What should teaching look like?

What should be the role of teachers in our schools? Should teachers use direct instruction or facilitate student-directed learning? These are some of the questions raised by Ron and Chris Baran in a recent letter.

Although the Barans go to great lengths to define the terms “teacher” and “facilitator,” they also use the terms “Teacher-Directed Learning,” “Direct Instruction,” and “Teacher-Directed Instruction” interchangeably, regardless of their original contexts. After reading this letter, I decided to ask my middle and high school students what they thought about it. One question that came out of our discussion was, “What does direct instruction look like?”

Typically in schools where class sizes range into the 30s, direct instruction looks like the familiar picture of a teacher lecturing or solving problems on the chalkboard, assigning homework, and then grading tests. This is not the kind of “Direct Instruction” that appears in the 1970s research cited by the Barans.

Instead, the Project Follow Through study evaluated Zig Engelmann's preschool model that originally looked like this: Zig would ask six students to sit in a semicircle and listen while he explained basic problems in mathematics. Then he would ask each student questions about the problem until every pupil could recite the correct answers.

What Engelmann's model shows is that in a small group setting, direct and personalized instruction raises student achievement, something teachers have been saying for decades. Clearly, it is difficult to tell what instruction directed by teachers looks like, since it varies greatly from school to school.

It is equally difficult to tell what “teachers becoming facilitators” and “students as workers” look like, since there is great variation here as well. Facilitating a class might mean students choose topics for research, or select specific objectives to work towards, or decide to express their individuality in artistic ways.

One common feature of facilitation is more active participation by students. The Barans claim that students actively participate in their learning by “paying attention as the teacher teaches, ... and getting graded for one's work.”

None of my students thought this was active learning. One middle school student commented, “If the teacher tells them everything they need to know, the kids don't really do anything.”

Another remarked, “When you are involved in your learning process, you will put more effort into it.”

In his written reflection on the Barans' letter, another student said, “You can have a facilitator as a teacher and still have well-defined goals. It's not like the teacher doesn't come to school, but leaves a note saying `learn multiplication.'”

At this point it would be logical to cite current research that shows that student-directed approaches raise student achievement. Since the mid-1980s when Theodore Sizer's “A Study of High Schools” was first published, there have been numerous studies by researchers such as Fred Newmann, Gary Wehlage, David Bensman, and Margaret MacMullen that demonstrate how a variety of student-directed approaches applied in regular classrooms increase the success of students in schools.

One might even note Central Park East Elementary School in East Harlem, the focus of Bensman's research, which recently documented that 94.8 percent of its students graduated from high school, compared to the city-wide rate of 66.9 percent. Of these CPESS graduates, 87.4 percent went to college, as compared to only 15.5 percent of all residents in East Harlem (1991-1993).

However, one must be careful reading statistics from studies like Project Follow Through and others that are cited here. One middle school student pointed out, “You can find whatever you want in research” to support your personal opinion.

Instead of relying on statistics as proof, one must take a good look at how schools as a whole support “teachers as facilitators,” what their classrooms look like, and whether the specific programs work for that school's student population.

If the Barans or others want to see what “facilitation” and “student-directed instruction” look like, I would gladly invite them to visit our school, where we have modeled these approaches for the past 25 years.

Lann Wasson
Counterpane School
connect@counterpane.org

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