SELF Modeling Rich States of Growth 309 The ultimate evidence of whether education has been effecti is in the reci- procal relationships of educated people with their world—contributing to it and profiting from it. We discuss a framework for examining the growing self and modeling for our students a self-actualizing way of life. PART V THE BEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS FAMILY Behavior Theory 321 On the foundation of the work of B. F. Skinner a large number of approaches to learning have been developed, each taking advantage of the human being’s ability to modify behavior in response to tasks and feedback. ‘These models are used in a wide variety of applications, from teaching infor- mation, concepts, and skills to increasing comfort and relaxation, decreasing phobias, changing habits, and learning to control one’s behavior. Our selec- tion includes just a few of the ones with broad potential for uses in school settings. CHAPTER 19 MASTERY LEARNING AND PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION 329 ‘An important application of behavioral systems theory is in the development of systems that enable learning tasks to be regulated according to the progress of the learners and that teach students to pace themselves for opti- mal performance. Often these systems organize material to be learned in relatively small, sequenced, instructional “modules” presénted to the stu- dents with assessments of learning embedded in them. These “mastery learning” and “programmed instruction” systems have wide applicability in academic curriculum areas. We stress the work of Benjamin Bloom in the development of mastery learning and Bloom and Carroll's conception of intelligence as a matter of time to accomplish certain kinds of tasks.xii CONTENTS: CHAPTER 20 DIRECT INSTRUCTION 343 Direct instruction involves a straightforward use of tasks and feedback to help students master academic content. This approach is based on studies, especially by Jere Brophy and Tom Good, of effective teachers and on social learning theory, particularly the applications by Wes Becker and his colleagues. CHAPTER 21 LEARNING FROM SIMULATIONS Training and Self-Training 353 In industrial, military, athletic, and educational settings, researchers have developed procedures for developing skills and enabling those to be used effectively in work and education. Computer-based simulations are readily adding to curricular options in elementary and secondary schools. part VI PROFESSIONAL SKILL 365 Planning instruction, adding to one’s teaching repertoire, and learning as we teach are our themes. CHAPTER 22 THE CONDITIONS OF LEARNING Focusing and Planning Instruction 367 Robert Gagné and his colleagues have developed a classification of learning goals that enables us to organize objectives and place them in appropriate sequence. We study planning, using Gagne'’s framework, and illustrate plan- ning with a global education curriculum. CHAPTER 23 HOW TO LEARN A TEACHING REPERTOIRE The Professional Learning Community 375 Based on 25 years of research on how we acquire teaching skills, we present a framework for organizing ourselves to expand our teaching repertoire.CONTENTS: xiii CHAPTER 24 LEARNING STYLES AND MODELS OF TEACHING Making Discomfort Productive 385 For our students and ourselves, reaching out for new learning tools and ideas involves some necessary and exciting discomfort. One of the major challenges of teaching is to build learning communities that represent “safe space” in which students can keep themselves on the move as learners. “At- risk" students are those who are trying to stretch too limited a repertoire over too many searning tasks. Our remedy is to design the school as a labo- ratory for learning how to learn, a place where stretching one’s capacity is a way of life, APPENDIX PEER COACHING GUIDES 399 These guides are designed to facilitate planning for practice with nine of the most commonly used models of teaching and to provide formats for obsery- ing demonstration and peer practice. Advance Organizer 401 Cooperative Learning Organization ‘ 405 Jurisprudential Model 409 Synectics 415 Concept Attainment 420 Inquiry Training 426 Assists to Memory 430 Role Playing 435 Inductive Thinking 439 References 445 Index 477FOREWORD The autumn efflorescence of color annually admired in New England fo- liage is no less visually exciting or aesthetically satisfying because it is fa- miliar and oft-observed. Neither is a new publication of Models of Teaching less intellectually stimulating or professionally rewarding because one has admired earlier editions of the work. Although I now live most of the year in Florida, 1 never willingly miss an October in Vermont or up-state New York. And while I'm now only an occasional teacher, I could never ignore a fresh, while yet familiar, demonstration of the authors’ insights into the mysteries and complexities of teaching. The essential task of this realization of Models of Teaching, as, indeed, ofall earlier editions, is to describe a rich variety of approaches to teaching— in sufficient detail and with sufficient illustration of their uses and purposes in real learning situations as to make each model an active, or at least po- tentially active, part of a teacher's repertoire. No teacher, prospective, neo- phyte, or veteran, could examine these models without a renewed sense of the multiplicity of educational purposes, the range and diversity of useful teaching behaviors, or the intellectual zest inherent in the craft. No model is presented didactically. Each is discussed in terms of its underlying theory and of the problematics intrinsic to its use. Research test- ing the effectiveness of each model is nicely marshalled. Citing such theory and research is clearly not intended to provide closed, static “proofs” of the efficacy of individual models, but to encourage reflection and inquiry about yet unknown aspects of teaching strategy. Readers of this book are never as- sumed to be passive receptacles of the authors’ wisdom. Iam impressed, as I have long been, with the breadth of scholarship, the command of psychological and pedagogical literature, and the sheer professional enthusiasm that Models of Teaching exemplifies. It is true that Ihave grown accustomed to such virtues and have duly noted them in ear- lier editions of the book. But I still respond, also, to the familiar golds, the reds, the browns, and the persistent greens of New England autumns. Each manifestation, be it of book or foliage, is a uniquely exciting experience. Robert J. Schaefer Longboat Key, Florida xvPART IT FRAME OF REFERENCE We move into the study of teaching as an inquiry by individuals, faculties, and school districts. As practitioners we use the knowledge base as a mir- tor for the study of our own practice and draw on the models of teaching that are the products of disciplined inquiry into teaching to find tools we can explore with our students. In these chapters we survey the available models, examine them as models of learning for students, and take stock of the research. Perhaps the most important finding is that the purpose of teaching is to increase capacity to learn—the multifaceted thing we call intelligence. We find that education can greatly affect intelligence and that these tools we call models of teaching are one way to organize intelligence-oriented edu- cation. Therefore, many of the differences that have often been said to inhibit Jearning—differences in race, gender, culture, and socioeconomic back- ground—are trivial in comparison to the power education has to give the learners tools to educate themselves:CHAPTER 1 BEGINNING THE INQUIRY Tooling Up the Community of Learners Every once in a while I think we should have called the book Models of Learning. Then, I remember that real teaching is teaching kids how to learn. So I guess the title is all right. —Marsha Weil to Bruce Joyce, January 1974 Let's begin by visiting two first-grade and two tenth-grade classrooms at 9:00 on the first day of school. Ss C EN ARI O In one first-grade classroom the children are gathered around a table on which a candle and jar have been placed. The teacher, Jackie Wiseman, lights the candle and, after it has burned brightly for a minute or two, cov- ers it carefully with the jar. The candle grows dim, flickers, and goes out. Then she produces another candle and a larger jar, and the exercise is re- peated. The candle goes out, but more slowly. Jackie produces two more candles and jars of different sizes, and the children light the candles, place the jars over them, and the flames slowly go out. “Now we're going to de- velop some ideas about what has just happened,” she says. “I want you to ask me questions about those.candles and jars and what you just observed.” ‘The students begin. She gently helps them rephrase their questions or plan experiments. When one asks, “Would the candles burn longer with an even bigger jar?,” Jackie responds, “How might we find out?” Periodically, she will ask them to dictate to her what they know and questions they have and will write what they say on newsprint paper. Their own words will be the content of their first study of reading.PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE Jackie is beginning her year with the model of teaching we call inquiry train- ing (Chapter‘12). The model begins by having the students encounter what will be, to them, a puzzling situation. Then, by asking questions and con- ducting experiments, they build ideas and test them. Jackie will study their inquiry and plan the next series of activities to build a community that can work together to explore their world S§ C EN ARIO Next door the children are seated in pairs. In front of them is a pile of small objects. Each pair of children also has a magnet. Their teacher, Jan Fisher, smiles at them and explains that the U-shaped object is called a mag- net. “We're going to find out something about this thing we call a magnet We'll begin by finding out what it does when it's held close to different things. So I want you to explore with your magnet. Find out what happens when you bring it close to or touch the things in front of you with it. And sort the other objects according to what happens.” She, too, will take notes on the categories they form and use the categories to begin their study of written vocabulary. Jan has begun with the model we call inductive thinking (Chapter 10). That model begins by presenting the students with information or having them collect information and engage in classifying. As they develop cate. gories—in this case of objects according to how they respond to a magnetic field—they will build hypotheses to test. Jan will study how they think and what they see and don't see and will help them learn to attack other prob- lem areas as a community of inductive thinkers. SC EN ARIO Mariam True’s.10th-grade social studies class begins with a videotape taken in a California courtroom, where litigation is being conducted over whether a mother can prevent a father and their 12-year-old son from hav- ing time together. The parents are divorced and have joint custody of their son, who lives with the mother. The tape presents the opening arguments in the case. Mariam asks the students to generate, individually, the issues as they see them and to re- quest further information about the situation. She then urges them to share and also asks each student to accumulate the ideas and questions that all the students share under the headings of “issues” and “questions.” They find it necessary to develop another category called “positions andCHAPTER 1 / BEGINNING THE INQUIRY values,” because many of the students articulated positions during the sharing exercise. The inquiry will continue by watching more segments of the tape and analyzing several abstracts of similar cases that Mariam has collected for them. One such case is their first homework assignment. Gradually, through the week, Mariam will lead the students to develop sets of policy statements and the values that underlie the various possible policies. As the exercise proceeds, she will be studying how well the students are able to clarify facts, distinguish value positions from one another, and discuss differences be- tween seemingly opposing values and policy positions. She, too, is begin ning the development of a learning inquiry and is herself an inquirer into her students and their learning. Mariam has opened her class with the jurisprudential model of teaching (Chapter 8), which is designed to lead students to the study of public policy issues and their own values. Ss C ENA RIO The class then moves to Shirley Mills’s English course, which opens with a scene from the film The Milagro Beanfield War. The students share their reactions to the setting, action, and characters. They express a variety of viewpoints, but when they want to defend their interpretations or argue against the ideas of others, Shirley announces that, for the time being, she wants to preserve their differences so that they can inquire into them. She then passes out copies of the novel of the same name by the author John Nichols and asks them to begin reading it. During the week she will en- courage them to explore the social issues presented by the book and film and to compare the devices used by the author and filmmakers. She will watch closely what issues and devices they see and don't see as she builds her little community. Shirley has introduced her students to the group investigation model (Chapter 6), a powerful cooperative learning model she has used to design her course. The model begins by having students confront information that will lead to an area of inquiry. They then inquire into their own perceptual worlds, noting similarities and differences in perception as the inquiries proceed. Education continuously builds ideas and emotions. The flux of human con- sciousness gives the process of education its distinctive character and makes teaching and learning such a wondrous, ever-changing process, as thoughts and feelings are built and rebuilt. The children come to school filled with words that exist in their memories of listening and speaking andPARTI J FRAME OF REFERENCE experience the transformation of the words and all they mean into reading and writing. The words will never be the same again, for they take ona new dimension. Where they could be heard before, they are now seen as well. Where they could be produced before as sounds, they can now be written down. The fundamental reality of the words continues, nonetheless, to be in the minds of those children, but something important has happened to them and that happening is the property of each unique mind. The teacher brings those changes to the children by arranging the learning environ- ments and providing tasks that generate those new realities. The realities, however, are possessions of the minds of the children. We try to peer inside to find out what learning has taken place and what readiness there is for new learning. But teachers cannot crawl inside and look around—we have to infer what is inside from what we can see and hear. Our educated guesses are the substance of our trade as we try, continually, to con- struct in our minds the pictures of the minds of our students. The never-end- ing cycles of arranging environments, providing tasks, and building pictures of the minds of the students make teaching—the continuous inquiry into mind and environment—a business that is never complete. The process is ex- actly the same in the secondary phase of education and in undergraduate and graduate school as it is with young children. The teacher and professor of physics arrange environments, provide tasks, and try to learn what is going on in those wondrous and unique minds in parallel cadence with the teacher who first introduces reading and writing to the students. To engage in teaching well is to embrace the adventure of limitless learning about minds and how ideas and emotions interact with environ- ments and become transformed. We are never finished with this adventure, never satisfied with the arts and sciences of making those inferences, never done with the construction of models of learning and teaching that are built on the guesses we make about what is going on in those minds. The nature of our work takes us‘on a safari through a rich landscape that offers adventures we cannot predict. We are caught up in an inquiry that has no end. Schools and classes are communities of students brought together to ex- plore the world and learn how to navigate it productively. We have great hopes for these little units of our society. We hope their members will become highly literate, that they will read omnivorously and write with skill and del- icacy. We hope they will understand their social world, be devoted to its im- Provement, and develop the dignity, self-esteem, and sense of efficacy to generate personal lives of high quality. These aspirations are central to the study of teaching and guide the research that has resulted in a rich array of models of teaching. These models are the work of teachers who have beaten a path for us and hacked out some clearings where we can start our inquiries. In this book we introduce some of these models, discuss their underly. ing theories, examine the research that has tested them, and illustrate their uses. As educators we survey these models and select ones we will master to develop and increase our own effectiveness. We use them, study our stu-CHAPTER 1 / BEGINNING THE INQUIRY dents’ responses, and adapt them. To become competent to use these teach- ing strategies comfortably and effectively requires much study and practice, but by concentrating on one or two at a time we can easily expand our repertoires. (Chapter 23 describes the process of acquiring the skill neces- sary to use new models of teaching.) The key to getting good at them is to use them as tools of inquiry. Mobets oF LEARNING Models of teaching are really models of learning. As we help students ac- quire information, ideas, skills, values, ways of thinking, and means of ex- pressing themselves, we are also teaching them how to learn. In fact, the most important long-term outcome of instruction may be the students’ in- creased capabilities to learn more easily and effectively in the future, both be- cause of the knowledge and skill they have acquired and because they have mastered learning processes. How teaching is conducted has a large impact on students’ abilities to. educate themselves. Successful teachers are not simply charismatic and persuasive presenters. Rather, they engage their students in robust cognitive and social tasks and teach the students how to use them productively. For ex- ample, although learning to lecture clearly and knowledgeably is highly de- sirable, it is the learner who does the learning; successful lecturers teach students how to mine the information in the talk and make it their own. Ef- fective learners draw information, ideas, and wisdom from their teachers and use learning resources effectively. Thus, a major role in teaching is to create powerful learners. The same principle applies to schools. Outstanding schools teach the students to learn. Thus, teaching becomes more effective as the students progress through those schools because, year by year, the students have been taught to be stronger learners. We measure the effects of various mod- els of teaching not only by how well they achieve the specific objectives to- ward which they are directed (for example, self-esteem, social skill, information, ideas, creativity) but also by how well they increase the ability to learn, which is their fundamental purpose. Students will change as their repertoire of learning strategies increases, and they will be able to accom- plish more and more types of learning more effectively. THE RAPID RESPONSE TO CHANGES IN INSTRUCTION Many people are surprised to learn just how quickly a teacher can acceler- ate the learning rates of students. A nice example of speed and size of gain’ was provided by the 190 elementary school teachers of an Iowa school dis-PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE trict. They focused on improving the quality of writing of their students by using the inductive model of teaching (Chapter 10). With the model, they were able to help students explore the techniques used by published authors to accomplish such tasks as introducing characters, establishing settings, and describing action. At intervals the teachers collected samples of the children’s writing, which were scored by experts who did not know the iden- tity of the children. By the end of the year the children’s writing had improved dramatically. The example of the fourth grade illustrates how much they improved (Table 1.1). Their end-of-year scores for writing quality were higher than the end-of-year scores for eighth-grade students the previous year! They had made greater gains in one year than were normally achieved by compara- ble students over a period of four years. Moreover, all students had gained substantially—from the ones who started with the poorest writing skills to the ones who began with the most developed skills. A gender gap in writing (males often lag behind females in developing writing skills) narrowed sig- nificantly (Joyce, Calhoun, Carran, and Halliburton, 1995). That the same model of teaching reached all the students is also sur- prising to many people, but it is a typical finding in studies of teaching and teaching strategies. Teachers who “reach” the students with poor histories of learning and help them out of their rut also propel the best students into higher states of growth than they have been accustomed to. A group of secondary school teachers in Israel, led by Shlomo Sharan and Hana Shachar (1988), demonstrated the rapid acceleration in states of TABLE 1.1 MEAN GRADE-FOUR SCORES ON EXPOSITORY WRITING FOR FALL 1992 AND SPRING 1993 Dimensions: Focus! Grammar! Period Organization (FO) Support (SUP) Mechanics (GM) Fall M 16 22 21 sD 0.55 0.65 0.65 Spring M 28 32 3.0 sD 0.94 - 0.96 0.97 Note: In the fall, the coefficients of correlation between FO and SUP and GM were .56 and .61, respectively; between SUP and GM, the coefficient of correlation was .63. In the spring, these were .84, .65, and .74, respectively. Effect sizes computed between fall and spring scores were, for FO, 2.18, for SUP, 1.53, and for GM, 1.37. See Chapter 3 for an explanation of “effect size” and how to interpret it.CHAPTER 1 / BEGINNING THE INQUIRY growth when they studied and first began to use the group investigation model (Chapter 6), a complex form of cooperative learning. They worked with classes in which the children of the poor (referred to as “low-SES,” which is shorthand for “lower socioeconomic status”) were mixed with the children of middle-class parents (referred to as “high-SES,” for “higher so- cioeconomic status”). In a year-long social studies course, the teachers gave pretests of knowledge to the students as well as final examinations. This way they could measure students’ gains in academic learning and compare them with those of students taught by, the “whole-class” format most com- mon in Israeli schools. Table 1.2 shows the results. You can make several interesting comparisons as you read the table. First, in the pretests the lower-SES students scored significantly lower than their higher-SES counterparts. Typically, socioeconomic status is related to the knowledge students bring to the instructional situation, and these stu- dents were no exception. Then the lower-SES students taught by group in- vestigation achieved average gains nearly two and a half times those of the lower-SES students taught by the whole-class method and exceeded the scores made by the higher-SES students taught with the whole-class format. In other words, the “socially disadvantaged” students taught with group in- vestigation learned at rates above those of the “socially advantaged” stu- dents taught by teachers who did not have the repertoire provided by group investigation. Finally, the “advantaged” students also learned more through group investigation. Their average gain was twice that of their whole-class counterparts. Thus, the model was effective by a large margin for students from both backgrounds. TABLE 1.2 EFFECTS OF COMPLEX COOPERATIVE LEARNING IN A HISTORY COURSE BY SES Cooperative Learning (Treatment) Whole Class Control High SES Low SES HighSES —_ Low SES Pretest M 20.99 14.81 21,73 12.31 sD 9.20 7.20 10.53 7.05 Posttest, M 62.60 50.17 42.78 27.03 sD 10.85 14.44 14.40 13.73 Mean Gain 41.61 35.36 21.05 14.92 Source: S. Sharan and H. Shachar, Language and Learning in the Cooperative Classroom. N.Y.: Springer-Verlag, 1988.10 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE These examples should get us thinking about making a big difference for our students. As we will see, other models also can help students in- crease their learning capability, sometimes modestly and sometimes dra- matically. The important point is that teaching can make a big difference to students at both the classroom and school levels. Knowing this is the core of effective teaching, because effective teachers are confident that they can make a difference and that the difference is made by tooling up their learn- ing community. Then they study student learning closely and shape the learning environment to accelerate growth. DEsIGNING THE SCHOOL WHERE EVERYBODY CAN LEARN Imagine a school where the various models of teaching are not only in- tended to accomplish a range of curriculum goals (learning to read; to com- pute; to understand mathematical systems; to comprehend literature, science, and the social world; and to engage in the performing-arts and ath- letics) but are also designed to help the students increase their power as learners. As students master information and skills, the result of each learn- ing experience is not only the content they learn, but the increased ability they acquire to approach future learning tasks and to create programs of study for themselves. In our school the students acquire a range of learning strategies because their teachers use the models of teaching that require them. Our students learn models for memorizing information (Chapter 13). They learn how to attain concepts (Chapter 11) and how to invent them (Chapter 10). They practice building hypotheses and theories and using the tools of science to test them. They learn how to extract information and ideas from lectures and presentations (Chapter 15), how to study social issues (Chapter 8), and how to analyze their own social values (Chapter 7). Our students also know how to profit from training and how to train themselves in athletic, performing arts, mathematical, and social skills (Chapters 19-21). They know how to make their writing and problem solv- ing more lucid and creative (Chapter 14). Perhaps most important, they know how to take initiative in planning personal study (Chapter 17), and they know how to work with others to initiate and carry out cooperative programs of inquiry (Chapter 6). These students are both challenging and exhilarating to teach because their expanded learning styles enable us to teach them in the variety of ways that are appropriate for the many goals of education. Can we design such a school? You bet we can! Can we do it by using the models of teaching as rigid formulae? No we can't! Do we have to study the kids’ responses and continuously adapt the ways we teach? You bet we do! So let's continue our inquiry.CHAPTER 2 WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? How Are They Used? This work is more than worthwhile. It's transporting. The satisfaction when the veil lifts and someone realizes that the only barriers to growth are imaginary and self-imposed is almost unbearable. It must be like watching the birth of a species. —Fritz Perls to Bruce Joyce, Spring 1968 The core of the teaching process is the arrangement of environments within which the students can interact and study how to learn (Dewey, 1916). A model of teaching is a description of a learning environment. The descrip- tions have many uses, ranging from planning curriculums, courses, units, and lessons to designing instructional materials—books and workbooks, multimedia programs, and computer-assisted learning programs. Because the models provide learning tools to the students, they are uniquely suited to the development of programs for students whose “learning histories” are cause for concern. For the last 40 years we have conducted a continuous and worldwide search for promising approaches to teaching. We visit schools and class- rooms and study research on teaching and learning. We also look at the work of persons in teaching roles outside of schools, such as therapists and trainers in industrial, military, and athletic settings. We have found models of teaching in abundance. Some have broad applications, while others are designed for specific purposes. They range from simple, direct procedures that get immediate results to complex strategies that students acquire grad- ually from patient and skillful instruction. For inclusion in this book we have selected models that constitute a basic repertoire for schooling. That is, with these models we can accomplish most of the common goals of schools—and a good many goals that few schools achieve. They include many, but not all, of the major philosophical and psychological orientations toward teaching and learning, All have a12 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE coherent theoretical basis—that is, their creators provide us with a rationale that explains why we expect them to achieve the goals for which they were designed. The models selected also have long histories of practice behind them: they have been refined through experience so that they can be used comfortably and efficiently in classrooms and other educational settings. Furthermore, they are adaptable: they can be adjusted to the learning styles of students and to the requirements of the subject matter. Finally, there is evidence that they work. Besides being validated by ex- perience, all are backed by some amount of formal research that tests their theories and their abilities to gain effects. The amount of related research varies from model to model. Some are backed by a few-studies, while oth- ers have a history of literally hundreds of items of research. We have grouped the models of teaching we have discovered into four families that share orientations toward human beings and how they learn. ‘These are the social family, the information-processing family, the personal family, and the behavioral systems family. Parts II to V of the book present the models selected for each family, with the last chapter of each part deal- ing with frameworks for modifying the models to account for individual dif- ferences in students, THE SOCIAL FAMILY ‘When we work together we generate a collective energy that we call synergy. The social models of teaching are constructed to take advantage of this phe- nomenon by building learning communities. Essentially, “classroom man- agement” is a matter of developing cooperative relationships in the classroom. The development of positive school cultures is a process of de- veloping integrative and productive ways of interacting and norms that sup- port vigorous learning activity. Thus, we begin with the social family. Table 2.1 identifies the models and several of the developers and redevelopers of the social models. PARTNERS IN LEARNING (CHAPTER 6) In recent years there has been a great deal of development work on co- operative learning, and great progress has been made in developing strate- gies that help students work effectively together. The contributions of three teams—led respectively by Roger and David Johnson, Robert Slavin, and Shlomo Sharan—have been particularly notable, but the entire cooperative learning community has been active in exchanging information and tech- niques and in conducting and analyzing research (see, for example, Sharan, 1990). The result is a large number of effective means tor organizing stu- dents to-work together. These range from systems for teaching students to carry out simple learning tasks in pairs to complex models for organizing classes and even schools in learning communities that strive to educate themselves.Dedicated to Elinor and Joel Duncan. Af true humanism is congenitally driven, they've got it.CHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? TABLE 2.1 SOCIAL MODELS Models Developers (Redevelopers) Partners in learning Positive interdependence David Johnson Roger Johnson Margarita Calderon Elizabeth Cohen Structured inquiry Robert Slavin (Aronson) Group investigation John Dewey Herbert Thelan (Shlomo Sharan) (Bruce Joyce) Role playing Fannie Shaftel Jurisprudential inquiry Donald Oliver James Shaver Cooperative learning procedures facilitate learning across all curricu- lum areas and ages, improving self-esteem, social skill and solidarity, and academic learning goals ranging from the acquisition of information and skill through the modes of inquiry of the academic disciplines. In Chapter 6 we begin with the simpler forms of cooperative learning, especially as they are combined with other models of teaching. We end with the most complex model, that of group investigation, which combines preparation for life in a democratic society with academic study. GROUP INVESTIGATION (CHAPTER 6) Group investigation is the direct route to the development of the com- muuity of learners. All the simpler forms of cooperative learning are prepa- ration for rigorous, active, and integrative collective action as learners. John Dewey (1916) developed the idea—extended and refined by a great many teachers and theorists and shaped into powerful definition by Herbert The- len (1960)—that education in a democratic society should teach the demo- cratic process directly. A substantial part of the students’ education should be by cooperative inquiry into important social and academic problems. Es- sentially, the model also provides a social organization within which many other models can be used when appropriate. Group investigation has been used in all subject areas, with children of all ages, and even as the core social model for entire schools (Chamberlin and Chamberlin, 1943). The model is designed to lead students to define problems, explore various perspectives on the problems, and study together to master information, ideas, and 13PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE skills—simultaneously developing their social competence. The teacher or- ganizes the group process and disciplines it, helps the students find and or- ganize information, and ensures that there is a vigorous level of activity and discourse. ROLE PLAYING (CHAPTER 7) Role playing is included next because it leads students to understand so- cial behavior, their role in social interactions, and ways of solving problems more effectively. Designed by Fannie and George Shaftel (1982) specifically to help students study their social values and reflect on them, role playing also helps students collect and organize information about social issues, de- velop empathy with others, and attempt to improve their social skills. In ad- dition, the model asks students to “act out” conflicts, to learn to take the roles of others, and to observe social behavior. With appropriate adaptation, role playing can be used with students of all ages. JURISPRUDENTIAL INQUIRY (CHAPTER 8) As students mature, the study of social issues at community, state, na- tional, and international levels can be made available to them. The ju- risprudential model is designed for this purpose. Created especially for secondary students in the social studies, the model brings the case-study method, reminiscent of legal education, to the process of schooling (Oliver and Shaver, 1966, 1971; Shaver, 1995). Students study cases involving social problems in areas where public policy needs to be made (on issues of jus- tice and equality, poverty and power, for example). They are led to identify the public policy issues as well as options available for dealing with them and the values underlying those options. Although developed for the social studies, this model can be used in any area where there are public policy is- sues, and most curriculum areas abound with them (ethics in science, busi- ness, sports, and so on). THE INFORMATION-PROCESSING FAMILY Information-processing models emphasize ways of enhancing the human being’s innate drive to make sense of the world by acquiring and organizing data, sensing problems and generating solutions to them, and developing concepts and language for conveying them. Some models provide the learner with information and concepts, some emphasize concept formation and hypothesis testing, and still others generate creative thinking. A few are designed to enhance general intellectual ability, Many information- processing models are useful for studying the self and society, and thus for achieving the personal and social goals of education. Seven information-processing models are discussed in Part III. Table 2.2 displays the developers and redevelopers of those models.CHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? 15 TABLE 2.2 INFORMATION-PROCESSING MODELS Models Developers (Redevelopers) Inductive thinking Hilda Taba (classification-oriented) (Bruce Joyce) Concept attainment Jerome Brimer (Fred Lighthall) (Tennyson) (Cocchiarella) (Bruce Joyce) Mnemonics Michael Pressley (memory assists) Joel Levin Richard Anderson Advance organizers David Ausubel (Lawton and Wanska) Scientific inquiry Joseph Schwab Inquiry training Richard Suchman (Howard Jones) Synectics Bill Gordon INDUCTIVE THINKING (CHAPTER 10) The ability to analyze information and create concepts is generally re- garded as the fundamental thinking skill. The model presented here is an adaptation from the work of Hilda Taba (1966) and of many others (Schwab, 1965; Tennyson and Cocchiarella, 1986) who have studied how to teach students to find and organize information and to create and test hy- potheses describing relationships among sets of data. The model has been used in a wide variety of curriculum areas and with:students of all ages—it is not confined to the sciences. Phonetic and structural analysis depend on concept learning, as do rules of grammar. The structure of literature is based on classification. The study of communities, nations, and history re- quires concept learning. Even if concept learning were not so critical in the development of thought, the organization of information is so fundamental to curriculum areas that inductive thinking would be a very important model for learning and teaching school subjects. CONCEPT ATTAINMENT (CHAPTER 11) This model, built around the studies of thinking conducted by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1967), is a close relative of the inductive model.16 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE Designed both to teach concepts and to help students become more effec- tive at learning concepts, it provides an efficient method for presenting or- ganized information from a wide range of topics to students at every stage of development, The model is placed here because it provides a way of de- livering and clarifying concepts and of training students to become more ef- fective at developing concepts. MNEMONICS (MEMORY ASSISTS) (CHAPTER 13) Mnemonics are strategies for memorizing and assimilating informa- tion. Teachers can use mnemonics to guide their presentations of material (teaching in such a way that students can easily absorb the information), and they can teach devices that students can use to enhance their individ- ual and cooperative study of information and concepts. This model also has been tested over many curriculum areas and with students of many ages and characteristics. We include variations developed by Pressley, Levin, and Delaney (1982), Levin and Levin (1990), and popular applications by Lo- rayne and Lucas (1974). Because memorjzation is sometimes confused with repetitious, rote learning of obscure or arcane terms and trivial informa- tion, people sometimes assume that mnemonics deal only with the lowest level of information. That is by no means true. Mnemonics can be used to help people master interesting concepts, and in addition, they are a great deal of fun. ADVANCE ORGANIZERS (CHAPTER 15) During the last 35 years this model, formulated by David Ausubel (1963), has become one of the most studied in the information-processing family. It is designed to provide students with a cognitive structure for com- prehending material presented through lectures, readings, and other media. It has been employed with almost every conceivable content and with stu- dents of every age. It can be easily combined with other models—for exam- ple, when presentations are mixed with inductive activity. SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY (CHAPTER 12) Of the several models that engage students in scientific inquiry, we use as the primary example the work of the Biological Sciences Study Commit- tee, led by Joseph Schwab (1965). From the beginning, the student is brought into the scientific process and helped to collect and analyze data, check out hypotheses and theories, and reflect on the nature of knowledge construction. INQUIRY TRAINING (CHAPTER 12) Designed to teach students to engage in causal reasoning and to become more fluent and precise in asking questions, building concepts and hy- potheses, and testing them, this model was first formulated by RichardCHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? ‘Suchman (1962). Although originally used with the natural sciences, it has been applied in the social sciences and in training programs with personal and social content. It is included here because it has value for teaching stu- dents how to make inferences and build and test hypotheses. SYNECTICS (CHAPTER 14) Developed first for use with “creativity groups” in industrial settings, synectics was adapted by William Gordon (1961a) for use in elementary and secondary education. Synectics is designed to help people “break set” in problem-solving and writing activities and to gain new perspectives on top- ics from a wide range of fields. In the classroom it is introduced to the stu- dents in a series of workshops until they can apply the procedures individually and in cooperative groups. Although designed as a direct stim- ulus to creative thought, synectics has the side effect of promoting collabo- rative work and study skills and a feeling of camaraderie among the students. ADJUSTING TO THE STUDENT: THE DEVELOPING INTELLECT (CHAPTER 16) Models based on studies of students’ intellectual development (Kohlberg, 1976; Piaget, 1952; Sigel, 1969; Sullivan, 1967) are used to help us adjust instruction to the stage of maturity of an individual student and to design ways of increasing the students’ rate of development. These models can be used in all types of educational settings and with all types of content. They are now most often employed with young children, particularly envi- ronmentally disadvantaged children, especially when the educational goal is to accelerate their growth (Spaulding, 1970). But the applications for older students are just as important (Purpel and Ryan, 1976). Table 2.3 displays models for adapting to individual differences and planning adaptive instruction, TABLE 2.3 DEVELOPMENT, ADAPTATION, AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN MODELS oe Models Developers (Redevelopers) eee a Conceptual systems theory David Hunt 0. J. Harvey Harry Schroder Cognitive development Jean Piaget (Irving Sige!) (Constance Kamii) Conditions of learning Robert Gagne ——————— 718 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE ‘The long-term goal of all information-processing models is to teach stu- dents how to think effectively. These models rest on the thesis that students learning more complex intellectual strategies will increase their ability to master information and concepts. Taken together, they represent a full- blown “thinking skills” program: helping students learn information and concepts, the ability to analyze information and develop hypotheses, and the capacity to synthesize new ideas and solutions to problems. THE PERSONAL FAMILY Ultimately huraan reality resides in our individual consciousnesses. We de- velop unique personalities and see the world from perspectives that are the products of our experiences and positions. Common understandings are a product of the negotiation of individuals who must live and work and cre- ate families together, The personal models of learning begin from the perspective of the self- hood of the individual. They attempt to shape education so that we come to understand ourselves better, take responsibility for our education, and learn to reach beyond our current development to become stronger, more sensi- tive, and more creative in our search for high-quality lives. The cluster of personal models pays great attention to the individual perspective and seeks to encourage productive independence, so that peo- ple become increasingly self-aware and responsible for their own destinies. Table 2.4 displays the models and their developers. NONDIRECTIVE TEACHING (CHAPTER 17) Psychologist and counselor Carl Rogers (1961, 1982) was for three decades the acknowledged spokesperson for models in which the teacher plays the role of counselor. Developed from counseling theory, the model emphasizes a partnership between students and teacher. The teacher en- deavors to help the students understand how to play major roles in direct- ing their own educations—for example, by behaving in such a way as to clarify goals and participate in developing avenues for reaching those goals. The teacher provides information about how much progress is being made and helps the students solve problems. The nondirective teacher has to TABLE 2.4 PERSONAL MODELS Models Developers (Redevelopers) Nondirective teaching Carl Rogers Enhancing self-esteem Abraham Maslow (Bruce Joyce)CHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? actively build the partnerships required and provide the help needed as the students try to work out their problems. ‘The model is used in several ways. First, at the most general (and least common) level, it is used as the basic model for the operation of entire ed- ucational programs (Neill, 1960). Second, it is used in combination with other models to ensure that contact is made with the students. In this role, it moderates the educational environment. Third, it is used when students are planning independent and cooperative study projects. Fourth, it is used periodically when counseling students, finding out what they are thinking and feeling, and helping them undefstand what they are about. ‘The model has been used with all types of students and across all sub- jects and teaching roles. Although designed to promote self-understanding and independence, it has fared well as a contributor to a wide range of aca- demic objectives (see Aspy and Roebuck, 1973; Chamberlin and Chamber- lin, 1943). ENHANCING SELF-ESTEEM (CHAPTER 18) The influential work of Abraham Maslow has been used to guide pro- grams to build self-esteem and self-actualizing capability for 40 years. We explore the principles that can guide our actions as we work with our stu- dents to ensure that their personal image functions as well as possible. The personal, social, and academic goals of education are compatible with one another. The personal family of teaching models provides the es- sential part of the teaching repertoire that directly addresses the students’ needs for self-esteem and self-understanding and for the support and re- spect of other students. THe BEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS FAMILY A.common theoretical base—most commonly called social learning theory, but also known as behavior modification, behavior therapy, and cybernetics— guides the design of the models in this family. The stance taken is that human beings are self-correcting communication systems that modify be- havior in response to information about how successfully tasks are navi gated. For example, imagine a human being who is climbing (the task) an unfamiliar staircase in the dark. The first few steps are tentative as the [oot reaches for the treads. If the stride is too high, feedback is received as the foot encounters air and has to descend to make contact with the surface. If a step is too low, feedback results as the foot hits the riser. Gradually be- havior is adjusted in accordance with the feedback until progress up the stairs is relatively comfortable. Capitalizing on knowledge about how people respond to tasks and feed- back, psychologists (see especially Skinner, 1953) have learned how to or- ganize task and feedback structures to make it easy for human beings’ 19PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE self-correcting capability to function. The result includes programs for re- ducing phobias, learning to read and compute, developing social and ath- letic skills, replacing anxiety with relaxation, and learning the complexes of intellectual, social, and physical skills necessary to pilot an airplane or a space shuttle. Because these models concentrate on observable behavior and clearly defined tasks and methods for communicating progress to the student, this family of teaching models has a firm research foundation. Behavioral techniques are appropriate for learners of all ages and for an impressive range of educational goals. Part V describes four models that, to- gether, represent a part of the spectrum and provide considerable power to teachers and program and media designers. Table 2.5 displays the models and their developers. MASTERY LEARNING AND PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION (CHAPTER 19) The most common application of behavioral systems theory for aca- demic goals takes the form of what is called mastery learning (Bloom, 1971). First, material to be learned is divided into units ranging from the simple to. the complex. The material is presented to the students, generally working as individuals, through appropriate media (readings, tapes, activities). Piece by Piece, the students work their way successively through the units of materi- als, after each of which they take a test designed to help them find out what TABLE 2.5 BEHAVIORAL MODELS Models Developers (Redevelopers) Mastery learning Benjamin Bloom James Block Direct instruction Tom Good Jere Brophy Carl Gereiter Ziggy Engleman Wes Becker Simulation Carl Smith Mary Smith Social learning Albert Bandura Carl Thoresen Wes Becker Programmed schedule B. F Skinner (task performance reinforcement)CHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? a1 they have learned. If they have not mastered any given unit, they can repeat it or an equivalent version until they have mastered the material. Instructional systems based on this model have been used to provide in- struction to students of all ages in areas ranging from the basic skills to highly complex material in the academic disciplines. With appropriate adaptation, they have also been used with gifted and talented students, stu- dents with emotional problems, and athletes and astronauts. DIRECT INSTRUCTION (CHAPTER 20) From studies of the differences between more and less effective teach- ers and from sociai learning theory, a paradigm for instructing directly has been assembled. Direct statements of objectives, sets of activities clearly re- lated to the cbjectives, careful monitoring of progress, and feedback about achievement and tactics for achieving more effectively are linked with séts of guidelines for facilitating learning. t SIMULATION (CHAPTER 21) aia, ¢ ic Two approaches to training have been developed from the cybernetic) group of-behavior theorists. One is a theory-to-practice model and the othi*i | Date : is simulation. The former mixes information about a skill with demonstra- tions, practice, feedback, and coaching until the skill is mastered. For example, if an arithmetic skill is the objective, it is explained and demon- strated, practice is given with corrective feedback, and the student is asked to apply it with coaching from peers or the instructor. This variation is com- monly used for athletic training, Simulations are constructed from descriptions of real-life situations. A less-than-real-life environment is created for the instructional situation. Sometimes the renditions are elaborate (for example, flight and spaceflight simulators or simulations of international relations). The student engages in activity to achieve the goal of the simulation (to get the aircraft off the ground, perhaps, or to redevelop an urban area) and has to deal with real. istic factors until the goal is mastered. —_—_ PROFESSIONAL SKILL AND DEVELOPMENT Part VI presents a model for thinking about the design of curriculum and instruction, a procedure for learning to expand the teaching repertoire, and a position on helping students learn to increase their repertoire. THE CONDITIONS OF LEARNING (CHAPTER 22) Over the years Robert Gagné has provided ways of organizing instruc- tion that take into account both the condition of the learner and ways of22 PART! / FRAME OF REFERENCE sequencing instruction so that one activity builds on another: The resulting hierarchy is employed in curricular and instructional design. USING THE TEACHING REPERTOIRE: A FIRM YET DELICATE HAND Although we gain personal satisfaction as teachers by expanding our repertoire of tools, and although teaching is made easier by teaching stu- dents strategies for learning, all of the creators of the various models of teaching have designed them to increase student learning and thus to help us become more effective professionals. As we consider when and how to use various combinations of models and, therefore, which learning strategies will get priority for particular units and lessons and groups of students, we take into account the types and pace of learning likely to be promoted. We draw on the research to help us de- termine the sizes and kinds of effects each model has had in its history so that we can estimate its productivity if we use it properly. ‘As you study the four families of teaching models, you will want to ac- cumulate a mental picture of what each model is designed. to accomplish and whether, under certain conditions, one is likely to have a larger effect than another. Sometimes decision making is relatively easy because one model just stands out as though it was crafted for a given purpose. For example, the jurisprudential model is designed to teach students to analyze public issues in the high school. It is not appropriate for use with young children, but then neither is the study of complex national and international political and economic issues. However, a high school course that has the analysis of public issues as a major objective can give major attention to the model, which can actually be used to design a whole course or part of one. The model serves other objectives (students learn information and concepts while studying issues, and the model promotes cooperative skills), but those are its nurturant rather than its primary objectives. It is more complicated when several models can achieve the same ob- jective. For example, information can be acquired through inductive inquiry or from readings and lectures developed around advance organizers. Or the two models can be blended. While the coordination of models with objec- tives when designing curricula, courses, and activities cannot be thoroughly addressed until the four families have been studied, we need to keep in mind as we study each model that it eventually becomes part of a repertoire that we draw on as we design programs of learning As we study the research base, we learn to estimate the magnitude of ef- fects we can get when we teach the students any given model in compari- son with some other possible procedure. The cognitive and social tasks that each model of teaching provides to students are designed to create energy that will result in particular kinds of learning. The effects of each model are the types of learning prompted byCHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? the model in comparison to a condition in which that model or some equiv- alent one is not being used. For example, we can ask, “Are certain kinds of learning enhanced when students study together compared to when they study alone?” Notice that this is a question of comparison. Clearly students can learn under either condition. The question when choosing models is which will probably pay off best in certain courses, units, or episodes. Also, we have to keep in mind that there are many kinds of learning and that some may be enhanced through cooperative study whereas others may not. Placement of models in a program of study is important, as is blending them appropriately. Consider a program to teach students a new language. One of the early tasks when learning a new language is to develop an initial vocabulary. The link-word method has been dramatically successful in ini- tial vocabulary acquisition, in some cases helping students acquire and re- tain words as much as twice as fast as normal (Pressley, Levin, and Delaney, 1982), making it a good choice for use early in the program. Students need to acquire skills in reading, writing, and conversation that are enhanced by an expanded vocabulary; then other models that generate practice and syn- thesis can be used. To make matters more complicated, we have to acknowletige, thank- fully, that students are not identical. What helps one person learn a given thing more efficiently may not help another as much. Fortunately, there are few known cases where an educational treatment that helps a given type of student a great deal has serious damaging effects on another type, but dif- ferences in positive effects can be substantial and need to be taken into account when we design educational environments. Thus, we pay consid- erable attention to the “learning history” of students, how they have pro- gressed academically, their self-image, their cognitive and personality developmenit, and their social skills and attitudes. Also, students will change as their repertoire of learning strategies in- creases. As they become a more powerful learning community, they will be able to accomplish more and more types of learning more effectively. All the models of teaching in this book can enhance the ability of students to achieve various learning objectives. In a very real sense, increasing aptitude to learn is one of the fundamental purposes of these models. Thus, in assessing the research, we are concerned with the general ed- ucational effects of each model and the specific, “model-relevant” effects for which it was designed. For example, the inductive models were designed to teach students the methods of science. That is their primary, direct mission Research clearly indicates that those models achieve those effects very well, but that traditional, “chalk-and-talk” methods of teaching science are poor instruments for teaching the scientific method (Bredderman, 1983; El- Nemr, 1979). Just as important, scientific inquiry increases the amount of information students learn, encourages their development of concepts, and improves their attitudes toward science. What is of interest to us is that those models both achieve their primary goals and have general educational benefits, including gains in student aptitude to learn. 2324 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE ‘We are satisfied when some models achieve small but consistent effects that accumulate over time. The advance organizer model, which is designed to increase the acquisition and retention of information from lectures and other kinds of presentations such as films and readings, achieves its results when the “organizers” are properly used (Joyce and Showers, 1995). Con- sider the thousands of hours of presentations and readings to which stu- dents are exposed as part of their education: lectures, written assignments, and films and other media are so pervasive as educational tools that even relatively modest increments of knowledge from specific uses of organizers can add up to impressive increases in learning. Perhaps the most interesting research has resulted when several mod- els have been combined to attack multifaceted educational problems. Robert L. Spaulding, for example, developed a program for economically poor, socially disruptive, low-achieving children that used social learning theory techniques based on knowledge from developmental psychology and inductive teaching models. That program succeeded in improving students’ social skills and cooperative learning behavior, induced students to take more responsibility for their education, substantially increased students’ learning of basic skills and knowledge, and even improved students’ perfor- mance on tests of intelligence (Spaulding, 1970). ‘Spaulding’s work illustrates the importance of combining models in an educational program to pyramid their effects and achieve multiple objec- tives. Effective education requires combinations of personal, social, and academic leaining that can best be achieved by using several appropriate models. ‘Also, although many models have been designed to promote specific kinds of learning, they do not necessarily inhibit other objectives. For ex- ample, because inductive teaching methods are designed to teach students how to form concepts and test hypotheses, it is sometimes assumed that they will inhibit the “coverage” of information. Tests of these models have found that they are also excellent ways of helping students learn informa- tion. In addition, the information so learned is likely to be retained longer than that learned by the recitation and drill-and-practice methods that are so common in schools (Worthen, 1968). Methods designed for particular kinds of content can often be adapted successfully for others. Inductive methods, for example, were designed for academic content in the sciences and’social sciences, but they can also be used for studying literature and social values. However, it would be a mistake to assume that, because a particular model is effective, it should be used exclusively. Inductive models illustrate this point. If they are used relentlessly for all purposes, they achieve less- than-optimal results. Creativity is valuable, and the creative spirit should pervade our lives, But much learning requires noncreative activity. Memo- rization is important, too, but to build all of education around memoriza- tion would be a serious mistake.CHAPTER 2 / WHERE DO MODELS OF TEACHING COME FROM? A few models of learning can have dramatic effects in specific applica- tions. The link-word method, one of several models that assist memoriza- tion, has increased rates of learning two to three times in a series of experiments. Essentially, this means that students learned given amounts of material two to three times faster when they used the link-word method than they would have if they had used customary procedures for memoriz- ing words (Pressley, Levin, and Delaney, 1982). However, such dramatic ef- fects should not lead us to attempt to achieve all objectives with the link-word method. It is one of the models of choice when rapid acquisition of information is the objective, but it is not the sole answer to the problems of education. On the other hand, it should not be sold short. It has been shown to be useful. to teach hierarchies of concepts in science (Levin and Levin, 1990), addressing one of the important and most complex instruc- tional goals. It also nurtures academic self-confidence—more rapid and confident learning almost always helps students feel better about them- selves. Thus, as we study the tested alternative models of teaching, we find no easy route to a single model that is superior for all purposes, or even that should be the sole avenue to any given objective. However, we do find pow- erful options that we can link to the multiple educational goals that consti- tute a complete educational diet. The message is that the most effective teachers (and designers) need to master a range of models and prepare for a career-long process of adding new tools and polishing and expanding their old ones. Satisfaction from personal and professional growth and exploration should be reason enough for teachers to set as a goal not one or two basic models to use for all purposes, but a variety that they explore for the po- tential they hold for pupils and teachers alike. The world we hope to see is one in which children (and older students) will experience many models of teaching and learn to profit from them. As teachers increase their repertoires, so will students increase theirs and be- come more powerful and multifaceted learners. That is the raison d’étre of Models of Teaching. 25CHAPTER TEACHING AS INQUIRY Taking Off from the Research Base It's Inquiry, INQUIRY, INQUIRY! Do I sound like a broken record? But Thelen was right! It’ inquiry, not activity! —Emily Calhoun to Bruce Joyce, for the thousandth time SCENARIO ‘The teachers of Kaiser Elementary School in the Newport/Costa Mesa School District have been learning to use the inductive model of teaching to help their students connect reading and writing. The objective is to see if the students can learn to generate better-quality writing by analyzing how expert writers work. For example, when studying how to introduce charac- ters, the students classify the approaches used by authors in the books they are reading. They then experiment with the devices they have identified. Periodically, the teachers ask the students to produce writing elicited with standardized content and prompts. The students might watch a seg- ment of film that introduces a character and then be asked to provide a writ- ten introduction to the character. These samples of writing are scored with an instrument developed at the UCLA Center for Research on Evaluation (Quellmalz and Burry, 1983) to measure quality of writing across the grades. This instrument yields scores on three dimensions of quality. The year before the teachers began to design the teaching of writing with the inductive model, the average gain during a year was about 20 points on the scale. For example, the fourth-grade average climbed from a score of 180 to 200, The grade-six average moved from about 220 to about 240. As the teachers taught the students to make the connection between reading and writing, the average gain jumped to about 90 points the first year: The average student gained about four and a half times more than the 2728 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE average gain the previous year. No student gained less than 40 points. Some gained as much as 140 points. The teachers surveyed the research on the teaching of writing and found some examples of what looked like large gains when particular curriculum approaches were implemented. They wondered how they could compare the results of their efforts when some studies used different scales. In this chapter we will explore what the Kaiser teachers found—a tool that will help us as we examine the research underlying various models of teaching. More important, welll see how that tool can be applied to your inquiries into teaching. Our Kaiser teachers are inquirers. They conduct teaching as an action re- search activity, using the knowledge base on teaching as a starting point, then studying student response, preparing to adapt what they are doing and also to seek new models that can enhance their students’ learning repertoire. This chapter is an introduction to the knowledge base and to tools for individual and collective inquiry into teaching. Models of teaching link ed- ucational theory and research to contemporary classroom practice. Each model is built on long study of teaching and learning. But they are all in the process of being improved, both through formal research and through the study of teacher-researchers all over the world. Thus, we urge that you use the models as a framework for your study of teaching and as points of de- parture for your inquiry rather than regarding them as formulas that will work without further need to study student response. We'll begin our quest with an important tool, one that can be used to as- sess the existing knowledge base and that will help us conduct inquiry linked to that base. THe CONCEPT OF EFFECT SIZE We use the concept of “effect size” (Glass, 1982) to describe the magni- tude of gains from any given change in educational practice and thus to pre- dict what we can hope to accomplish by using that practice. To introduce the idea, let us consider a study conducted by Dr. Bharati Baveja with the authors (1988) in the Motilal Nehru School of Sports about 30 miles northwest of New Delhi, India. Dr. Baveja designed her study to test the effectiveness of an inductive approach to a botany unit compared with an intensive tutorial treatment. All the students were given a test at the beginning of the unit to assess their knowledge before instruction began and were divided into two groups equated on the basis of achievement. The control group studied the material with the aid of tutoring and lectures on the material—the standard treatment in Indian schools for courses of this type. The experimental group worked in pairs and were led through induc- tive and concept attainment exercises emphasizing classification of plants.CHAPTER 3 / TEACHING AS INQUIRY Figure 3.1 shows the distribution of scores for the experimental and control groups on the posttest which, like the pretest, contained items deal- ing with the information pertaining to the unit. The difference between the experimental and control groups was a lit- tle above a standard deviation. The difference, computed in terms of stan- dard deviations, is the effect size of the inductive treatment. Essentially, what that means is that the experimental-group average score was where the 80th percentile score was for the control group. The difference increased when a delayed recall test was given 10 months later, indicating that the informa- tion acquired with the concept-oriented strategies was retained somewhat better than information gained via the control treatment. Calculations like these enable us to compare the magnitude of the po- tential effects of the innovations (teaching skills and strategies, curricula, and technologies) that we might use in an effort to affect student learning. We can also determine whether the treatment has different effects for all kinds of students or just for some. In the study described just above, the ex- perimental treatment was apparently effective for the whole population The lowest score in the experimental-group distribution was about where the 30th-percentile score was for the control group, and about 30 percent of the students exceeded the highest score obtained in the control. Although substantial in their own right, gains in learning and retention of information were modest when we consider the effect on the students’ ability to identify plants and their characteristics, which was measured on a separate test. The scores by students from the experimental group were eight times higher than the scores for the control group. Baveja’s inquiry FIGURE 3.1 Compared distributions for experimental and control groups: Baveja study. 2930 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE confirmed her hypothesis that the students, using the inductive model, were able to apply the information and concepts from the unit much more ef- fectively than were the students from the tutorial treatment. FURTHER INQUIRY INTO EFFECT SIZE Let’s work through some concepts that are useful in describing distri- butions of scores to deepen our understanding a bit. We describe distributions of scores in terms of the central tendencies, which refer to the clustering of scores around the middle of the distribution, and variance, or their dispersion. Concepts describing central tendency in- clude the average or arithmetic mean, which is computed by summing the scores and dividing by the number of scores, the median or middle score (half of the others are above and half below the median score), and the mode, which is the most frequent score (graphically, the highest point in the distribution). In Figure 3.2 the median, average, and mode are all in the same place, because the distribution is completely symmetrical. Dispersion is described in terms of the range (the distance between the highest and lowest scores), the rank, which is frequently described in per- centiles (the 20th score from the top in a 100-person distribution is at the 80th percentile because 20 percent of the scores are above and 80 percent are below it), and the standard deviation, which describes how widely or narrowly scores are distributed, In Figure 3.3, the range is from 70 (the lowest score) to 150 (the highest score), The 50th-percentile score is at the middle (in this case cor- responding with the average, the mode, and the median). The standard devia- FIGURE 3.2 A sample normal distribution.CHAPTER / TEACHING AS INQUIRY FIGURE 3.3 A sample normal distribution with standard deviations. tions are marked off by the vertical lines labeled +1 SD, +2 SD, and soon. Note that the percentile rank of the score 1 standard deviation above the mean is 84 (84 percent of the scores are below that point); the rank 2 standard deviations above the mean is 97; and 3 standard deviations above the mean is 99. When the mean, median, and mode coincide as in these distributions, and the distribution of scores is as symmetrical as the ones depicted in these figures, the distribution is referred to as normal. This concept is useful in statistical operations, although many actual distributions are not symmet- rical, as we will see. To explain the concept of effect size, we will use sym- metrical, “normal” distributions before illustrating how the concept works with differently shaped distributions. Thus, in Figure 3.4 we will convert the results of the study of group in- vestigation that appeared in Table 1.2 to graphical form. Figure 3.4 com- pares the posttest scores of the low-SES students in the “whole-class” and “group investigation” treatments. The average score of the “group investi- gation” treatment corresponds to about the 92nd percentile of the distribu- tion of the “whole-class” students. The effect size is computed by dividing the difference between the two means by the standard deviation of the “con- trol” or “whole-class” group. The effect size in this case is 1.6 standard de- viations using the formula ES = Average of experimental group - Average of control group + Standard deviation of control Throughout the book figures like these will provide an idea about the relative effects one can expect if one teaches students with each model of 31PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE FIGURE 3.4 A sample depiction of effect size: Sharan-Shachar study. teaching compared with using the normative patterns of curriculum and in- struction. We will create each figure from an analysis of the research base currently available and will usually build the figure to depict the average ef- fects from large numbers of studies. When using the research base to decide when to use a given model of teach- ing it is important to realize that size of effects is not the only consideration. ‘We have to consider the nature of the objectives and the uses of the model. For example, in Spaulding’s study described above, the effect size on ability measures was just 0.5, or about a half standard deviation (see Figure 3.5). However, ability is a powerful attribute, and a model or combination of models that can increase ability will have an effect on everything the stu- dent does for years to come, increasing learning through those years. The simplest cooperative learning procedures have relatively modest effect sizes, affecting feelings about self as a learner, social skills, and academic learning, and they are easy to use and have wide applications. Thus, their modest effect can be felt more regularly and broadly than some models that have more dramatic effect sizes with respect to a given objective. ‘Some models can help us virtually eliminate dispersion in a distribution. For example, a colleague of ours used mnemonic devices to teach his fourth- grade students the names of the states and their capitals. All his students learned all of them and remembered them throughout the year. Thus the dis tribution of his class's scores on tests of their ability to supply all the names ona blank map had no range at all. The average score was the highest pos- sible score. There were no percentile ranks because the students’ scores were all tied at the top. For some objectives—basic knowledge about the U.S. Con- stitution, computation skills, a basic reading vocabulary—we want, in fact, to have a very high degree of success for all our students because anything less-is terribly disadvantaging for them—and for their society.CHAPTER 3 / TEACHING AS INCUIRY FIGURE 3.5 A sample effect size: ability scores from Spaviding study. Although high effect sizes make a treatment attractive, size alone is not the only consideration when choosing among alternatives. Modest effect sizes that affect many persons can have a large payoff for the population. A comparison with medicine is worthwhile. Suppose a dread disease is af- fecting a population and we possess a vaccine that will reduce the chances Steontracting the disease by only 10 percent. Ifa million persons might be- came infected without the vaccine but 900,000 if it is used, the modest ef- fect of the vaccine might save 100,000 lives. In education, some estimates suggest that during the first year of school about one million children, each year (about 30 percent) make little progress toward learning to read. We iso know that lack of success in reading instruction is in fact a dread edu- cational disease, since for each year that initial instruction is unsuccessful the probability that the student will respond to instruction later is greatly lowered, Would a modestly effective treatment—say, one that reduced the bck of success in the first year for 50,000 children by 5 percent—be worth: taf ile? We think so. Also, several such treatments might be cumulative. Of course, we prefer a high-effect treatment, but one is not always available. Even when itis, it might not reach some students and we might need to re- sort to a less-powerful choice for those students. Also, different types of effects need to be considered. Attitudes, values, concepts, intellectual development, skills, and information are just a few. Keeping to the example of early reading, two treatments might be approxi- nately equal in terms of learning to read in the short run, but one might af- fect artitudes positively and leave the students feeling confident and ready to try again, Similarly, two social studies programs might achieve similar we jounts of information and concepts, but one might excel in attitudes foward citizenship. In the most dramatic instances, when the effect size weches five or six standard deviations, the lowest-scoring student in the 33PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE experimental treatment exceeds the highest-scoring student in the control treatment! This is a rare event, of course, but when it does occur, it gives us great hope about the potential of educational practice. Again, as we describe some practices and the effects that can be ex- pected from them, we should not concentrate on magnitude of effects alone. Self-instructional programs that are no more effective than standard in- struction can be very useful because they enable students to teach them- selves and can be blended with agent-delivered instruction. Broadcast television, because of its potential to reach so many children, can make a big difference even though it is modestly effective in comparison with stan- dard instruction. Sesame Street and the Electric Company (Ball and Bogatz, 1970) are examples. They are not dramatically more effective than first. grade instruction without them, but they produce Positive attitudes and augment instruction handsomely, enabling a certain percentage of students to virtually teach themselves. In fact, distance education and media-based instruction (learning from television, computer-assisted instruction, and packages of multimedia materials) need not be more effective to be terribly useful. For example, in a high school that does not offer a given foreign lan- guage, a student who can learn that language by self-study assisted by tele- vision, computer programs, and such can benefit greatly. The British Open University, operated as distance education augmented by tutorial centers, virtually doubled the number of university graduates in the United King. dom, and the performance of its students on academic tests compared fa- vorably with the performance of “regular” university students. Some procedures can interact productively with others. One-to-one tu- toring has a very large effect size (Bloom, 1984) and might interact pro- ductively with some teaching strategies. Or, as is evidently the case within the “Success for All” (Slavin, Madden, Karweit, Livermon, and Dolan, 1990) and “Reading Recovery” (Pinnell, 1989) programs, it is incorporated within a curriculum management system that enables short periods of tutoring to pay off handsomely. On the other hand, “tracking” hurts the effectiveness of any procedure (Oakes, 1986). Simply learning the size of effects of a year’s instruction can be very in- formative, as we learned from the National Assessment of Writing Progress (Applebee et al., 1990). This assessment revealed that the effect size of in- struction in writing nationally is such that the average eighth-grade student is about at the 62nd percentile of the fourth-grade distribution! Schools may want to learn how much better they can do than that! Measures of learning can be of many kinds. School grades are of great importance, as are measures of conduct such as counts of referrals and sus- pensions. In fact, staff development programs want to give close attention to those measures as well as simple measures such as how many books students read. Content analyses of student work are very important, as in the study of quality of writing. Curriculum-relevant tests (those that measure the content of a unit or course) are important. Finally, the traditional standardized tests can be submitted to an analysis that produces estimates of effect size.CHAPTERS / TEACHING AS INQUIRY sc ENA RIO When our Kaiser School faculty discovered the concept of effect size, they were able to calculate the effects of their efforts in such a way that they could compare their results to those of other efforts. They consulted the re- view of research on writing conducted by George Hillocks (1987) and found that the average effect size of “inquiry” approaches to the teaching of writ- ing was 0.67 compared to textbook-oriented instruction. The average stu- dent in the average treatment was at about the 70th percentile of the distributions of students taught by the textbook method. For each grade the teachers carefully calculated the effect size. For example, their sixth grade had gained an average of 90 points compared with an average of 20 the pre- vious year (the control), a difference of 70 points. The standard deviation of the control year was 55. Dividing 55 into 70 they calculated an effect size of 1.27, nearly twice the average in the Hillocks review. The average student in the first year the inductive model was used was at approximately the 90th percentile of the distribution of the control year. Figure 3.6 depicts the two distributions. ‘As we said before, our Kaiser teachers are inquirers. They picked a model of teaching, learned to use it, and inquired into its effects on the students, ‘The inquiry will lead them to continue to search for ways of using that FIGURE 3.6 Comparison of Kaiser students’ gains in quality of writing, 1993-94 with 1994-95.36 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE model well and for other models that can serve their students. They are clas- sic “teacher-researchers.” The state of the art is not such that any specific curricular or instruc- tional models can solve ail problems of student learning. Educational re- search is in its infancy. We hope that the readers of this book will not just use it as a source of teaching and learning strategies, but will learn how to add to the knowledge base. There are more than two million teachers in the United States alone. If only 1 percent conducted and reported one study each year, there would be 20,000 new studies every year, a knowledge in- crement several times larger than the entire current base. But aside from contributing to the larger knowledge base, teachers in any school can, by studying their teaching, share ideas that can help everyone in the school be- come more effective Gettin GOING: SURVEYING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE The following pages are designed to provide an introduction to some of the research underlying the models of teaching described later in the book and also some other sources of research on teaching practices. The aspects of research dealt with are ones that we believe can provide some understand- ing of the yield to date, but the review is not exhaustive. To summarize all the research would require several volumes. This book is about teaching, so most of its space needs to be devoted to the models and how they work However, the models rely heavily on the knowledge base. We need to con- sider the nature of that base and how to use it to help us select the models that will best fuel our quest to do our job knowledgeably and well. Our focus is on what can be achieved if any given model is used well. From that start- ing point, you learn one model and conduct your own inquiry to see how it works and whether you can improve it TO Tnoumry INTO MODELS OF TEACHING Most models of teaching are designed for specific purposes—the teaching of information, concepts, ways of thinking, the study of social values, and so on—by asking students to engage in particular cognitive and social tasks. The research generally begins with a thesis describing an educational envi. ronment, its presumed effects, and a rationale that links the environment and its intended effects—how to develop concepts or to learn them, how to build theories, memorize information, solve problems, learn skills. Some models center on delivery by the instructor while others develop as the learners respond to tasks, and the student is regarded as a partner in the ed- ucational enterprise. However, all mature educational models emphasizeCHAPTERS / TEACHING AS INQUIRY how to help students learn to construct knowledge—learning how to learn—. including learning from sources that are often stereotyped as passive, such as learning from lectures, films, reading assignments, and such. Testing instructional models requires training teachers to use them. The first step in theory-driven research is often the collection of baseline data about how the teachers normally teach. Then the teachers are prepared to use the new teaching behaviors, including how to teach the students the “learning skills” essential to the model. Since most teachers have used the “recitation” or “lecture-recitation” as the primary mode of teaching (Good- lad, 1984; Goodlad and Klein, 1970; Hoetker and Ahlbrand, 1969; Sirotnik, 1983), training in new strategies must be extensive enough that the new model becomes comfortable. Implementation of the new behavior is moni- tored, either in the regular classroom or in a laboratory setting, and theory- relevant student behaviors or outcomes are measured, Experimental classrooms are often compared with control classrooms to determine the presence, direction, and magnitude of change, with the use of the concept of effect size. In lines of programmatic research, such as those conducted by Pressley, Levin, and their colleagues on mnemonics (Levin and Levin, 1990) and those by Sharan (1990, 1992) and his colleagues on complex co- operative learning models, repeated studies attempt to engineer increas- ingly effective ways of helping students learn. One way of looking at this type of research is that the development of a model of teaching is the process of submitting an educational idea to repeated testing and refinement until the idea has matured to the point where fairly precise predictions can be made about how to use it and the effects to be expected if it is implemented well. In nearly all cases the mastery of a model by the students is the key to effec- tiveness—the students have 16 learn how to engage in the particular learn- ing process emphasized by that model. INQUIRY INTO COOPERATIVE LEARNING MODELS There have been three lines of research on ways of helping students study and learn together, one led by David and Roger Johnson, a second by Robert Slavin, and the third by Shlomo and Yael Sharan and Rachel Hertz- Lazarowitz in Israel. Among other things, the Johnsons and their colleagues (1974, 1981, 1990) have studied the effects of cooperative task and reward structures on learning. The Johnsons’ (1975a, 1981) work on peers teaching peers has provided information about the effects of cooperative behavior on both traditional learning tasks and on values and intergroup behavior and attitudes. Their models emphasize the development of what they call posi- tive interdependence, or cooperation where collective action also celebrates individual differences. Slavin’s extensive 1983 review includes the study of a variety of approaches where he manipulates the complexity of the social tasks and experiments with various types of grouping. He reported success with the use of heterogeneous groups with tasks requiring coordination of group members,, both on academic learning and intergroup relations, and 7PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE has generated a variety of strategies that employ extrinsic and intrinsic re- ward structures. The Israeli team has concentrated on group investigation, the most complex of the social models of teaching. What is the magnitude of effects that we can expect when we learn to use the cooperative learning strategies effectively? Rolheiser-Bennett (1986) compared the effects of the degrees of cooperative structure required by the several approaches (Joyce, Showers, and Rolheiser-Bennett, 1989). On standardized tests in the basic curriculum areas (such as reading and mathematics), the highly structured approaches to teaching students wo ‘work together generated effect sizes of an average 0.28 with some studies approaching half a standard deviation. On criterion-referenced tests the av- erage was 0.48, with some of the best implementations reaching an effect of about 1 standard deviation, The more elaborate cooperative learning models generated an average effect size of somewhat more than 1 standard deviation, with some exceeding 2 standard deviations. (The average student was above the 90th percentile student in the control group.) The effects on higher-order thinking were even greater, with an average effect of about 1.25 standard deviations and effects in some studies as high as 3 standard devi- ations (Figure 3.7). WHOLE-SCHOOL COOPERATIVE LEARNING Research that compares schools has gone on for some time. In the early years, these studies were designed on a planned-variation model, where schools operating from different stances toward education were compared FIGURE 3.7 Effects of elaborate cooperative learning strategies on student achieve- ment compared with noncooperative lecture/recitation procedures.CHAPTER 3. / TEACHING AS INQUIRY with one another. For example, 50 years ago the beautifully designed “eight- year study” (Chamberlin and Chamberlin, 1943) submitted the theses of the Progressive Movement (largely cooperative learning-oriented) to a serious (and generally successful) test and defended it against the suggestion that social and personal models of education were dangerous to the academic health of students. Recent research on unusually effective schools has found that one of their most prominent characteristics is a cooperative social cli- mate in which all faculty and students work together to build a supportive, achievement-oriented climate. Taken as a whole, research on cooperative learning is overwhelmingly positive—nearly every study has had from modest to very high effects. ‘Moreover, the cooperative approaches are effective over a range of achieve- ment measures. The more intensely cooperative the environment, the greater the effects—and the more complex the outcomes (higher-order pro- cessing of information, problem solving), the greater the effects. The cooperative environment engendered by these models has had sub- stantial effects on the cooperative behavior of the students, increasing feel- ings of empathy for others, reducing intergroup tensions and aggressive and antisocial behavior, improving moral judgment, and building positive feel- ings toward others, including those of other ethnic groups. Many of these ef- fect sizes are substantial—I or 2 standard deviations are not uncommon and one is as high as 8. Hertz-Lazarowitz (1993) used one of the models to cre- ate integrative interaction between Israeli and Arab students in the West Bank! Margarita Calderon has worked with Lazarowitz and Jusefina Tina- jero to adapt a cooperative integrated reading and composition program for bilingual students with some nice results (Calderon, Hertz-Lazarowitz, and Tinajero, 1991). An adaptation in higher education that organizes students into cooperative study groups reduced a dropout rate in engineering from 40 to about 5 percent (Bonsangue, 1993). Conflict-resolution strategies have taught students to develop integrative behavior and reduced social tension in some very divided environments in inner-city schools (Johnson and John- son, 1990). INQUIRY INTO INFORMATION-PROCESSING MODELS Quite a number of models of teaching are designed to increase students’ ability to process information more powerfully. These include methods for presenting information so that students can learn and retain it more effec- tively by operating on it more conceptually, systems that assist memoriza- tion and teach students how to organize information for mastery, models to teach students to collect and organize information conceptually, and ones to teach students to use the methods of the disciplines, to engage in causal reasoning, and to master concepts. Many of these models have an extensive recent research literature (the number ranges from about a dozen to more than 300 publications). We will discuss just three models here: advance organizers, mnemonics, and scien- tific inquiry. 3940 PART! / FRAME OF REFERENCE ADVANCE ORGANIZERS David Ausubel's formulation (1963) that there would be greater reten- tion of materials from presentations and reading if the material was ac- companied by organizing ideas has generated more than 200 studies. Essentially, lectures, assignments of reading and research, and courses are accompanied by presentations of concepts that help the student increase in- tellectual activity during and after exposure to information. The early stud- ies involved much experimentation with ways of formulating and delivering organizers. Because of modest findings, some reviewers asserted that the line of work was not paying off (Barnes and Clausen, 1975). The technique advanced quite a bit during the 1970s, however, and current reviewers are quite positive (Lawton and Wanska, 1977a, 1979; Luiten, Ames, and Acker- son, 1980). Rolheiser-Bennett’s (1986) review of 18 recent investigations turned up an average effect size of lower-order achievement (such as the re- call of information and concepts) of 1.35. (With such an effect the average student studying with the aid of organizers learned about as much as the 90th-percentile student studying the same material without the assistance of the organizing ideas.) The effects on higher-order thinking (transfer of concepts to new material, and so on) averaged 0.42. Longer-term studies ob- tained somewhat better results than did short-term studies, presumably be- cause the organizing ideas became better anchored in the minds of the students and had greater facilitating effect. Stone's (1983) analysis indicated that organizers are effective across ages, being somewhat more effective for students at the stage of concrete opera- tions (when students may need more assistance formulating abstract ideas to anchor content), and across curriculum areas. Illustrations add to the effec- tiveness of organizers, and the impact is increased when they lead to activi- ties and generalizations. While organizers affect several kinds of outcomes, recall of facts and formulas is most affected. The prediction that can be made is that teachers who accompany presentations and written assignments with or- ganizers will have consistent, although sometimes modest, effects on the learn- ing of information and concepts. Because readings and lectures repeatedly reach so many learners, the curnulative potential is great. Also, structuring a course around organizers, organizing presentations and assignments within the course, tying the organizers to activities that require their application, and illustrating them can have effects as high as 2 standard deviations. (With an effect of that size, the lowest-achieving students are about where the av- erage student would be when studying without the help of organizers. The rest of the distribution is comparably above the control.) MNEMONICS (SYSTEMS TO IMPROVE MEMORIZATION) Although research on memorization and mnemonic strategies has been conducted for more than a hundred years, until a few years ago most of the yield for school practice offerred few and very general guidelines, such as advice about when to mass and when to distribute practice. Little researchCHAPTERS / TEACHING AS INQUIRY had been conducted on the learning of school subjects. In the mid-1970s a productive line of work was begun by Atkinson at Stanford University that has been greatly extended by Pressley and Levin at the Universities of West- ern Ontario and Wisconsin. They have developed a series of systems for or- ganizing information to promote memory and have given. particular, although not exclusive, attention to a method known as the “link-word” ‘method. Atkinson applied the method during experiments with computer assisted instruction in which he was attempting to increase students’ learn- ing of initial foreign language vocabularies. He experimented with what he called “acoustic” and “imagery” links. The first was designed to make asso- Giations between foreign pronunciations and the sounds of known English words. The second was used to make the connection vivid (Atkinson, 1975). Tone early study the link-word method produced as much learning in two trials as the conventional method did in three. The experimental group Iearned about half as many words more than the control group and main- tained the advantage after several weeks. He also found that the method was enhanced when the students supplied their own imagery. Further developmental work included experiments with children of var- ious ages and across subjects. Using a link-word system in Spanish vocab- uulary learning, second- and fifth-grade children learned about twice the number of words as did children using rote and rehearsal methods (Press- ley, 1977). In later work with Levin and Miller (Pressley, Levin, and Miller, 1981a, 1981b), Pressley employed a “pictured action” variant of the method with first- and sixth-grade children, who acquired three times as much vo- cabulary as did control groups. With Dennis-Rounds (Pressley and Dennis- Rounds, 1980), he extended the strategy to social studies information (products and cities) and learned that students could transfer the method to other learning tasks with instruction. Pressley, Levin, and McCormick (1980) found that primary school students could generate sentences to en- hance memorization. The results were three times as great as for students using their own methods. Similar results were found with kindergarten and preschool children (Pressley et al., 1981a, 1981b). Pressley and colleagues (1981a, 1981b) successfully extended the work to vocabulary with abstract meanings. Levin and Levin (1990) have also extended the application to ab- stract prose. Tt was important to learn whether better “natural” memorizers, with practice, develop their own equivalent methods. Pressley, Levin, and Ghatala (1984) asked whether students, with age and practice, would spon- taneously develop elaborated methods for memorizing material and found that very few did. The better performers had developed more elaborate methods than the majority, who used rote-rehearsal methods alone. How- ever, the newly developed mnemonic methods enhanced learning for the best memorizers, as well as for the others. Hence, it appears that the method or an equivalent one can be beneficial for most students. ‘The consistency of the findings is impressive. The link-word method ap- pears to have general applicability across subject matters and ages of 4142 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE children (Pressley, Levin, and Delaney, 1982) and can be used by teachers and taught to children. The effect sizes reached by many of the studies are quite high. The average for transfer tasks (where the material learned was to be applied in another setting) was 1.91. Recall of attributes of items (such as towns, cities, minerals) was 1.5. Foreign language acquisition was 1.3, with many studies reporting very high outcomes. Delayed recall generally maintained the gains, indicating that the mnemonics strategies have a last- ing effect. SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY Models taken directly from the sciences have been the basis for curric- ula for both elementary and high school children. A description of the teaching skills and the effects of the science-based curriculums is included ina later section of this chapter. The results of the research indicate that the scientific method can be taught and has positive effects on the acquisition of information, concepts, and attitudes. More narrowly defined studies have been made on inductive teaching and inquiry training. Beginning with Taba’s (1966) exploration of an inductive social studies curriculum, periodic small-scale studies have probed the area. In 1968 Worthen provided evi- ence to support one of its central theses—that induced concepts would fa- cilitate long-term recall. Feeley (1972) reviewed the social science studies and reported that differences in terminology hampered the accumulation of research but that the inductive methods generally lived up to expectations, generating concept development and positive attitudes. Research on Such. man’s (1964) model for teaching causal reasoning directly supported the Proposition that inquiry training can be employed with both elementary and high school children. Schrenker (1976) reported that inquiry training resulted in increased understanding of science, greater productivity in crit. ical thinking, and skills for obtaining and analyzing information. He re- ported that it made little difference in the mastery of information per se, but that it was as efficient as didactic methods or the didactic-cum-laboratory methods. generally employed to teach science. Ivany (1969) and Collins (1969) examined variants in the kinds of confrontations and materials used and reported that the strength of the confrontation as a stimulus to inquiry was important and that richness in instructional materials was a significant factor. Elefant (1980) successfully carried out the strategy with deaf chil- dren in an intriguing study that has implications for work with all children. Voss's (1982) general review includes an annotation of a variety of studies that are generally supportive of the approach. Currently the clearest evidence about the potential effects on students comes from the study of the academically oriented curriculums in science and mathematics that were developed and used during the 20-year period from 1955 to 1975 and from the experience with elementary curriculums in a variety of subject areas (Becker and Gersten, 1982; Rhine, 1981). The the- ory of the academic curriculums was relatively straightforward. The essenceCHAPTERS / TEACHING AS INQUIRY of the position was stated in Bruner’s The Process of Education (1961) and ‘Schwab and Brandwein’s The Teaching of Science (1962). The teaching of sci- ence should be as much as possible a simulation of the scientific process it- self. The concepts of the disciplines should be studied rigorously in relation to their knowledge base. Thus science would be learned as inquiry. Further, the information learned would be retained well because it would be embed- ded in a meaningful ftamework and the student would possess the interre- lated concepts that make up the structure of the disciplines. In the academic retorm movement of the 1950s and 1960s, entire cur- riculums in the sciences (for example, Biological Sciences Study Commit- tee’s Biology), social studies (such as Man: A Course of Study), mathematics (for instance, School Mathematics Study Group), and language (like the lin- guistic approaches) were developed and introduced to the schools. These curriculums had in common their designers’ beliefs that academic subjects should be studied with the tools of their respective disciplines. Most of these curriculums therefore required that students learn the modes of inquiry em- ployed by the disciplines as well as factual material. Process was valued equally with content, and many of these curriculums became characterized as “inquiry oriented.” Much curriculum research resembles the experimental studies of teach- ing, but the unit under study is a configuration of content, teaching meth- ods, instructional materials and technologies, and organizational forms. In the experiments any one of the elements of curriculum may be studied sep- arately or in combination with the others, and the yield is expressed in terms of whether a curriculum produces predicted effects. Research on cur- riculum depends heavily on training in the content of the curriculum and the. teaching strategies needed to implement it. Following training, imple- mentation is monitored, either by classroom observation or interviews. Ef- fects are determined by comparing student outcomes in experimental and control classrooms. In a few studies (for example, Almy, 1970), combina- tions of curriculums are employed to determine effects on cognitive devel- opment and intelligence. In reviewing the studies, El-Nemr (1979) concentrated on the teaching of biology as inquiry in high schools and colleges. He looked at the effects on achievement of information, on the development of process skills, and on attitudes toward science. The experimentally oriented biology curricu- lums achieved positive effects on all three outcomes. The average effect sizes were largest for process skills (0.44 at the high school level and 0.62 at the college level). For achievement they were 0.27 and 0.11 respectively, and for attitudes, 0.22 and 0.51. Bredderman’s (1983) analysis included a broader range of science programs and included the elementary grades. He also reported positive effects for information (0.10), creativity (0.13), sci- ence process (0.52), and, in addition, reported effects on intelligence tests where they were included (0.50). From these and other studies we can con- clude that it is possible to develop curriculums that will achieve model- relevant effects and also will increase learning of information and concepts.PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE Also, vigorous curriculums in one area appear to stimulate growth in other, apparently unconnected areas. For example, Smith's (1980) analysis of aesthetics curriculums shows that the implementation of the arts. oriented curriculums was accompanied by gains in the basic skills areas, Possibly an active and effective curriculum in one area has energing effects on the entire school program. Hillocks’ (1987) review of the teaching of reading and writing produced similar effects. His conclusion indicated just how closely haw we teach is connected with what we teach. Essentially, the inductive approaches to the teaching of reading and writing produced av. erage effect sizes of about 0.60 compared to treatments that covered the same material, but without the inductive approaches to the teaching/learn- ing process. Reviews (Sternberg, 1986b; Sternberg and Bahna, 1986) of some of the recently developed packages for teaching elements of analytic reasoning to students have reported modest effects for some of them. Bereiter (1984) produced a fine analysis of various approaches to the teaching of thinking in which he concluded that the teaching of thinking is far better undertaken ina fashion that is integrated with the curriculum areas than ina “separate- skills” approach. INQUIRY INTO PERSONAL MODELS OF TEACHING Synectics (Gordon and Poze, 1971b) is designed both to enhance per- sonal flexibility and creativity and to teach another of the higher-order thinking skills, specifically the ability to think divergently and generate al- ternative and relevant solutions to difficult problems and alternative per- spectives on important concepts and values. Research on synectics indicates that it achieves its “model-relevant” Purposes, increasing student generation of ideas, divergent solutions to Problems, and fluency in expressing idvas. (Effect sizes average 1.5 for generation of ideas and problem solving.) By helping students develop more multidimensional perspectives, it also increases recall of material from written passages by an effect size of 2.0, and the information is re- tained at an even higher level-It is of considerable interest is that teaching students to think creatively is positively related with the learning and re- tention of information and can increase the lower-order outcomes toa sub- stantial degree. Many laypeople form the opinion that an emphasis on creativity runs counter to the acquisition of information, concepts, and skills, but it turns out that they are enhanced by the synthesis required to think metaphorically. NONDIRECTIVE TEACHING Carl Rogers's Freedom to Learn in the Fighties (1982) includes a chapter summarizing much of the research from the humanistic perspective. Aspy, (Roebuck, Willson, and Adams, 1974) and Roebuck, Buhler, and AspyCHAPTER 3 / TEACHING AS INQUIRY (1976) have been very productive over the last 20 years. They have explored several of the theses of the personal family of models, particularly that building self-directed, empathetic communities of learners will have posi- tive effects on students’ feelings about themselves and others and, conse- quently, will free energy for learning. Roebuck, Bubler, and Aspy's (1976) study with students identified as having learning difficulties produced pos- itive effects on self-concept, intergroup attitudes and interaction patterns, achievement in reading and mathematics, and increased scores on tests of intelligence. In studies of classroom teachers, they have documented the need for extensive training (Aspy et al., 1974). The students of teachers who had learned the model thoroughly achieved more, felt better about them- selves, had better attendance records, and improved their interpersonal skills, The model of nondirective teaching is complex. Teachers have to de- velop egalitarian relationships with the students, create a cooperative group of students who respect one anothers’ differences in personality and ability, and help those students develop programs of study (including goals and the means for achieving them). They also have to provide feedback about per- formance and behavior and teach the students to reflect on one another's behavior and performance, help individuals and groups evaluate progress, and maintain an affirmative social climate. Here, as with synectics, the findings run counter to what many people expect. Placing the student at the center of the learning process and paying close attention to personality development and esteem for self apparently enhance learning in the academic as well as the personal domain. BEHAVIORAL SYSTEMS MODELS This family, based on the work of B. F. Skinner and the cybernetic train- ing psychologists (Smith and Smith, 1966), has the largest literature. Stud- ies range from programmed instruction to simulations and include training, models (Joyce and Showers, 1983) and methods derived directly from ther- apy (Wolpe and Lazarus, 1966). There is a great deal of research on the ap- plication of social learning theory to instruction (Becker and Gersten, 1982), training (Smith and Smith, 1966), and simulations (Boocock and Schild, 1968). The behavioral technologists have demonstrated that they can design programs for both specific and general goals (Becker and Ger- sten, 1982) and also that the effective application of those techniques re- quires extensive cognitive activity and precise interactive skills (Spaulding, 1970). Arecent analysis by White (1986) examined the results of studies on the application of the DISTAR version of social learning theory to special education, The average effect sizes for mathematics and reading ranged from about one-half to one standard deviation. The effects for moderately and severely handicapped students were similar. Perhaps most important, there were a few studies in which the effects on aptitude (measures of intellectual ability) were included. Where the DISTAR program was46 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE implemented for several years the effect sizes were 1.0 or above, represent- ing an increase of about 10 points in the standard IQ ratio. Thoreson and his associates have concentrated on teaching people to change their behavior by developing their own programs. Some of the most interesting work relates to the self-curing of phobias, such as acrophobia, and teaching people to monitor and modify their own behavior in social sit- uations, such as overcoming excessive shyness and aggressiveness. InouIRERs BUILDING ON INQUIRERS In recent years there has been a new “call to arms" to help students learn to construct knowledge (Brooks and Brooks, 1993). We discuss three types of student learning. One is where the students attempt to discover the world from their own perspectives. The second is the work by groups of students to inquire together and construct ideas about the world. The third is inquiry based on the academic disciplines, where students try on the ideas and approaches to inquiry that prevail in the disciplines. Each of these three types of student learning can be facilitated by the different families of mod- els of teaching. The assumption that if students construct knowledge their learning will be both richer and more enduring is borne out by most of the research. Whether it is the “inquiry” approaches to language learning (Hillocks, 1987), or the inductive approaches to science (Bredderman, 1983), or the development of group investigation in social science (or any other curriculum area), the various themes of constructivism pay off, not only in helping students learn to reason and gain conceptual control over academic substance, but in the learning of information and skills as well. The relation to teaching is that, as we help students construct knowledge, we are constructing knowledge about teaching. SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT School faculties can use models of teaching as an avenue to school im- provement by learning sets of models that can increase the learning capa ity of their students. In a recent school improvement project (Joyce, Murphy, Showers, and Murphy, 1989), part of the focus was on a middle school whose students had poor histories of learning. Only 30 percent of the students achieved promotion at the end of the year before the project began. Scores on standard tests revealed that the average student in the school had gained only about 6 months’ achievement for each year in school (10 months is average). The school district had made a number of initiatives to alleviate the situation, including special programs for “at-risk” students, lowered class size, increased counseling services, and so on, all with no ef. fect. However, as the teachers learned to use several models of teaching de- signed to increase cooperative activity, teach concepts, and teach students to work inductively and to memorize information, the learning rates of theCHAPTER 3 / TEACHING AS INQUIRY students began to improve dramatically. By the end of the first year, 70 per- cent achieved the standards required for promotion, and 95 percent achieved promotion at the end of the second year. Jud~ing from the stan- dardized tests administered at the end of the second year, the average : dents in the school were achieving at a normal rate—that is, gaining 10 months of learning for 10 months of effort when compared to the U.S. pop- ulation as a whole, We believe that the use of the models of teaching that the teachers added to their repertoire increased the learning rates of the stu- dents, reduced off-task behavior, and improved the tone of the school's so- cial climate. Time lost in disciplinary action decreased d: amatically, to about one-fifth of the amount lost before the program began. It is unlikely that any one model could have achieved effects of this magnitude, but the combination of models helped students learn a variety of learning strategies that together enabled them to educate themselves more strongly. THE UNENDING SEARCH As you examine the models presented in the following chapters, you may want to glance back at this chapter from time to time and think about the inquiries that can be engaged in as you begin to design lessons, units, and courses for your students. We never finish studying teaching—we are all, as Ernest Hemingway put it with respect to writing, “apprentices to a craft which none of us will ever master.” 47CHAPTER 4 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE, METACOGNITIONS, AND CONCEPTIONS OF INTELLIGENCE What I can't figure out is why it's not just obvious. The school is a place where knowledge is manufactured. For the teachers it’s knowledge about teaching and learning. For the teachers and kids, it’s knowledge about the world—everything: from the most abstruse literature to the here and now. And how knowledge is built has to be a part of the study for teachers and students alike, because you don't know what you have uiiless you know how it was created. And the most important thing about learning how knowledge is constructed is so you can build knowledge for yourself and for others. —Bob Schaefer to Bruce Joyce, June 1969 In the process of education, the educators design the environment with which the student will interact. If the transaction between the student and the environment is productive, learning results. And it is the student who does the learning. (Teachers learn, too, but here we are concerned with the objective of the whole enterprise: the education of the young and the adult novice.) The learner does this by constructing knowledge. Knowledge lives in the consciousness of the minds that inhabit the planet, and those minds have a life of their own. The education game evolves differently from games played with material objects. When one of us throws a Frisbee to another, the Frisbee that is caught is the same Frisbee that was thrown, or at least most of us will agree to that, pending the outcome of metaphysical inquiry. Education differs greatly from a giant game in which chunks of knowledge are thrown, like Frisbees, and are caught pretty much as they left the thrower. The environment stores knowledge, all right, but it is knowledge in 4950 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE the process of transformation. The storage bins, even books, are approxi- mations of concepts in the mind of the author, and the contents are inter- preted and changed as they are read. During the last 15 years much attention has been given to the ambigu- ous natures of knowledge, learners, and environments in an attempt to pro- vide greater clarity about the process of education and how to make it real and productive. Three areas of inquiry have particular relevance to the na- ture and purpose of the various models of teaching: 1, The study of how the mind creates knowledge has resulted in what are currently referred to as constructivist views of education. 2. The study of how to help the learner gain understanding about how knowledge is constructed and about the conscious control of tools for doing so is the study of metacognition. 3. Reflection on learner capacity is resulting in the reassessment of the na- ture of the mind, particularly in redefinitions of the nature of intelli- gence. All the models of teaching discussed here have either explicit or implicit positions on how knowledge is constructed. The appropriate use of each helps students gain conscious control of tools for learning that they can use to approach particular kinds of learning. Each model is designed to increase certain aspects of the ability to learn—to increase intelligence of particular kinds. ConstRUCTIVIST VIEWS: THE CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE We acknowledge the position that the learner constructs knowledge and aim at developing a learning environment that facilitates the inquiry of the learner (Brooks and Brooks, 1993). The constructivist challenges the long- standing societal view that knowledge and skill come in finished, polished pieces and the job of the school is to take those pieces out of the cultural storehouse and give them to the learner intact until the picture puzzle of es- sential knowledge is complete Within the general framework of constructivism there are three schools of thought, each placing a somewhat different emphasis on the role of in- dividuals, social groups, and academic modes of knowing in knowledge de- velopment. A personalistic view makes central the attempt by students. The school emphasizes the unique internal frame of reference, along with the view that, as individuals develop knowledge, there will always be differences between them in conception and meaning. The personal family of models of teaching described in Part IV makes the individual personality central in the educational process and attempts to help individuals understand them-CHAPTER 4 | THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE selves and their world as a basic part of schooling. The social point of view emphasizes the process by which groups of students inquire together and construct ideas about the world. Viewed thus, knowledge cannot be sepa- rated from the social process within which it is manufactured. The social models described in Part I emphasize the social construction of knowledge, The academic inquiry position is based on the methods of the academic dis- ciplines, and helps students try on the ideas and approaches of disciplined inquiry, using academic tools to construct knowledge. The information- processing models described in Part III give much emphasis to the use of those academic tools. All three positions take the view that knowledge is emerging rather than static, that the inevitable task of learning is to seek meaning within one’s expanding frame of reference, and that a major part of the process of education is building knowledge and checking it against the concepts of others. Bereiter’s (1984a) reviews of debates about the var- ious views of constructivism are important reading for anyone wishing to delve into the subject of constructivism as such. The constructivist position is very respectful of the learner and makes important the study of the nature of knowledge as well as its construction. The youngest children are led toward the attempt to understand. Phonics is inquired into and mastered, rather than being treated as a set of phonetic Frisbees that can be sailed intact across the classroom. The social world be- comes content to be dug into and learned, with an emphasis on social prob- lem solving. The disciplines provide ways of thinking that open up windows for inquiry. Real learning generates growth in the learner's mind. New con- cepts change ways of organizing knowledge and thinking about it, provid- ing new material for associations and problem solving. Meracocnrrion: LETTING THE STUDENT IN ON THE SECRET The central idea is to help the student think about the nature of learning and develop conscious control over tools for learning. Sometimes called cognitive strategy instruction (Gaskins and Elliot, 1991; Pressley and Asso- ciates, 1990), the position is taken that a major task of the school is to in- crease capacity for learning—that the student's construction of knowledge and mastery of skill can become increasingly sophisticated and efficient if we make the student an insider to the learning process. Thus viewed, mod- els of teaching are not only models for helping students construct knowl- edge and skill, they are learning strategies that can be taught directly to the students. Therefore, we teach students to develop concepts, to teach them- selves skills, to use metaphorical thinking to solve problems, and to inquire as the scientist does. ‘An extensive line of research has been directed toward the questions, “Can metacognition be taught?” and “Does the conscious control over tools 5152 PART! / FRAME OF REFERENCE for learning help the student become a more effective learner?” Thus far, the answer to both is “yes” (Pressley and Associates, 1990). Cognitive strategy training can begin as the child enters school and is just beginning the study of reading, writing, and arithmetic. For 30 years research on several moaeis of teaching has inquired into the effects of teaching the students the underlying model of learning. The original work on teaching students to develop concepts was based on the idea that inductive thinking can be taught. Inquiry training, as the name im- plies, was an early example of an approach to teach processes of causal rea- soning. The scientific inquiry model was designed to teach sciencing consciously, not just information about science. Synectics was designed to provide conceptual control over metaphorical thinking, Behaviorist ap- proaches to help people control anxiety and aversions to learning were de- signed 30 years ago. Essentially, we are unaware of an effective model of teaching that does not bring the learner into the game. Concepts OF INTELLIGENCE The Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives, as the first definition of intelligence, “the ability to learn or understand or deal with new or trying situations.” That definition covers a lot of territory. It leaves possible many kinds of learning, newness, and demanding situations. It leaves open ques- tions about where intelligence comes from, whether it is unitary or many sided, and whether it can change or be taught. The developers of most of the models of teaching in this book have grap- pled with the question of the nature of intelligence. Thirty years ago Ben- jamin Bloom (1974) and John Carroll (1963) developed a concept of learning ability that has led to the development of the mastery learning model. About the same time, W. W. Gordon (1961a) concentrated on the role of metaphoric thinking in creative solutions to problems. Hilda Taba’s (1966) study of inductive thinking led to the important inductive thinking model. Car] Rogers (1961) and Abraham Maslow (1962) developed views of how people learn that led to their personal models of teaching. As different as they are and as different as are their models, the developers share three beliefs about intelligence that run counter to the general societal concepts. First, gender, race, and ethnicity do not hinder the development of intelligence (see Chapter 5). Second, intelligence is not fixed, but can be learned and taught. Third, intelligence is multidimensional and aspects of it can be capitalized on with specific models of learning and taught through them. In recent years Howard Gardner (1983) and Robert Sternberg (1986a) have become the spokespersons for the view that intelligence has many di- mensions and that the learning environment should capitalize on those di- mensions for energy and, in turn, enhance them. Gardner takes the viewCHAPTER 4 / THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE that the combinations of dimensions of intelligence in different mixes is one reason we develop our unique personalities. Seven “intelligences” are included in Gardner's “map”: linguistic (capacity to use words), logical- mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. With respect to the models of teaching described in this book, it is easy to see how the personal models capitalize on the intrapersonal and the so- cial models capitalize on the interpersonal, but all models utilize those di- mensions of capability to varying degrees. Similarly, it is easy to see which dimensions of capability the various models are designed to exercise and improve. A CONSTRUCTED, SELF-AWARE, CAPACITY-INCREASING ENVIRONMENT The construction of knowledge, the teaching of models of learning, and the development of learner capacity will appear throughout the book in the dis- cussion of each model. We hope the concepts will be clarifying, but we hope they will also help you assume the optimistic position we take with respect to the learner. 53CHAPTER 5 TEACHING AND EQUITY Gender, Money, Race, and Culture The belief in the importance of hard work is not alien to Americans. The mystery is why, in the later years of the twentieth century, we have modified this belief in such a destructive way. Why do we dwell on the differences among us, rather than on our similarities? Why are we unwilling to see that the whole society is advanced when all its members, not only the privileged socioeconomic and ethnic groups, are given the opportunity to use their abilities to the fullest? —Harold Stevenson and Jay Stigler in The Learning Gap, 1992 sc ENA RIO Recently, a team of cheerleaders .. . sat ina circle in their high school cafeteria and looked at the pages of a Frederick's of Hollywood catalog to see what their competition squad would wear this season. Some of the girls were just a month and a half out of junior high. When the 44 girls are training, the room buzzes with adolescent en- ergy ... which is why the hush was so pronounced when the Frederick’s catalogue went around. The reason for the stillness was a glossy photograph of a perfectly proportioned woman in a white lace teddy. “Trl look great,” the coach insisted, their silence an implicit rejection of her choice for the uniform. She hadn't yet announced which of the 44 girls would make the competition squad. . . . The squad competes throughout the winter at meets run by private companies. “The high-waist pants will make you look slim,” the coach said. “You'll wear a white tank top under the white lace so no one will see your nipples.” ‘That, the coach confided, had been something of a problem with past uni- forms. Jane Gottesman, New York Times, October 23, 1994 55PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE We are so lucky to be allowed to teach. The rich countryside of humanity gives us its children to live with and school. We are given boys and girls who come in every human color and bring us the sumptuous cultural and per- sonal differences of their homes. We have the fortune to nurture the bold and the shy, the tall and the short, the serious and the comic, the confident and the frightened. And we are given such a luxury of opportunities to show them, Science and engineering of unparalleled sophistication, a globe that has shrunk to bring all cultures within reach, and whose nations, for the first time in his- tory, are almost ail politically free to make their way. We have spectacular media within our fingertips and a phenomenal library that is easier and eas- ier to access. Our riches enable us to educate in such a way that human variety can be capitalized on and enrich the entire society. Our wealth of educational technology enables us to reach all children and ensure that they are well ed- ucated, can make their way in the world of work, arid can build a fine qual- ity of life. We have also inherited a terrible problem that we must defeat. The prob- lem originates with a perverse defect in the structure of our society and the norms and beliefs that accompany that structure. The process of education, reflecting the society, has developed a major quirk that operates against its fundamental purpose. The problem is that millions of children, perhaps nearly all of them, do not receive an equitable education—one that fulfills their promise—because of the way individual differences are regarded in the culture. This cultural error con- tains three assumption: 1, Learning capacity is derived from genetic differences and/or differences in early socialization and is virtually unchangeable thereafter. 2. Schools are relatively powerless in relation to the capacity the child brings to them. Wide levels of achievement of the basic core curriculum can be toler- ated, including levels that disadvantage the student throughout much of life. As a result of those beliefs, education is conducted in such a manner that 30 percent of our children leave school without completing their basic education and millions of others leave with a deficit of one kind or another that hampers their future opportunities. Although other types of individual differences affect equity, we will deal briefly here with the most prominent categorical ones: gender, money, race, and culture. GENDER Both genders suffer, but women in the most obvious and pervasive ways. Myra and David Sadker have written beautifully on the subject (as SadkerCHAPTERS / TEACHING AND EQUITY and Sadker, 1994). Their treatment and bibliographies are a good starting point for a student of the subject. The reason tor the suttering is that the society teaches that there are ge- netic differences in aptitude that are related to gender and to the “proper roles for each gender.” For example, our culture ‘deems men to be better at things mechanical, to be less able in literary matters, and women to have less mathematical aptitude but to be better at empathy and nurturing. Males are to make their way by being outwardly self-sufficient and com- manding, women by being feminine and charming. ‘These attributed differences play their way out in school. In the nation as a whole, the quality of writing by the average male is at about the 30th percentile of the average female. That difference is accepted as “normal,” because it is assumed that a genetic difference is playing its way out. Simi- larly, three times as many boys as girls fail to learn to read in the primary grades. The difference in learning to read disappears under powerful strate- gies for teaching kids how to read. And when writing is taught with the most effective curricular and instructional methods, both genders improve their writing markedly, and the gender differences virtually disappear! Thus it is with mathematics, science, and women. but the problem is even more sinister, because the achievement gap between the genders in mathematics and science is not nearly as great as is the situation with re- spect to reading and writing, but the myth persists in terms of self-esteem and opportunities provided. Sadker and Sadker (1994) report that, whereas in elementary school, 31 percent of women feel they are “good” at math, only 18 percent feel that way by the middle school level. Sheila Tobias (1993) refers to a study of women entering the University of California at Berkeley. All have been high achievers in general in order to be admitted. In the year of the study, though 57 percent of the males admitted had taken four years of mathematics, only 8 percent of the females had. Without the four years of mathematics courses, students there are not eligible for the calculus sequence, would rarely attempt chemistry or physics, and are dis- advantaged for statistics and economics. Because they could not take the entry-level courses, they were ineligible for 10 of the 12 “colleges” and 22 out of the 44 majors the university offered! Many of the high-achieving men had disadvantaged themselves, but nine out of ten of the women had. We could go on and on. There is no need, because everyone who reads this can supply their own examples of gender-attributed academic, artistic, and athletic stereotypes. The athletic stereotypes are now being beaten down in public. When the male author of this book was in high school, one of his teammates on the swimming team (there was no team for females) broke the interscholastic 200-yard freestyle record. Looking at the local paper yesterday, he noticed that one of the local girls had won the same event in several seconds less than the time of his high school cohort. Look- ing farther at the times of her teammates, he realized that the championship male team of his boyhood would have been wiped out by the girls of the small local high school near where he now lives. The boys are better, today, too, but those local girls would outperform nearly all the high school boys 5758 PARTI / FRAME OF REFERENCE alive today. What has brought about the change? A difference in beliefs, plus good teaching. However, we are not holding up the athletic programs as paragons. Many schools give more prestige to athletic participation than to academic achievement, and for decades have thus drawn the energy of boys away from their education. Cheerleading corps have an absurd prominence in many secondary schools, teaching both genders that the female route to success is femininity and sexiness. Adolescence in our society is fraught with inner turbulence as kids struggle to create their identity. Walk around almost any high school and you will see heaps of girls who are have obvi- ously succumbed to the notion that becoming sexually attractive, in an im- mediate, enticing sense, is more important than becoming a person of inner substance. The arts are better, although lingering doubts about masculinity (let alone sexual preference, which is a story for a different book) still can dog any male who takes art seriously. But changes in stereotypes plus good teaching are gradually changing the picture. The academic opportunity discrimination persists. The old notion that girls who were achievers would make poor dates probably has diminished somewhat, but the idea that femininity and academic excellence can go to- gether is not well established, and many females are still taught that acad- emic learning is not as important as being good-looking and charming. They can give themselves permission not to push themselves. The loss is atrocious. For males, too, gender stereotypes cause great damage academically. Differential treatment at an early age can have some devastating effects. Be- tween kindergarten and third grade boys are about three times as likely to be retained in grade (held back a year) as girls. Retention at that age in- creases the likelihood of dropping out of school about 75 percent compared with students of equal achievement who are promoted! The same propor- tional difference exists with respect to retention between grades four and six, where the effect is to increase the dropout rate by about 90 percent! Differential achievement expectations affect the male, also. Like females in other subjects, boys can give up trying to learn to read and write if they accept the cultural stereotype that their academic situation is “just the way it is.” Presently, male “dropouts” greatly outnumber female dropouts largely because the educational system cooperates with the cultural idea that many boys are just not “academically oriented.” Again, walk around nearly any high school and you will see males who have succumbed to the notion that projecting a masculine image is more important than becoming a person of inner substance. We are not arguing that adolescence and early adulthood are not times when young men and women have to learn to come to terms with and cap- italize on their real and wonderful biological differences. Far from it. Vive la différence! But the view that gender prevents learning is perverse.CHAPTER 5 / TEACHING AND EQUITY With respect to the basic education schools offer, gender differences in academic aptitude, if they exist, need have no effect. There are no gender differences sufficient to prevent boys and girls from having equal degrees of excellence in all the areas within the general curriculum (Friedman, 1995). In an excellent educational system (or classroom), everybody wins. Good education is the key. But the school has to lead the culture on this one. The ridiculous popularity of books like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (Gray, 1993) is a relatively mild indication of the kind of societal stereotypes the school has to overcome. Money Socioeconomic differences are the greatest predictor of success in school. A massive and very well-known study of educational achievement (Coleman et al., 1966) found that parents’ education and occupation so influenced academic achievement that its authors actually concluded that the influ- ence of differences between schools was so minor that they asserted that schools did not make a difference. In other words, they argued that if achievement in any given school could be predicted simply by knowing the characteristics of the parents, then schools that thought they were: good were kidding themselves—change the kids and achievement would change! Although the Coleman team overinterpreted their findings somewhat— there are schools that make a difference (Brookover et al., 1978; Mortimer, et al., 1988)—there is no question that the students’ backgrounds have a huge influence on schools as they are presently run. Furthermore, the mas- sive federal government Chapter I program, which provides school districts with resources to try to improve the education of the economically poor, has failed miserably. One of the present authors was recently a member of a team that studied a large urban school district. We found that the district was receiving Chapter I funds for nearly 70 percent of the students and that the students served in the first grade were still receiving service in the twelfth grade because their educational disadvantage had not been “fixed.” Yet there are school-improvement programs built around powerful models of teaching that have elevated the achievement of the children of the poor and done it quickly—within a year or two. (See Slavin et al., 1990; Wallace, Lemahieu, and Bickel, 1990; Joyce, Showers, Murphy, and Mur- phy, 1989; Becker and Gersten, 1982; Levin and Levin, 1990. For general re- views, see Joyce, Wolf, and Calhoun, 1993, 1995; Joyce and Showers, 1995.) Again, good teaching can make a huge dent in the problem. And it must, be- cause the failure to learn leaves people with a lifelong self-image that they cannot learn, causing them to avoid the learning opportunities and chal- lenges of adulthood and perpetuating the cycles of poverty. The long series of studies by Cohen (1995) and her associates have shown how feasible it is 5960 PART! / FRAME OF REFERENCE to generate status equality and how rapidly schools can affect the interac- tions that generate better self-images and achievement for all students. Unfortunately, few school districts have prepared their teachers to use the curricular and instructional strategies that provide equity for the poor. We must solve that problem. Again, schooling must lead the society. The massive publicity given to absurd books such as The Bell Curve (Hermstein and Murray, 1994), which argues that the poor are genetically inferior to the rich, indicates how seriously the school has to battle ignorance of the real facts. The children of the poor have as much potential as the children of the rich, but schools haven't learned to use the tools that will reach them, al- though plenty of those tools exist. As an editorial in the October 24, 1994, issue of the New York Times proclaimed, in relation to The Bell Curve, “Plants grown under ideal conditions will achieve different heights. . .. But, lock half the plants in a dark closet and the difference in average height be- tween the two groups will be due entirely to environment.” Race Racial prejudice has been a part of our society for hundreds of years and in- tellectual inferiority has been attributed to people of color as a major part of that prejudice. A wonderful review by Professor’ Jim Banks of the Uni- versity of Washington traces the convoluted intellectual gyrations by psy- chologists who have tried to develop decent measurements of intellectital ability but who were, themselves, the children of their times (Banks, 1995). While nearly all the scientific community rejects the notion of racially de- termined intelligence, the idea dies hard in society in general. Although the outstanding achievements of so many people of color have demonstrated the fallacy and despite the wonderful economic progress made in several countries where everybody has color, the ingraihed prejudice still leads peo- ple to believe that those outstanding achievements are exceptions. The problem is compounded in our society by the fact that so many peo- ple of color are also economically poor, so that race interacts with the prob- Jem of money. The fact is that race does not predict academic ability, but good educa- tion does. The same programs cited in the preceding section have demon- strated that, with good curriculum and instruction and a positive social climate, racial differences in academic achievement diminish rapidly. We possess the technology. We have only to use it. Cutrure American schools have always been most comfortable with kids who come with the mainstream culture already in place, simply because American so- ciety has always been most comfortable with people who are similar toCHAPTER 5 / TEACHING AND EQUITY them. (Nearly all world societies share this problem, often to an extreme: witness the world history of strife between tribes and nations.) During the periods of large European immigration to the United States, there was sig- nificant strife between those already here and those who were new, even though the European nations share much more culture than they do not. The nomenclature of ethnic slurs could be worked into a kind of sick Rap: Frogs, Micks, Wops, Polacks, Squareheads, Kikes, and Dumb Swedes will do for a beginning. Linguistic differences were not tolerated in schools. “Learn English fast or fail!” was the policy. The European children huddled in ethnic ghettos until they got a han- dle on English and a handhold on the economic ladder. The schools helped in that they were the place where English was learned and where the kids mingled and gradually learned to get along. The schools permitted a cruel cost, however: many of those children went through life, and many of their great-grandchildren do today, embarrassed about the origins that gave them life and love and the cultural base that provided them with social meaning. Today, the cultural difference problem is at a crisis stage that has two dimensions. One is that a very large proportion of American children have migrated recently from other places, particularly Latin countries and Asia. The schools are not reaching them effectively, either in terms of achieve- ment or cultural dignity. The other is that the world has changed, and the future prosperity of the nation depends on the ability to mingle productively with the other societies in the world. The current ethnic and linguistic mix makes our schools a perfect lab- oratory both to demonstrate that cultural difference is not a barrier to achievement or dignity and to prepare all our kids for the new global soci- ety that we have to navigate as a nation if not individually. Again, we have the technology if we have the will. But giving up some- thing is the hard part of growing up, for a society as well as for individuals. The really difficult part of our struggle is giving up the idea that gender, monetary, racial, and cultural differences are factors that determine educa- tional potential. They are factors only if we make them so. The powerfu! models of teaching reach all students and create a much more level playing field because they teach children how to learn and because they possess the adaptive flexibility to accommodate differences productively and capitalize on them. Research that has sought “special” methods for the children of the poor, the racially or culturally different, or for boys and girls, has come up empty-handed because our likenesses are far more salient than are our dif- ferences and the differences are superficial. It used to be said that “travel is broadening.” World travel certainly is, because as you encounter other cul- tures and experience new ways of doing things, you find out that there is only one kind of people on Planet Earth. 61PART Il THE SOCIAL FAMILY The models of teaching described in this book come from beliefs about the nature of human beings and how they learn. The social models, as the name implies, emphasize our social nature, how we learn social behavior, and how social interaction can enhance academic learning. Nearly all inventors of social models believe that a central role of education is to prepare citi- zens to generate integrative democratic behavior, both to enhance personal and social life and to ensure a productive democratic social order. They be- lieve that cooperative enterprise inherently enhances our quality of life, bringing joy and a sense of verve and bonhomie to us.and reducing alien- ation and unproductive social conflict. In addition, cooperative behavior is stimulating not only socially but also intellectually. Thus, tasks requiring so- cial interaction can be designed to enhance academic learning. The devel- opment of productive social behavior and academic skills and knowledge are combined. The social theorists have developed a large number of models that have great potential for our teaching repertoires and for the design of entire school environments as well, for they envision the school as a productive lit- tle society, rather than a collection of individuals acquiring education inde- pendently. In a cooperative school culture, students can be taught to use the other families of models of teaching to acquire the knowledge and skills to- ward which those models are developed. Many of the social theorists have not only built rationales for their mod- ls, but have raised serious questions about the adequacy of the current dominant patterns of schooling. In many schools the majority of learning tasks are structured by teachers for individuals. Most interaction between teachers and students is in the pattern of recitation—the teacher directs questions about what has been studied, calls on an individual who re- sponds, and then affirms the response or corrects it (Sirotnik, 1983). Pat- terns of evaluation pit student against student. Many developers of the social models believe that individualistic patterns of schooling, combined with the teacher-dominated recitation pattern of schooling, are actually64 PART Il | THE SOCIAL FAMILY counterproductive for individuals and for society by depressing learning rates, creating an unnatural and even antisocial climate, and failing to pro- vide opportunities for young people to maximize their potential and that of others by exercising thejr capacity for cooperation. People are inherently cooperative, they argue, and depressing cooperation drives children from each other and deprives them of an important dimension of their compe- tence (see Johnson and Johnson, 1990; Sharan, 1990; Thelen, 1960). The ideas of cooperating to learn academic content and of preparing students for citizenship and a satisfying social life are very old. They can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, as well as in those of Christian educators such as Thomas Aquinas, in the medieval pe- riod, and John Amos Comenius in the Renaissance. The rise of the modern commercial democratic states found expression in the writing of Jean- Jacques Rousseau in France, John Locke in England, and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in America, During the period of the development of the common school in America, Horace Mann and Henry Barnard argued strongly for an active cooperative school. The concept was announced forcefully by John Dewey throughout the first half of the twentieth century. With his ideas as the primary rationale, it found expression in the development of a number of models for school- ing and in the activity of the Progressive Education Association, ushering in the current era of research and development of social models of education. We will see the themes generated during the evolution of Western civi- lization in the following chapters as we study the work of the contemporary developers of social models. Three active communities are strongly work- ing to improve the social models. One is led by David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota. The second is led by Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins University. The third, in Israel, includes Shlomo Sharan, Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz, and several other teacher-researchers, There are differ- ences in their frames of reference, but they are respectful and cooperative with one another and are appropriately international. Increasingly they are joined by European researchers, and elements of their work are being used and extended by collaborators in Asia. In Chapter 6 we begin with procedures for developing partnerships in learning and proceed to the contemporary versions of the classic group in- vestigation model. In Chapters 7, 8, and 9 we focus on values and social problem solving. Social inquiry and role playing can be used with students of all ages, and the jurisprudential inquiry model emphasizes social policies and issues for older students, Finally, we examine procedures developed from conceptual systems theory for adapting the social models to the learn- ing styles of students.CHAPTER 6 PARTNERS IN LEARNING From Dyads to Group Investigation The most stunning thing about teaching people to help kids learn cooperatively is that people don't know how to do it as a consequence of their own schooling and life in this society. And, if anything is genetically- driven, it's a social instinct. If it weren't for each other, we wouldn't even know who we are. —Herbert Thelen to Bruce Joyce, about 1964 SG BN An Rt © Mary Hilltepper opens the year in her 10th-grade English class by pre- senting the students with 12 poems she has selected from a set of 100 poems that represent the works of prominent contemporary poets. She organizes the students into pairs, asking them to read the poems and then classify them by structure, style, and themes. As they classify the poems (see Chap- ter 10 for the structure of the inductive model), they are to prepare to re- port their categories to the other students so that the partnerships can compare their classifications with those of the other students. Working to- gether, the class accumulates a list of the ways they have-perceived struc- ture, style, and theme. Then, Ms. Hilltepper presents the pairs of students with another dozen poems that they examine, both fitting them into their existing categories and expanding the categories as necessary. This process is repeated until all students are familiar with four dozen poems. She then gives them several other tasks. One is to decide how particular themes are handled by style and structure and vice versa (whether style and structure are correlated with each other and with themes). Another is to build hy- potheses about whether some groups of poems were written by particular authors using distinctive combinations of style, structure, and theme. 6566 PARTI | THE SOCIAL FAMILY Only then does she pass out the anthologies and books of critical analy- sis that are used as the course textbooks, asking students to test their hy- potheses about authorship and also to find out if the scholars of poetry employ the same categories they have been developing in their partnerships. Mary is organizing her class for partnership-based learning. The cogni- tive tasks of the classification version of the inductive model of teaching (see Chapter 10) have been used to drive the inquiry. In addition to the substance of this opening unit of study she is preparing the students to embark coop- eratively on their next unit of study—writing poetry or studying the short story. (Which would you use next? For our answer, see Chapter 10.) Before ong she will introduce them to the more complex activities of group inves- tigation. S C EN ARI O As the children enter Kelly Farmer's fifth-grade classroom in Savannah Elementary on the first day of the school year, they find the class roster on each desk. She smiles at them and says, “Let's start by learning all our names and one of the ways we will be working together this year. You'll no- tice I've arranged the desks in pairs, and the people sitting together will be partners in today’s activities. I want each partnership to take our class list and classify the first names by how they sound. Then we will share the groupings or categories each partnership makes. This will help us learn one another's names. It is also to introduce you to one of the ways we will study spelling and several other subjects this year. I know from Mrs. Annis that you have worked inductively last year so you know how to classify, but let me know if you have any problems.” The students do know what to do, and within a few minutes they are ready to share their classifications. “We put Nancy and Sally together be- cause they end in ‘y’” “We put George and Jerry together because they sound the same at the beginning even though they're spelled differently.” “We put the three ‘Kevin's’ together.” A few minutes later the pairs are mur- muring together as they help one another learn to spell the list of names. Kelly has started the year by organizing the students into a “cooperative set,” by which we mean an organization for cooperative learning. She will teach them to work in dyads and triads, which can combine into groups of five or six. (Task or work groups larger than that generally have much lower productivity.) The partnerships will change for various activities. The stu- dents will learn to accept any members of the class as their partners and will learn that they are to work with each other to try to ensure that every- cone achieves the objectives of each activity. She begins with pairs because that is the simplest social organization, In fact, much of the early training in cooperative activity will be conducted in groups of two and three because the interaction is simpler than it is inCHAPTER 6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING larger groups. She also uses fairly straightforward and familiar cognitive tasks for the initial training for the same reason—it is easier for students to learn to work together when they are not mastering complex activities at the same time. For example, she will have them change partners and have the new partnerships quiz each other on simple knowledge, such as of the states and their capitals, and tutor one another. She will change partnerships again and ask them to categorize sets of fractions by size. Each student will learn how to work with any and all of the other students in the class over a variety of tasks. Later she will teach the children to respond to the cognitive tasks of the more complex information-processing models of teaching as well as more complex cooperative sets. By the end of October she expects that they will be skillful enough that she can introduce them to group investigation. Both teachers have embarked on the task of building learning communities. They will teach the students to work together impersonally but positively, to gather and analyze information, to build and test hypotheses, and to coach one another as they develop skills. The difference in maturity between the classes will affect the degree of sophistication of their inquiry, but the basic processes will be the same. Each of these teachers possesses a variety of strategies for educating their students to work productively together. On their desks aré Circles of Learning (Johnson and Johnson, 1985a) and Cooperative Learning Resources for Teachers (Kagan, 1988). Each is studying the students, learning how ef- fectively they cooperate, and deciding how to design the next activities to teach them to work more effectively together. —_—_— SSeS PurPOSES AND ASSUMPTIONS The assumptions that underlie the development of cooperative learning communities are straightforward: 1. The synergy generated in cooperative settings generates more motiva- tion than do individualistic, competitive environments. Integrative so- cial groups are, in effect, more than the sum of their parts, The feelings of connectedness produce positive energy. 2. The members of cooperative groups learn from_-one another. Each learner has more helping hands than in a structure that generates iso- lation, 3. Interacting with one another produces cognitive as well as social com- plexity, creating more intellectual activity that increases learning when contrasted with solitary study 6768 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY 4. Cooperation increases positive feelings toward one another, reducing alienation and loneliness, building relationships, and providing affir- mative views of other people. 5. Cooperation increases self-esteem not only through increased learning but through the feeling of being respected and cared for by the others in the environment. 6. Students can respond to experience in tasks requiring cooperation by increasing their capacity to work productively together. In other words, the more children are given the opportunity to work together, the bet- ter they get at it, which benefits their general social skills. 7. Students, including primary school children, can learn from training to increase their ability to work together. Recently, interest has been renewed in research on the cooperative learning models. The more sophisticated research procedures that now exist have enabled better tests of their assumptions and more precise esti- mates of their effects on academic, personal, and social behavior. Work by three groups of researchers is of particular interest. One is led by David and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota (Johnson and Johnson, 1974, 1981, 1990). Another is led by Robert Slavin (1983, 1990) of Johus Hopkins University, and the third by Shlomo Sharan of Tél Aviv University (1980, 1990a). Using somewhat different strategies, the teams of both the Johnsons and Slavin have conducted sets of investigations that closely examine the assumptions of the social family of teaching models. Specifically, they have studied whether cooperative tasks and reward structures affect learning outcomes positively. Also, they have asked whether group cohesion, coop- erative behavior, and intergroup relations are improved through coopera- tive learning procedures. In some of their investigations they have examined the effects of cooperative task and reward structures on “traditional” learn- ing tasks, in which students are presented with material to master. Important for us is the question of whether cooperative groups do in fact generate the energy that results in improved learning. The evidence is largely affirmative. In classrooms organized so that students work in pairs and larger groups, tutor each other, and share rewards, there is greater mas- tery of material than with the common individual-study-cum-recitation pat- tern. Also, the shared responsibility and interaction produce more positive feelings toward tasks and others, generate better intergroup relations, and result in better self-images for students with histories of poor achievement. In other words, the results generally affirm the assumptions that underlie the use of cooperative learning methods (see Sharan, 1990). Cooperative learning theorists differ in their views about whether groups should com- pete with one another, Slavin generally favoring competition and the John- sons favoring cooperation. Qin, Johnson, and Johnson (1995) have recently published a complex review of research on this question and report that the cooperative structures generally generate improved learning in the impor- tant area of problem-solving.CHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING Sharan and his colleagues have studied group investigation. They have learned much both about how to make the dynamics of the model work and about its effects on cooperative behavior, intergroup relations, and lower- and higher-order achievement. We will discuss their research as we discuss group investigation later in this chapter. ‘An exciting use of the cooperative procedures is in combination with models from other families, in an effort to combine the effects of several models. For example, Baveja, Showers, and Joyce (1985) conducted a study in which concept and inductive procedures were carried out in cooperative groups. The effects fulfilled the promise of the marriage of the information- processing and social models, reflecting gains that were twice those of a comparison group that received intensive individual and group tutoring over the same material. Similarly, Joyce, Murphy, Showers, and Murphy (1989) combined cooperative learning with several other models of teach- ing to obtain dramatic (30 to 95 percent) increases in promotion rates with at-risk students as well as correspondingly large decreases in disruptive activity, an obvious reciprocal of increases in cooperative and integrative behavior. For those for whom cooperative learning is an innovation, an endear- ing feature is that it is easy to organize students into pairs and triads. And it gets effects immediately. The combination of social support and the in- crease in cognitive complexity caused by the social interaction have mild but rapid effects on the learning of content and skills. In addition, partner- ships in learning provide a pleasant laboratory in which to develop social skills and empathy for others. Off-task and disruptive behavior diminish substantially. Students feel good in cooperative settings, and positive feel- ings toward self and others are enhanced. ‘Another nice feature is that the students with poorer academic histories benefit so quickly. Partnerships increase involvement, and the concentra- tion on cooperation has the side effect of reducing self-absorption and in- creasing responsibility for personal learning. Whereas the elfect sizes on academic learning are modest but consistent, the effects on social learning and personal esteem can be considerable when comparisons are made with individualistic classroom organization. Curiously, we have found that some parents and teachers believe that students who are the most successful in individualistic environments will not profit from cooperative environments. Sometimes this belief is ex- pressed as “gifted students prefer to work alone.” A mass of evidence contradicts that belief (Slavin, 1991; Joyce, 1991a). Perhaps a misunder- standing about the relationship between individual and cooperative study contributes to the persistence of the belief. Developing partnerships does not imply that individual effort is not required. In the scenario in Ms. Hill- tepper's classroom all the individuals read the poems. When classifying poems together, each individual contributed ideas and studied the ideas of others. Individuals are not submerged but are enhanced by partnerships with others. Successful students are.not inherently less cooperative. In 6970 PART II / THE SOCIAL FAMILY highly individualistic environments they are sometimes taught disdain for less-successful students, to their detriment as students and people, both in school and in the future. INcREASING THE EFFICIENCY OF PARTNERSHIPS: TRAINING FOR COOPERATION For reasons not entirely clear to us, the initial reaction of some people to the proposition that students be organized to study together is one of con- cem that they will not know how to work together productively. In fact, partnerships over simple tasks are not very demanding of social skills. Most students are quite capable of cooperating when they are clear about what has been asked of them. However, developing more efficient ways of work- ing together is clearly important, and there are some guidelines for helping students become more practiced and efficient. These guidelines pertain to group size, complexity, and practice. Our initial illustrations are of simple dyadic partnerships over clear cog- nitive tasks. The reason is that the pair or dyad is the simplest form of so- cial organization. One way to help students learn to work cooperatively is to provide practice in the simpler settings of twos and threes. Essentially, we regulate complexity through the tasks we give and the sizes of groups we form. If students are unaccustomed to cooperative work, it makes sense to use the smallest groups with simple or familiar tasks to permit them to gain the experience that will enable them to work in groups of larger sizes. Task groups larger than six persons are clumsy and require skilled leadership, which students cannot provide to one another without experience or train- ing. Partnerships of two, three, or four are the most commonly employed. Practice results in increased efficiency. If we begin learning with part- ners and simply provide practice for a few weeks, we will find that the stu- dents become increasingly productive. TRAINING FOR EFFICIENCY There are also methods for training the students for more efficient co- operation and “positive interdependence” (see Qin, Johnson and Johnson, 1995; Kagan, 1990). Simple hand signals can be used to get the attention of busy groups. One of the common procedures is to teach the students that when the instructors raise their hands, anyone who notices is to give their attention to the instructor and raise their hand also. Other students notice and raise their hands, and soon the entire instructional group is attending. This type of procedure is nice because it works while avoiding shouting above the hubbub of the busy partnerships and teaches the students to par- ticipate in the management process.CHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING Kagan has developed several procedures for teaching students to work together for goals and to ensure that all students participate equally in the group tasks. An example is what he calls “numbered heads.” Suppose that the students are working in partnerships of three. Each member takes a number from one to three. Simple tasks are given ("How many metaphors can you find in this page of prose?”). All members are responsible for mas- tery of each task. After a suitable interval, the instructor calls out one num- ber—for example, “Number twos.” The number two persons in all groups raise their hands. They are responsible for speaking for their groups. The instructor calls on one of them. All other persons are responsible for listen- ing and checking the answer of the person who reports. For example, if the response is “seven,” the other students are responsible for checking that re- sponse against their own. “How many agree? Disagree?” The procedure is designed to ensure that some individuals do not become the “learners” and “spokespersons” for their groups while others are carried along for the ride. ‘Also, for tasks for which it is appropriate, pretests may be given. An ex: ample might be a list of words to learn to spell. After the pretest a number of tasks might be given to help the students study the words, Then an in- terval might be provided for the students to tutor one another, followed by a posttest, Each group would then calculate their gain scores (the number correct on the posttest minus the number correct on the pretest), giving all members a stake in everyone s learning, Also, cooperative learning aside, the procedure makes clear that learning expressed as gain is the purpose of the exercise. When posttests only are used, it is not clear whether anyone has actually learned—students can receive high marks for a score no higher than they would have achieved jn a pretest. Sets of training tasks can help students learn to be more effective part- nerships, to increase their stake in one another, and to work assiduously for learning by all. TRAINING FOR INTERDEPENDENCE In addition to practice and training for more efficient cooperative be- havior, procedures for helping students become truly interdependent are available. The least complex involve reflection on the group process and dis- cussions about ways of working together most effectively. The more com- plex involve the provision of tasks that require interdependent behavior. For example, there are card games where success depends on “giving up” valu- able cards to another player and communication games where success re- quires taking the position of another. Familiar games like “Charades” and “Pictionary” are popular because they increase cohesion and the ability to put oneself in the place of the other. There are also procedures for rotating tasks so that each person moves from subordinate to superordinate tasks and where members take turns as coordinators. ‘The Johnsons (1995) have demonstrated that sets of these tasks can in- crease interdependence, empathy, and role-taking ability and that students nm72 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY can become quite expert at analyzing group dynamics and learning to cre- ate group climates that foster mutuality and collective responsibility. The role-playing model of teaching, discussed in the next chapter, is designed to. help students analyze their values and to work together to develop interac- tive frames of reference. DIVISION OF LABOR: SPECIALIZATION Avvariety of procedures have been developed to help students learn how to help one another by dividing labor. Essentially, tasks are presented in such a way that division of labor increases efficiency. The underlying ratio- nale is that dividing labor increases group cohesion as the team works to learn information or skills while ensuring that all members have both re- sponsibility for learning and an important role in the group. Imagine, for example, that a class is studying Africa and is organized into groups of four. Four countries are chosen for study. One member of each team might be designated a “country specialist.” The country specialists from all teams would gather together and study their assigned nation and become the tu- tors for their original groups, responsible for summarizing information and presenting it to the other members. Or similarly, when tasks requiring mem- orization are presented to the class, the group will divide responsibility for creating mnemonics for aspects of the data. Or teams could take responsi- bility for parts of the information to be learned. A procedure known as jigsaw (Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Sikes, and Snapp, 1978; Slavin, 1983) has been worked out to develop formal organi- zations for divisions of labor. It is highly structured and appropriate a an introduction to division-of-labor processes. Whereas individualistic class- room organization allows individuals to exercise their best-developed skills, division of labor procedures require students to rotate roles, developing their skills invall areas. COOPERATIVE OR’ COMPETITIVE GOAL STRUCTURES Some developers organize teams to compete against one another while others emphasize cooperative goals and minimize team competition. John- son and Johnson (1990) have'analyzed the research and argue that the evi- dence favors cooperative goal structures, but Slavin (1983) argues that competition between teams benefits learning. The fundamental question is whether students are oriented toward competing with one another or with a goal. Recently several of our colleagues have organized whole classes to work cooperatively toward a goal. For example, the science department of a high school began the year in chemistry by organizing the students to master the essential features of the Table of Elements. In teams, they built mnemonics that were used by al! teams. Within two weeks, all students knew the table backward and forward, and that information served as the structural organizer (see Chapter 5) for the entire course. In a group of fifth- grade classes the exploration of social studies began with memorization ofCHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING the states, large cities, river and mountain systems, and other basic infor- mation about the geography of the United States. Class scores were com- puted (for example, 50 states times 30 students is 1,500 items). The goal was for the class as a whole to achieve a perfect score. The classes reached scores over 1,450 within a week, leaving individuals with very few items to master to reach a perfect score for the class. MOTIVATION: FROM EXTRINSIC TO INTRINSIC? The issue about how much to emphasize cooperative or individualistic goal structures relates to conceptions of motivation. Sharan (1990) has ar- gued that cooperative learning increases learning partly because it causes motivational orientation to move from the external to the internal. In other words, when students cooperate over learning tasks, they become more in- terested in learning for its own sake rather than for external rewards. Thus, students engage in learning for intrinsic satisfaction and become less de- pendent on praise from teachers or other authorities. The internal motiva- tion is more powerful than the external, resulting in increased learning rates and retention of information and skills. The frame of reference of the cooperative learning community is a di- rect challenge to the principles that many schools have relied on to guide their use of tests and rewards for student achievement. Unquestionably, one of the fundamental purposes of general education is to increase internal motivation to learn and to encourage students to generate learning for the sheer satisfaction in growing. If cooperative learning procedures (among others) succeed partly because they contribute to this goal, then the testing and reward structures that prevail in most school environments may actu ally retard learning. As we turn to group investigation—a powerful model that radically changes the learning environment—consider how different are the tasks, cooperative structures, and principles of motivation we ob- serve in many contemporary schools. Group INVESTIGATION: BUILDING EDUCATION THROUGH THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS Sc EN A RIO Debbie Psychoyos’ 1 th-grade social studies class on world geography has been studying demographic data from the computer program PC- GLOBE on the 177 nations of the world. Each of the nine groups of four have analyzed the data on about 20 nations and searched for correlations among the following variables: population, per capita GNP, birth rate, life 7374 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY expectancy, education, health care services, industrial base, agricultural production, transportation systems, foreign debt, balance of payments, women's rights, and natural resources. ‘The groups reported, and what had begun as a purely academic exer- cise suddenly aroused the students. “People born in some countries have a life expectancy 20 years less than folks in other countries.” “We didn’t find a relationship between levels of education and per capita wealth!” “Some rich countries spend more on military facilities and personnel than some large poor ones spend on health care!” “Women’s rights don’t correlate with type of government! Some democ- racies are less liberal than some dictatorships!” “Some little countries are relatively wealthy because of commerce and industry. Some others just have one mineral that is valuable.” “The United States owes other countries an awful lot of money.” The time is ripe for group investigation. Ms. Psychoyos carefully leads the students to record their reactions to the data. They make a decision to bring together the data on all the countries and find out if the conclusions the groups are coming to will hold over the entire data set. They also decide that they need to find a way of getting in-depth information about selected countries to flesh out their statistical data. But which countries? Will they try to test hypotheses? One student wonders aloud about world organizations and how they re- late to the social situation of the world. They have heard of the United Na- tions and UNESCO but are vague about how they function. One has heard about the “Committee of Seven,” but the others have not. Several have heard of NATO and SEATO but are not sure how they operate. Several won- der about the European Economic Community. Quite a number wonder about the ramifications of German reunification. Several wonder about India and China and how they fit into the picture. Clearly, deciding priorities for the inquiry will not be easy. However, the conditions for group investigation are present. The students are puzzled. They react differently to the various questions. They need information and information sources are available. Ms. Psychoyos smiles at her brood of young furrowed brows. “Let's get organized, There is information we all need, and let's start with that. Then let's prioritize our questions and divide the labor to get information that will help us.” John Dewey's ideas have given rise to the broad and powerful model of teaching known as group investigation. In it, students are organized into democratic problem-solving groups that attack academic problems and are taught democratic procedures and scientific methods of inquiry as they pro- ceed. The movement to practice democracy in the classroom constituted the first major reform effort in American education and generated a great dealCHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING of critical reaction. As schools experimented with democratic-process edu- cation, they were subjected to serious criticism during the 1930s and 1940s. The first items of research produced by the reformers were actually devel- oped in defense—in response to questions raised by concerned citizens ‘about whether such a degree of reliance on social purposes would retard the students’ academic development. The studies generally indicated that social and academic goals are not at all incompatible. The students from those schools were not disadvantaged; in many respects, in fact, they outper- formed students from competitive environments where social education was not emphasized (Chamberlin and Chamberlin, 1943). The reaction con- tinued, however, a seeming anomaly in a democracy whose political and commercial institutions depend so much on integrative organizational behavior. Educational models derived from a conception of society usually envi- sion what human beings would be like in a very good, even utopian, soci- ety. Their educational methods aim to develop ideal citizens who could live in and enhance that society, who coutd fulfill themselves in and through it, and who would even be able to help create and revise it. We have had such models from the time of the Greeks. Plato's Republic (1945) is a blueprint for an ideal society and the educational program to support it. Aristotle (1912) also dealt with the ideal education and society. Since their time, many other utopians have produced educational models, including Augus- tine (The City of God, 1931), Sir Thomas More (Utopia, 1965). Comenius (The Great Didactic, 1907), and John Locke (1927). It was natural that attempts would be made to use teaching methods to improve society. In the United States, extensive efforts have been made to develop classroom instruction as a model of democratic process; in fact, variations on democratic process are probably more common than any other general teaching method as far as the educational literature is con- cerned. In terms of instructional models, democratic process has referred to organizing classroom groups to do any or all of the following tasks: 1. Develop a social system based on and created by democratic proce- dures. 2. Conduct scientific inquiry into the nature of social life and processes. In this case the term democratic procedures is synonymous with the sci- entific method and inquiry. 3. Engage in solving a social or interpersonal problem. 4. Provide an experience-based learning situation The implementation of democratic methods of teaching has been ex- ceedingly difficult. They require the teacher to have a high level.of inter- personal and instructional skills. Also, democratic process is cumbersome and frequently slow; parents, teachers, and school officials often fear that it will not be efficient as a teaching method. In addition, a rich array of in- structional resources is necessary, and these have not always been available. 776 PARTI J THE SOCIAL FAMILY Probably the most important hindrance is that the school simply has not been organized to teach the social and intellectual processes of democrac Instead, it has been directed toward and organized for basic instruction in academic subjects, and school officials and patrons have, for the most part, been unwilling to change that direction or organization. Given the positive effects on student learning in all domains, it is a serious mistake not to make group investigation a staple in the repertoire of all schools. THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS The dominating figure in the effort to develop models for democratic process has been John Dewey, who wrote How We Think in 1910. Nearly all the theoreticians dealing with reflective thinking since that time have acknowledged their debt to him. However, those who have emphasized democratic process have by no means been homogeneous, nor have they followed Dewey in the same ways or even directly. For example, in the 1920s Charles Hubbard Judd (1934) emphasized academic scholarship. William Heard Kilpatrick (1919),'for many years a major spokesperson for the Pro- gressive movement, emphasized social problem solving. George Counts (1932) stressed not only problem solving but also reconstruction of society. Boyd Bode (1927) emphasized the general intellectual processes of problem solving. A well-known statement of this group's concern with the democratic process and societal reconstruction was made in 1961 by Gordon H. Hull- fish and Philip G. Smith in Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education. These authors stress the role of education in improving the capacity of in- dividuals to reflect on the ways they handle information and on their con- cepts, their beliefs, their values. A society of reflective thinkers would be capable of improving itself and preserving the uniqueness of individuals. This philosophy contains many ideas or propositions common to democratic- process philosophies. It carefully delineates the ties among the personal world of the individual, his or her intellect, social processes, and the functioning of a democratic society. Hullfish and Smith see intellectual development and skill in social process as inextricably related. For example, the development of skill in so- cial process requires skill in synthesizing and analyzing the viewpoints of those engaged in social interaction. Next, they believe that knowledge is constructed and continuously re- constructed by individuals and groups. They stress.that knowledge is not conveyed to us merely through our sensory interactions with our environ- ment, but that we must operate on experience to produce knowledge. As a result, knowledge has a personal quality and is unique for each individual. For example, a few hours before writing this, one of the authors stood on a rocky point looking at the Pacific Ocean against the brown of the Califor- nia coast. He felt a quiet excitement and an appreciation of the se. and the rocks and the great peace of the scene about him. Yet the concept sea, theCHAPTER®6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING concept rock, the concept wave, and the excitement, peace, and apprecia- tion he felt were not inherent in the experience themselves. These were con- structed by the author in relation to that experience and to others he has had. He created some concepts and borrowed some from others, He gener- ated some feelings and some beliefs and had been given some by imitating other people (the vast majority were horrowed in this way). Thus, individuals’ ways of reflecting on reality are what make their world comprehensible to them and give them personal and social meaning. The quality of an individual's ability to reflect on experience becomes a crit- ical factor in determining the quality of the world that individual wiil con- struct about himself or herself. Someone who is insensitive to much of his or her experience and does not reflect on it will have a far less richly con- structed world than someone who takes in a good deal of experience and re- flects fully on it. It becomes critical for education to sensitize the individual to many aspects of the physical and social environment and to increase the individual's capacity to reflect on the environment. The individual quality of knowledge creates some difficulties, especially when it comes to constructing a society. Nevertheless, Hullfish and Smith maintain that individual differences are the strength of a democracy, and negotiating among them is a major democratic activity. The more an indi- vidual learns to take responsibility for reflecting on experience and devel- coping a valid view of the world and a valid set of beliefs, the more it is likely that the resulting network of information, concepts, and values will be unique to the individual. In other words, the more fully reflective an indi- vidual is, the more he or she will develop a personal processing system. A democratic society requires that we work together to understand each other's worlds and develop a shared perspective that will enable us to learn from each other and govern ourselves while preserving a pluralistic reality. ‘The perception of alternative frames of reference and alternative courses of action is essential to social negotiations. But one must have great personal development to understand other people's viewpoints. This shar- ing of perceptions is necessary, however, if a mutual reality is to be con- structed (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966). The essence of a functioning democracy is the negotiation of problem definitions and problem situations. This ability to negotiate.with others also helps each person negotiate his or her own world, Maintaining a sense of meaning and purpose depends on developing a valid and flexible way of dealing with reality. Failure to make life comprehensible or to negotiate re- ality with others will result in a feeling of chaos. The ability to continually reconstruct one’s value stances and the ability to create value systems that are compatible are both essential to mature development. Most models of teaching assume that one does something in particular to get a specific outcome from the learner. On the contrary, models that em- phasize democratic process assume that the outcome of any educational ex- perience is not completely predictable. The democratic model makers reason that if they are successful in persuading students to inquire into the nature78 PART II / THE SOCIAL FAMILY of their experiences, and to develop their own ways of viewing the world, it will be impossible to predict just how they will face any given situation or solve any particular problem. Hence, if the students are taught an academic discipline, it is not so that they will know exactly the discipline known by others, but so that this exposure will help each of them create a frame of reference and a unique way of ordering reality. ORIENTATION TO THE MODEL GOALS AND ASSUMPTIONS In Democracy and Education (1916), John Dewey recommends that the entire school be organized as a miniature democracy. Students participate in the development of the social system and, through experience, gradually learn how to apply the scientific method to improve human society. This, Dewey feels, is the best preparation for citizenship in a democracy. John U. Michaelis (1963) has extracted from Dewey's work a formulation specifi- cally for teaching the social studies at the elementary level. Central to his method of teaching is the creation of a democratic group that defines and attacks problems of social significance. Herbert Thelen is one of the founders of the National Training Labora- tory, In many respects Thelen’s group investigation model resembles the methods Dewey and Michaelis recommend. Group investigation attempts to combine in one teaching strategy the form and dynamics of the démo- cratic process with the process of academic inquiry. Thelen is reaching for an experience-based learning situation, easily transferable to later life situ- ations and characterized by a vigorous level of inquiry. Thelen (1960, p. 80) begins with a conception of a social being: “man [woman] who builds with other men [women] the rules and agreements that constitute social reality.” Any view of how people should-develop has to refer to the inescapable fact that life is social. A social being cannot act with- out reference to his or her companions on earth; otherwise in the quest for self-maintenance and autonomy each person may well conflict with other people making similar efforts. In establishing social agreements, each indi- vidual helps to determine both prohibitions and fréedom for action. Rules of conduct operate in all fields—religious, political, economic, and scien- tific—and constitute the culture of a society. For Thelen, this negotiation and renégotiation of the social order are the essence of social process: Thus in groups and societies a cyclical process exists: individuals, interdepen- dently seeking to meet their needs, must establish a social order (and in the process they develop groups and sdcieties). The social order determines in vary- ing degrees what ideas, values and actions are possible, valid, and “appropri- ate"! Working within these “rules” and stimulated by the need for rules the culture develops. The individual studies his reactions to the rules and reinter-CHAPTERS / PARTNERS IN LEARNING prets them to discover their meaning for the way of life he seeks. Through this quest, he changes his own way of life, and this in turn influences the way of life of others. But as the way of life changes, the rules must be revised, and new con- trols and agreements have to be hammered out and incorporated into the social order. (Thelen. 1960, p. 80) ‘The classroom is analogous to the larger society; it has a social order and classroom culture, and its students care about the way of life that de- velops there—that is, the standards and expectations that become estab- lished. Teachers should seek tc harness the energy naturally generated by the concern for creating the social order. The model of teaching replicates the negotiation pattern needed by society. Through negotiation the students study academic knowledge and engage in social problem solving. Accord- ing to Thelen, one should not attempt to teach knowledge from any aca- demic area without teaching the social process by which it was negotiated. ‘Thelen rejects the normal classroom order that develops around the basic values of comfort and politeness or of keeping the teacher happy. Rather, the classroom groiip should take seriously the process of develop- ing a social order. ‘The teacher’s task is to participate in the activities of developing the social order in the classroom for the purpose of orienting it to inquiry, and the “house rules” to be developed are the methods and attitudes of the knowledge discipline to be taught. The teacher influences the emerging social order toward inquiring when he “brings out” and capitalizes on differences in the way students act and in- terprets the roie of investigator—which is also the role of member in the class- room. (Thelen, 1960, p. 8) Life in classrooms takes the form of a series of “inquiries.” Each inquiry starts with a stimulus situation to which students can react and discover basic conflicts among their attitudes, ideas. and modes of perception. On the basis of this information, they identify the problem to be investigated, analyze the roles required to solve it, organize themselves to take these roles, act, report, and evaluate these results. These steps are illuminated by reading, by personal investigation, and by consultation with experts. The group is concerned with its own effectiveness, and with its discussion of its own process as related to the goals of investigation. (Thelen, 1960, p. 82) In their concentration on the overt activities of democratic process, many followers and interpreters of Dewey overlook the underlying spirit that brings the democratic process to life. The activities, if followed by rote, provide only lifeless applications quite unlike the democratic process and Scientific method Dewey and Thelen have in mind. The class should become a miniature democracy that attacks problems and, through problem solv- ing, acquires knowledge and becomes more effective as a social group. Many attempts to use democratic process did little to change educational 7980 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY practice because the implementation was superficial, following the form but not the substance of democracy. BASIC CONCEPTS The two concepts of (1) inquiry and (2) knowledge are central to The- len’s strategy. INQUIRY Inquiry is stimulated by confrontation with a problem, and knowledge results from the inquiry. The social process enhances inquiry and is itself studied and improved. The heart of group investigation lies in its formula- tion of inquiry. According to Thelen (1960), the concern of inquiry is to initiate and supervise the processes of giving attention to something; of in- teracting with and being stimulated by other people, whether in person or through their writing; and of reflection and reorganization of concepts and at- titudes as shown in arriving at conclusions, identifying new investigations to be undertaken, taking action and turning out a better product. (p. 85) The first element of inquiry is an event the individual can react to and puzzle over—a problem to be solved. In the classroom the teacher can se- lect content and cast it in terms of problem situations—for example, “How did our community come to be the way it is?” Simply providing a problem, however, will not generate the puzzlement that is a major energy source for inquiry. The students must add an awareness of self and a desire for per- sonal meaning. In addition, they must assume the dual roles of participant simultaneously inquiring into the problem and observing themselves as inquirers. Because inquiry is basically a social process, stu- dents are aided in the self-observer role by interacting with, and by observ- ing the reactions of, other puzzled people. The conflicting viewpoints that emerge also energize the students’ interest in the problem. Although the teacher can provide a’problem situation, it is up to the stu- dents as inquirers to identify and formulate the problem and pursue its so- lution. Inquiry calls for firsthand activity in a real situation and ongoing experience that continually generates new data. The students must thus be conscious of method so that they may collect data, associate and classify ideas recalling past experience, formulate and test hypotheses, study con- sequences, and modify plans. Finally, they must develop the capacity for re- flection, the ability to synthesize overt participative behavior with symbolic verbal behavior. The students are asked to give conscious attention to the experience—to formulate explicitly the conclusions of the study and to in- tegrate them with existing ideas. In this way thoughts are reorganized into new and more powerful patterns. Let us examine a few examples that Thelen gives us to illustrate the fla- vor of inquiry and to point out the difference between inquiry and activity. The first example is drawn from a second-grade social studies class dealingCHAPTER 6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING with the question, “How do different people live?” The teacher proposed that the students select some group, find out how they live, and put this in- formation ina play they would write themselves. After some discussion the students selected prairie dogs as a focus for their study, Here is an account of their inquiry. ‘They started their study by naming the characters for the play they would write, and of course the characters turned out to be baby, chicken, mother, father, farmer's boy, snake, etc. They made lists of questions to be answered: What do prairie dogs eat? Where do they live? What do they do with their time? How big are their families? Who are their enemies? etc. Individuals sought answers to Questions from science pamphlets, books, the science teacher, officials of the Tocal z00, and I have no doubt at least a few of them talked to their parents. They reported their findings in compositions during the writing lessons. The plot of the play gradually took shape and was endlessly modified with each new bit of information. The play centered around family life, and there was much discussion and spontaneous demonstration of how various members of the family would act. Most of these characterizations actually represented a cross- section of the home lives of seven-year-old children, as perceived by the children. But each action was gravely discussed and soberly considered, and justified in terms of what they knew about the ecology of prairie dogs ‘They built a stage with sliding curtains and four painted backdrops—more reference work here to get the field and farm right. The play itself was given six times, with six different casts, and each child played at least two different parts. ‘There was never any written script, only an agreement on the line of action and the part of it to occur in each scene. And after each presentation the youngsters sat around and discussed what they had been trying to communicate, how it might be improved. (Thelen, 1960, pp. 142-143) Thelen contrasts this example with one drawn from a high school social studies class in which students were to put on a series of television pro- grams on the history of the community. As preparation, the students looked tip information and visited historical sites, taking pictures of important evidence. Harry and Joe took pictures of an Indian mound, left there by original settlers. ‘They took it from the south because the light was better that way, and they never discovered the northern slope where erosion had laid bare a burrow full of In- Gian relics. Mary and Sue spent two afternoons on a graph of corn production in the region; the graph was in a geography book the teacher gave them and the, time was mostly spent in making a neat elaborately lettered document for the camera. The narrators were chosen for their handsome appearance, and much of the staging of the show (which used reports mostly) centered around decid- ing the most decorative way to seat the students. A lot of old firearms and house- hold implements were borrowed from a local museum and displayed, a sentence or two of comment for each, (Thelen, 1960, pp. 143-144) In this latter instance, Thelen acknowledges that the students have learned something about the region, but he points out that most of the 8182 PARTI | THE SOCIAL FAMILY energy—the measure of success—was the effectiveness of the television as a blend of entertainment and information giving. The roles in which the stu- dents inquired “were those of a reporter with a keen eye for human interest angles, rather than the sociologist’s or historian’s with a disciplined concern for the course of human events” (Thelen, 1960, p. 144) These two examples illustrate the distinction between activity and in- quiry. The actions of the second-grade class investigating prairie dogs con- tained the elements of inquiry: puzzlement, self-awareness, methodology, and reflection. In looking at the two examples given, we may ask ourselves: Were there questions? Who formulated them? Who sought their answers? How was the information obtained? Was the information applied? Were conclusions drawn, and who drew them? Activities are potential channels for inquiry, but inquiry must emanate from the motivations and curiosity of students. Activities cease to be inquiry when the teacher is the sole source of the problem identification and the formulation of plans, or when the end product of inquiry takes precedence over the inquiry process. That is what happened to the high school group—they attained production, but lost the process on the way. KNOWLEDGE The development of knowledge is the goal of inquiry, but Thelen uses knowledge in a special way: as the application of the universals and princi- ples drawn from past experience to present experience. In the prairie dog example, the process of discovering knowledge was on center stage at all times; the principles of inquiry were what counted, Knowledge is unborn experience; it is the universals incorporated into the ner- vous system; it is a predisposition to approach the world with inquiry; it is meaningful past experience living within itself; it is the seed of potential inter- nal reorganization through which one keeps in touch with the changing world. Knowledge lies in the basic alternative orientations and the proposition through which new orientations can be built. (Thelen, 1960, p. 51) In other words, we “try on” various ways of looking at experience, continu- ally reinterpreting experience into workable principles and concepts. Why should inquiry take place in groups? In addition to the application of scientific method, inquiry has emotional aspects—emotions rising from involvement and growing self-awareness, the seeking of personal meaning and the affect that accompanies conscious reflective behavior. Thus, Thelen (1954, p. 45) views a learning situation as “one which involves the emotions of the learner.” The group is both an arena for personal needs (individuals with their anxieties, doubts, and private desires), and also an instrument for solving social problems. As conflicting views impinge on individuals, they find themselves inescapably involved in the social and academic dimen- sions of inquiry. The individual “is driven by very profound and very perva- sive psychic needs for the kind of classroom in which he can survive as a person and find a place for himself in the organization. Algebra may meanCHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING less than nothing initially, but self-esteem, freedom of sorts, feelings of growing adequacy and stimulation that provoke him into rewarding activ- ity are important” (Thelen, 1960, p. 147). The social aspects of group inves- tigation provide a route, therefore, to disciplined academic inquiry. ‘As a group confronts a puzzling situation, the reactions of individuals vary widely, and the assumptive worlds that give rise to these varied reac- tions are even more different than the reactions themselves. The need to rec- oncile this difference generates a basic challenge. The newly perceived alternatives extend the student's experience by serving both as a source of self-awareness and as a stimulus to his or her curiosity. Engaged in inquiry with a group, individuals become aware of different points of view that help them find out who they are by seeing themselves projected against the views of others. It also stimulates them: they want to know why differences exist and how they affect them. OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING STRATEGY Thelen provides the example of a group of 11 adult women preparing to be elementary school teachers. This group has enough in common to facil- itate close relationships but contains enough diversity to generate the dif- fering reactions that energize inquiry. These women were investigating the skills, attitudes, and knowledge necessary to be effective teachers. The ini- tial confrontation centered on seven elementary school classes that the teachers had observed. They were given no instructions as to what to ob- serve but were simply told to report their findings to the group. Soon, heated arguments developed over the interpretation of a kinder- garten teacher's behavior. The discussion revealed a great many attitudes and ideas about teaching and learning as well as many submerged personal concerns about the course. At that point the discussion dissolved into ar- guments and ceased being informative. Hence, the instructors broke in with the suggestion that the group accept the difference of opinion and more sys- tematically examine the factors that influence classroom activities. Short filmstrip samples of classroom activities were then presented. The group listed all the factors they could think of to account for the differences among the samples. The purposes of the teacher seemed central. The next task was to relate the observed behavior of children to the mo- tivations of the teacher. Out of this task grew a checklist for studying the be- havior and roles of the students. In other words, the original emotional conflict had led to the collection of new information, more disciplined analysis, and finally the development of an instrument for making judg- ments more objectively. The group continued to make and compare its observations. From these discussions individuals were stimulated to pursue aspects of teaching that interested them; then they met on a private, personal basis with each per- son and developed further individual goals. But what were to be the next activities of the group as a whole? On the basis of their discussion with their students, the instructors were able to iden- 83PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY tify broad questions about child development that interested the group. Ac- cordingly, they made a proposal to study the skills, attitudes, and orientations of children at different ages. The group called in resource people, evaluated the children’s progress gradually, and took over responsibility for guiding its own action. The original inquiry into different reactions to the behavior of a teacher had been “recycled” into an inquiry into child development. THE MODEL OF TEACHING SYNTAX, The model begins by confronting the students with a stimulating prob- lem. The confrontation may be presented verbally, or it may be an actual ex- perience; it may arise naturally, or it may be provided by a teacher. If the students react, the teacher draws their attention to the differences in their reactions—what stances they take, what they perceive, how they organize things, and what they feel. As the students become interested in their dif- ferences in reaction, the teacher draws them toward formulating and struc- turing the problem for themselves. Next, students analyze the required roles, organize themselves, act, and report their results. Finally, the group evaluates its solution in terms of its original purposes. The cycle repeats it- self, either with another confrontation or with a new problem growing out of the investigation itself (see Table 6.1). SOCIAL SYSTEM The social system is democratic, governed by decisions developed from, or at least validated by, the experience of the group—within boundaries and TABLE 6.1 SYNTAX OF GROUP INVESTIGATION MODEL Phase One Phase Two Students encounter puzzling Students explore reactions to the situation (planed or unplanned). situation, Phase Three Phase Four Students formulate study task and ‘Independent and group study. organize for study (problem definition, role, assignments, etc.). Phase Five Phase Six Students analyze progress and Recycle activity. processCHAPTER6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING in relation to puzzling phenomena identified by the teacher as objects to study, The activities of the group emerge with a minimal amount of exter nal structure provided by the teacher: Students and teacher have equal sta- tus except for role differences. The atmosphere is one of reason and negotiation. PRINCIPLES OF REACTION The teacher's role in group investigation is one of counselor, consultant, and friendly critic. He or she must guide and reflect the group experience over three levels: the problem-solving or task level (What is the nature of the problem? What are the factors involved?), the group management level (What information do we need now? How can we organize ourselves to get it?), and the level of individual meaning (How do you feel about these con- clusions? What would you do differently as a result of knowing about .. .?) (Thelen, 1954, pp. 52-53). This teaching role is difficult and sensitive, be- cause the essence of inquiry is student activity—problems cannot be im- posed. At the same time the instructor must: (1) facilitate the group process, (2) intervene in the group to channel its energy into potentially educative activities, and (3) supervise these educative activities so that personal mean- ing comes from the experience (Thelen, 1960, p. 13). Intervention by the in- structor should be minimal unless the group bogs down seriously. Chapters 16 to 18 of Leadership of Discussion Groups (1975) by Gertrude K. Pollack provide an excellent advanced discussion of leadership in groups. Although the material was prepared for persons leading therapy groups, it is written at a general level and provides much useful advice for those wishing to build classrooms around group inquiry. SUPPORT SYSTEM The support system for group investigation should be extensive and re- sponsive to the needs of the students. The school needs to be equipped with a first-class library that provides information and opinion through a wide variety of media; it should also be able to provide access to outside re- sources as well. Children should be encouraged to investigate and to con- tact resource people beyond the school walls. One reason cooperative inquiry of this sort has been relatively rare is that the support systems were not adequate to maintain the level of inquiry. APPLICATION Group investigation requires flexibility from the teacher and the class- room organization. Although we assume that the model fits comfortably with the environment of the “open” classroom, we believe it is equally com- patible with more traditional classrooms. We have observed successful group investigation teachers in a context in which other subjects, such as math and reading, are carried out in a more structured, teacher-directed fashion. If students have not had an opportunity to experience the kind of 85PARTI THE SOCIAL FAMILY social interaction, decision making, and independent inquiry called for in this model, it may take some time before they function at a high level. On the other hand, students who have participated in classroom meetings and/or self-directed, inquiry-oriented learning will probably have an easier time. In any case, it is probably useful for the teacher to remember that the social aspects of the model may be as unfamiliar to students as the intel- lectual aspects and may be as demanding in terms of skill acquisition. Although the examples of the model described here tend to be intellec- tually and organizationally elaborate, all investigations need not be so com- plex. With young children or students new to group investigation, fairly small-scale investigations are possible; the initial confrontation can provide a narrow range of topics, issues, information, and alternative activities. For example, providing an evening's entertainment for the school is more fo- cused than resolving the energy crisis. Deciding who will care for the class- room pet and how is even narrower, Of course, the nature of the inquiry depends on the interests and ages of the students. Older students tend to be concerned with more complex issues. However, the skillful teacher can de- sign inquiries appropriate to the students’ abilities and to his or her own ability to manage the investigation. As we indicated in the introduction to the social family of models, three recent lines of research by three teams (led by David and Roger Johnson, Robert Slavin, and Shlomo Sharan) have contributed a good deal of know!- edge about how to engineer social models and what their effects are likely to be. The Johnsons have concentrated on cooperative tasks, cooperative re- wards, and peer tutoring. They have made extensive reviews of studies with students of all ages working in many substantive areas. As mentioned ear- lier, their reviews and studies support the contention that working together increases student energy and that rewarding teams of students for perfor- mance is effective, appearing to increase the energy of the teams (Johnson, Maruyana, Johnson, Nelson, and Skon, 1981). In addition, their work with peer tutoring appears positive as well, and heterogeneous teams (composed of high and low achievers) appear to be the most productive (Johnson and Johnson, 1972). Slavin’s (1983) work generally confirms that of the Johnsons, and he has added some interesting variations. He has explored ways of differentiating tasks when groups are working on projects and has found that differentiat- ing tasks increases the energy of the students, For example, when students are studying a topic in history, individuals can become “specialists” in cer- tain areas of the topic, with the responsibility of mastering certain infor- mation and conveying it to the other students. In addition, he has looked at the effects of team composition on learning and attitudes toward self and others. Generally, the more heterogeneous groups learn more, form more positive attitudes toward the learning tasks, and become more positive to- ward one another (Slavin, 1983). Sharan has studied group investigation per se. His team has reported that the more pervasive the cooperative climate, the more positive the stu-CHAPTER 6 / PARTNERS IN LEARNING dents toward both the learning tasks and toward each other (Sharan and Hertz-Lazarowitz, 1980a). In addition, he has hypothesized that the greater social complexity would increase achievement of more complex learning goals (concepts and theories) and both confirmed his hypothesis and found that it increased the learning of information and basic skills as well. A nice small study by teachers in an Oregon high school is worth reading both for its insight into the dynamics of the groups and the effects on the students (Huhtala, 1994), The purpose of cooperative inquiry is to combine complex social and academic tasks to generate academic and social learning. Properly imple- mented, it appears to achieve its goals. INSTRUCTIONAL AND NURTURANT EFFECTS ‘This model is highly versatile and comprehensive; it blends the goals of academic inquiry, social integration, and social-process learning. It can be used in all subject areas, with all age levels, when the teacher desires to em- phasize the formulation and problem-solving aspects of knowledge rather than the intake of preorganized, predetermined information. Provided that one accepts Thelen’s view of knowledge and its recon- struction, the group investigation model (Figure 6.1) can be considered a very direct and probably efficient way of teaching academic knowledge as well as social process, It also appears likely to nurture interpersonal warmth and trust, respect for negotiated rules and policies, independence in learn- ing, and respect for the dignity of others. In deciding whether to use the model, considering the potential nurturant effects may be as important as analyzing the likely direct instructional effects. Another model might be as appropriate for teaching academic inquiry, but a teacher may prefer group investigation for what it might nurture. FIGURE 6.1 Instructional and nurturant effects: group investigation model. [[Rospecttor ignty ofA} aoe ‘ Constructionist Conmimentto Paton **~/,, Model Interpersonal + Etective Group Process ‘Warmth and Affiliation 8788 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY Syntax Phase One: Encounter Puzzling Situation (planned or unplanned) Phase Two: Explore Reactions to the Situation Phase Three: Formulate Study Task and Organize for Study (problem definition, role, assignments, and so on) Phase Four: Independent and Group Study Phase Fi : Analyze Progress and Process Phase Six: Recycle Activity Social System The system is based on the democratic process and group decisions, with low external structure. Puzzlement must be genuine—it cannot be im- posed. Authentic exchanges are essential. Atmosphere is one of reason and negotiation. Principles of Reaction Teacher plays a facilitative role directed at group process (helps learners formulate plan, act, manage group) and requirements of inquiry (con- sciousness of method). He or she functions as an academic counselor. The students react to the puzzling situation and examine the nature of their common and different reactions. They determine what kinds of informa- tion they need to approach the problem and proceed to collect relevant data. They generate hypotheses and gather the information needed to test them. They evaluate their products and continue their inquiry or begin a new line of inquiry. The central teaching moves to build the cooperative social environment and teach students the skills of negotiation and con- flict resolution necessary for democratic problem solving. In addition, the teacher needs to guide the students in methods of data collection and analysis, help them frame testable hypotheses, and decide what would constitute a reasonable test of a hypothesis. Because groups vary consid- erably in their need for structure (Hunt, 1971) and their cohesiveness (Thelen, 1967), the teacher cannot behave mechanically but must “read” the students’ social and academic behavior and provide the assistance that keeps the inquiry moving without squelching it. Support System The environment must be able to respond to a variety of learner demands. Teacher and student must be able to assemble what they need when they need it. ——————CHAPTER ROLE PLAYING Studying Social Behavior and Values The analysis of values is what's important. Playing the roles lets the values become visible if the analysis is right. Understanding that what you do is a living out of your values starts the inquiry. —Fannie Shaftel to a group of Palo Alto teachers, May 1969 SiG VE NT AR 1. © We are in a seventh-grade classroom in East Los Angeles, California. The students have returned to the classroom from a recess period and are complaining excitedly to one another. Mr. Williams, the teacher, asks what the matter is and they all start in at once, discussing a series of difficulties that lasted throughout the recess period. Apparently, two of the students began to squabble about who was to take the sports equipment outside. Then all of the students argued about what game to play. Next, there was a dispute about choosing sides for the games. This included a dispute over whether the girls should be included with the boys or whether they should play separately. The class finally began to play volleyball, but very shortly there was a dispute over a line call, and the game was never completed. At first, Mr. Williams displays his displeasure toward the class. He is angry, not simply over the incidents, but because these arguments have been going on since the beginning of the year. At last he says, “OK, we really have to face this problem. You must be as tired of it as I am, and you really are not acting maturely. So we are going to use a technique that we have been using to discuss family problems to approach our own problems right here in this classroom: we're going to use role playing. Now, what I want you to do is divide into groups and try to identify the types of problems we've been having. Just take today, for example, and outline the problem situations that got us into this fix.” The students begin with the argument over taking the sports equipment outside, and then outline other arguments. Each is a typical situation that 89,PART Il / THE SOCIAL FAMILY people face all the time and that they must learn to take a stand on, After the separate groups of students have listed their problems, Mr. Williams ap- points one of the students to lead a discussion in which each group reports the kinds of problem situations that have come up; the groups agree on a half dozen problems that have consistently bothered the class. The students then group the problems according to type. One type con- cerns the division of labor. A second type deals with deciding principles for selecting teams. A third type focuses on resolving disputes over the partic- ulars of games, such as whether balls have been hit out of bounds, whether players are out or safe, and so on. Mr. Williams then assigns one type of problem to each group and asks the groups to describe situations in which the problems come up. When they have done this, the class votes on which problem to start with. The first problem they select is disputes over rules; the actual problem situation they select is the volleyball game in which the dispute over a line call occurred. ‘Together, the class talks about how the problem situation develops. It begins when a ball is hit close to the boundary line. One team believes it is in, and the other believes it is out of bounds. The students then argue with one another, and the argument goes on so that the game cannot continue. Several students are selected to enact the situation. Others gather around and are assigned to observe particular aspects of the role playing that follows. Some students are to look for the particulars of how the argu- ment develops. Some are to study one role player and others another, to de- termine how they handle the situation. The enactment is spirited. The students select as role players those who have been on opposite sides during the game, and they become as involved in the argument during the role playing as they were during the actual sit- uation. Finally, they are standing in the middle of the room shouting at one another. At this point, Mr. Williams calls, “Time!” and asks the students to describe what has gone on. Everyone is eager to talk. The discussion gradually focuses on how the attitude of the participants prevented resolving the problem. No one was lis- tening to the other person. And no one was dealing with the problem of how to resolve honest disputes. Finally, Mr. Williams asks the students to suggest other ways that people could behave in this kind of conflict. Some students suggest giving in gracefully. But others object that if someone believes he or she is right, that is not an easy thing to do. Finally, the students identify an important question to focus on: “How can we develop a policy about who should make calls, and how should others feel about those calls?” They de- cide to reenact the scene by having all the participants assume that the de- fensive team should make the calls only when they see clear evidence that a ball is out and the other team has not seen the evidence. The enactment takes place. This time, the players attempt to follow the policy that the defensive team has the right to make the call, but the offen- sive team has the right to object to a call. Once again, the enactment results in a shouting match; however, after it is over, the students who have watched the enactment point out that the role players have not behaved asCHAPTER7 / ROLE PLAYING if there is a resolution to the situation. They recognize that if there are to be games, there has to be agreement about who can make calls as well as a certain amount of trust on both sides. ‘They decide to try a third enactment, this time with two new role play- ers inserted as dispute referees. The introduction of referees completely changes the third enactment. The referees insist that the other players pay fattention to them, which the players do not want to do. In discussing this enactment, the students point out that there has to be a system to ensure reasonable order and the resolution of disputes. The students also agree that as things stand, they probably are unable to resolve disputes without including a referee of some sort, but that no referees will be effective unless the students agree to accept the referees’ decisions as final. They finally de- cide that in future games, two students will be referees. Those students will be chosen by lot prior to the game; their function will be to arbitrate and to make all calls relevant to the rules of the game, and their decisions will be final. The students agree that they will see how that system works. ‘The next day Mr. Williams opens up the second set of issues, and the students repeat this process. The exploration of other areas of dispute con- tinues over the next few weeks, At first, many of the notions that are clari- fied are simply practical ones about how to solve specific problems. Gradually, however, Mr. Williams directs the discussion to a consideration of the basic values governing individual behavior. The students begin to see the problems of communal living, and they develop policies for governing their own behavior, as individuals and as a group. They also begin to de- velop skills in negotiating. The students who were locked in conflict gradu- ally learn that if they behave in a slightly different way, others may also modify their behavior, and problems become easier to solve. In role playing, students explore human relations problems by enacting problem sitiations and then discussing the enactments. Together, students Pan explore feelings, attitudes, values, and problem-solving strategies. Sev- eral teams of researchers have experimented with role playing, and their treatments of the strategy are remarkably similar. The version we explore here was formulated by Fannie and George Shaftel (1967). We have also in- corporated ideas from the work of Mark Chesler and Robert Fox (1966). Role playing as a model of teaching tas roots in both the personal and social dimensions of education. It attempts to help individuals find personal meaning within their social worlds and to resolve personal dilemmas with the assistance of the social group. In the social dimension, it allows indi- viduals to work together in analyzing social situations, especially interper- Sonal problems, and in developing decent and democratic ways of coping with these situations. We have placed role playing in the social family of models because the social group plays such an indispensable part in human development and because of the unique opportunity that role playing offers for resolving interpersonal and social dilemmas. a192 PARTI / THE SOCIAL FAMILY OrtENTATION TO THE MODEL GOALS AND ASSUMPTIONS, On its simplest level, role playing is dealing with problems through ac- tion; a problem is delineated, acted out, and discussed. Some students are role players; others observers. A person puts himself or herself in the posi- tion of another person and then tries to interact with others who are also playing roles. As empathy, sympathy, anger, and affection are all generated during the interaction, role playing, if done well, becomes a part of life. This emotional content, as well as the words and the actions, becomes part of the later analysis. When the acting out is finished, even the observers are in- volved enough to want to know why each person reached his or her deci- sion, what the sources of resistance were, and whether there were other ways this situation could have been approached. The essence of role playing is the involvement of participants and ob- servers in a real problem situation and the desire for resolution and under- standing that this involvement engenders. The role-playing process provides a live sample of human behavior that serves as a vehicle for students to: (1) explore their feelings; (2) gain insight into their attitudes, values, and perceptions; (3) develop their problem-solving skills and attitudes; and (4) explore subject matter in varied ways. These goals reflect several assumptions about the learning process in role playing. First, role playing implicitly advocates an experience-based learning situation in which the “here and now” becomes the content of in- struction. The model assumes that it is possible to create authentic-analo- gies to real-life problem situations and that through these re-creations students can “sample” life. Thus, the enactment elicits genuine, typical emo- tional responses and behaviors from the students. A related assumption is that role playing can draw out students’ feel- ings, which they can recognize and perhaps release. The Shaftels’ version of role playing emphasizes the intellectual content as much as the emo- tional content; analysis and discussion of the enactment are as important as the role playing itself. We, as educators, are concerned that students rec- ognize and understand their feelings and see how their feelings influence their behavior. Another assumption, similar to an assumption of the synectics models, is that emotions and ideas can be brought to consciousness and enhanced by the group. The collective reactions of the peer group can bring out new ideas and provide directions for growth and change. The model deempha- sizes the traditional role of teacher and encourages listening and learning from one’s peers. A final assumption is that covert psychological processes involving one's own attitudes, values, and belief system can be brought to consciousness by combining spontaneous enactment with analysis. Furthermore, individualsCHAPTER7 / ROLE PLAYING can gain some measure of control over their belief systems if they recognize their values and attitudes and test them against the views of others. Such analysis can help them evaluate their attitudes and values and the conse- quences of their beliefs, so that they can allow themselves to grow. THE CONCEPT OF ROLE Each individual has a unique manner of relating to people, situations, and objects. One person may feel that most people are dishonest and can- not be trusted; someone else may feel that everyone is interesting and may look forward to meeting new people. People also evaluate and behave in consistent ways toward themselves, seeing themselves as powerful and smart, or perhaps afraid and not very able. These feelings about people and situations aad about themselves influence people's behavior and determine how they will respond in various situations. Some people respond with ag- gressive and hostile behavior, playing the part of a bully. Others withdraw and remain alone, playing the part of a shy or sulking person. These parts people play are called roles. A role is “a patterned sequence of feelings, words, and actions. ... It is a unique and accustomed manner of relating to others” (Chesler and Fox, 1966, pp. 5, 8). Unless people are looking for them, it is sometimes hard to perceive consistencies and pat- terns in behavior. But they are usually there. Terms such as friendly, builly, snobby, know-it-all, and grouch are convenient for describing characteristic responses or roles. The roles individuals play are determined by several factors over many years. The kinds of people someone meets determine his or her general feel- ings about people. How those people act toward the individual and how the individuals perceive their feelings toward them influence their feelings about themselves. The rules of one’s particular culture and institutions help to determine which roles a person assumes and how he or she plays them. People may not be happy with the roles they have assumed. And they may misperceive the attitudes and feelings of others because they do not recognize their role and why they play it. Two people can share the same feelings but behave in very different ways. They can desire the same goals, but if one person's behavior is misperceived by others, he or she may not at- tain that goal. For a clear understanding of oneself and of others, it is thus extremely important that a person be aware of roles and how they are played. To do this, each person must be able to put himself or herself in another's place, and to experience as much as possible that person's thoughts and feelings If someone is able to empathize, he or she can accurately interpret social events and interactions. Role playing is a vehicle that forces people to take the roles of others. The concept of role is one of the central theoretical underpinnings of the role-playing model. It is also a major goal. We must teach students to use this concept, to recognize different roles, and to think of their own and 93