Generally there are two bad classroom organizations: chaos and lecture. They are bad because student learning does not regularly occur. True chaos is rare because social groups start organizing themselves into hierarchies, pecking orders, and social networks around various commonalities (for instance, language, class, popularity, skin-color, religion). Lecture is much more common, and minimally effective except in transmission-based models of instruction and for high performing students who already have learned how to learn. I abominate transmission-based models of instruction, but I see a small place for brief lectures; they allow the teacher to tell his or her autobiographical experiences with the content and to provide stories that motivate student learning. Learners should be engaged in the content and process learning through means other that lecture, except for that small minority of learners who are completely auditory.
The good teacher envisions the organization of the classroom into participatory groups and learning activities, acting as guide to both functional classroom structure and learning. Lecture is kept to brief motivating transmissions while student engagement in learning activities is maximized through hands-on manipulation and minds-on engagement with physical materials, mental processes, inquiry, and multimedia. Students are taught in interactive sessions that last for a few moments (measured in seconds) to longer blocks of time. In these longer blocks of time, students respond in various ways, almost continuously involved; they answer teacher questions chorally or individually, write notes (teacher directed in early grades, but increasingly self-directed from second grade), read, write, ask questions, discuss ideas, demonstrate processes with teacher guidance, use computers, listen to recordings, watch video, and compose multimedia projects. In formal lectures that may be appropriate in high school, the student responses are individually engaged with note-taking and written questions as the learner works mentally with the information and processes being described; sometimes this process is called ‘active listening’ and exemplifies the constructivist learner who is building mental and linguistic knowledge at all times.
Differentiation is a buzz-word currently. It means that the good teacher changes instruction, strategies, activities, technologies, and materials to meet learner needs. Differentiated instruction is the tool that breaks apart the ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Learners need a variety of approaches to developing skill, competence, and mastery of knowledge and processes; good teachers have a repertoire of such approaches rather than relying on one. The teacher’s repertoire needs strategies for gaining learner attention and building learner practices that internalize what the learner needs to perform in various situations with the knowledge, skill or process that must be demonstrated. Differentiation means, to me, that the teacher is engaged in providing experiences for the learner that are in the Vygotskian zone of proximal development (ZPD). For example, a ten-year-old child reading four-grade levels below expectations cannot read the same text as the child performing at grade-level expectations. What can the teacher do? Here’s a list:
1. provide more of the same instruction (related to background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),
2. provide different instruction(related to the learner’s instruction differences but building background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),
3. teach the child alternate coping strategies for dealing with difficult texts and monitoring understanding and learning (again related to background knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension skills, decoding skills),
4. read the text to the child,
5. have someone else read the text to the child,
6. have technology read the text to the child (test to speech and Kurzweil devices),
7. change to alternate (easier) materials that the child can read but cover the same topic,
8. change the topic of the instruction to engage the child more effectively but reaching towards the general goal of the curriculum.
All of these require an extremely skilled teacher with a wide repertoire of teaching and a deep understanding of the curriculum. Meeting the needs of a learner having difficult academically or socially is impeded by current rigid structures of the school, including age-grade placement fetishes and testing mania. Classes and groupings need to become more flexible. Specialist teachers need to move independently through classrooms and schools, providing support to teachers and children. Teachers and specialist need time to confer and plan together to meet needs of learners having difficulty; rarely does repeating the same instruction work for learners having problem, so alternative programs are needed to match the characteristics of learners.
Since classrooms are complex communities of learners, an observer cannot understand what is going on in a classroom without interacting in the community and discussing the structures with the teacher (outside of classroom teaching time). Students are learning more that just information; they are developing habits and procedures that should improve their abilities to learn in other settings. They are developing moral and ethical frameworks and attitudes towards the school and learning in institutional settings. Understanding what a good teacher does takes time and conferencing with the teacher or teachers about the challenges and structures of the classroom.
All classrooms are structured. Period. The observer may not like the structure and may not understand it, but it takes time to see how things work in an individual classroom. IT’S WRONG TO CALL ANY CLASSROOM UNSTRUCTURED. If there are children and a teacher present, there is structure (although the empty set is a structure also). Teachers and administrators use “unstructured” to refer to a classroom structure that they don’t understand or just don’t like. Observers need to get beyond this, and discuss and describe the structures in place. For instance, many whole language (and some other) classrooms use workshops (reading workshop and writing workshop). These workshops are very carefully structured, crafted around the teacher’s idea of building students’ reading and writing procedures, and the students learn the structure and engage in the processes, colluding with the teacher in making the classroom function. Both children and teacher are parts of this complex social structure where language (oral and written) is used for communication and learning. The naïve observer (often an administrator, certified without competencies in curriculum) who only spends a few moments in the classroom without interacting with the children about their tasks will not understand how the classroom is structured or see how the activities are tied to grade-level standards. Good teachers must communicate to naïve observers about the importance of classroom structures and not let administrators or legislators bully teachers into adopting less productive structures.
How to organize various activities with groups in a classroom is an art form. With twenty children in a class, just the number of mathematically possible groups is staggering -- more than 2,432,902,008,176,649,000 (if you include order of assignment to the group with tasks within the group), and if the teacher is included or not in the group, the number doubles. A classroom of 25 had something like 1.6 x 1025 . Need I go on? The big idea is for every teacher to have envisioned the structure of his/her classroom as an environment and as a set of dynamic processes that flow over short time periods like seconds, minutes, or hours, and that evolve over longer time periods like days, weeks, or months. These structures should meet the needs of the teacher and the students for engagement, learning, productivity, performance, assessment, success, emotional well-being, and aesthetics. The teacher envisions cycles and products within the curriculum that keep all children learning with new content and review of important processes, differentiating for the needs of the various learners in the classroom. Teachers of literacy use various materials: text books (hard copy and electronic), children’s literature or adolescent literature (books that are age-appropriate or age-appropriate multimedia – yes, video can be literature!), enrichment reading materials (teacher selected material to build background, experiences, language, and vocabulary through a wide range of texts on various topics), self-selected readings (the child selects, but of course with guidance from teacher and parents), and children’s writing.
Teachers need a repertoire of strategies and organization schemes to perform their practice in the classroom and to motivate learners to collude with them. This takes conscious knowledge of a complex performance repertoire, caring, cooperation, collusion with the learners, community, an ability to change, and above all commitment. Rather than using one or two teachers as a model, every teacher has to develop a style. What will your teaching style be? What are its key ideas?
Further reading:
Bruner, Jerome. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, Jerome. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, Jerome. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, Jerome. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, 21-32.
Bruner, Jerome. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gardner, H. (1991). Intelligence in seven steps. Available: http://www.newhorizons.org/crfut_gardner.html.
Gardner, Howard. (1993). Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. Basic Books: New York.
Gardner, Howard. (1993). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Basic Books: New York.
Gardner, Howard. (1991). The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. Basic Books: New York.
Glasersfeld, Ernst V. (1996). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. Falmer Press: London.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). New York, NY: Plenum.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language (A. Kozulin, Trans., Ed.). Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press.
Vygotsky, Lev. (1987). The Collected Works. Problems of General Psychology. vol 1. New York: Plenum Press.
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