Simple, Surprising, Useful? Three Questions for Judging Teaching Methods th International Conference on The First-Year Experience The 16 10 July 2003 Vancouver, British Columbia Dr. William Palmer English Department Alma College Alma, Michigan, USA 48801 email: palmer@alma.edu ; phone: 989-463-7171 Some Quotes on Discovery Learning “ The road is better than the inn. ” Jerome Bruner, On Knowing (110) “ Whatever you really learn, you teach yourself. If you only learn what you are told, then you are only keeping in mind [. . .] what was put there by somebody else. What you really learn is what you discover. ” Ann Berthoff, Forming/Thinking/Writing (9) “ To understand something well is to sense wherein it is simple. ” Jerome Bruner, On Knowing ( 105) “ Any idea or problem or body of knowledge can be presented in a form simple enough so that any particular learner can understand it. ” Jerome Bruner, Theory of Instruction (44) “ An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory. ” Successful teaching methods “ give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results. ” John Dewey, Democracy and Education (169, 181) “ There is no royal road to learning through an airy path of brilliant generalizations. ” Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (10) Students cannot always “ do ” : “ If each human being had to learn everything by doing it, civilization would still be in the Stone Age. ” Wilbert McKeachie, Teaching Tips (229)
“ Losing balance, regaining it, and going on, is the substance of learning. ” Donald Graves, Writing: Teachers & Children at Work (231) ““ An important ingredient is a sense of excitement about discovery. ” Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (20) “ It is the unexpected that strikes one with wonder or astonishment. ” Jerome Bruner, On Knowing (18) “ Somewhere between apathy and wild excitement, there is an optimum level of aroused attention that is ideal for classroom activity. ” Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (72) “ Students teaching other students must actively organize and reorganize their own learning in order to explain it. Thus they themselves learn from teaching. ” Wilbert McKeachie, Teaching Tips (100) “ We believe that classroom teachers can, through close observation, the collection of feedback on student learning, and the design of experiments, learn more about how students learn, and more specifically, how students respond to particular teaching approaches. We call this process of involving teachers in the formal study of teaching and learning Classroom Research. ” K. Patricia Cross and Thomas A. Angelo, Classroom Assessment Techniques (1) “ The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily. ” Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (17) “ We may well ask of any item of information that is taught or that we lead a child to discover for himself whether it is worth knowing. I can think of only two good criteria [. . .] for deciding such an issue: whether the knowledge gives a sense of delight and whether it bestows the gift of intellectual travel beyond the information given, in the sense of containing within it the basis of generalization. ” Jerome Bruner, On Knowing (108-109)
“ Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry. ” Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (20) “ Great teachers [. . .] stimulate active, not passive, learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning after their college days are over. ” Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered (24) From the Classroom Simple, Surprising, Useful? Three Questions for Judging Teaching Methods William Palmer All teachers share in common at least one teaching practice: we do not teach pure content. We teach students how to learn our content and how to develop positive attitudes toward it. But how? What methods do we use, and how can we judge them? Jerome S. Bruner, a developmental psychologist and author of The Process of Education (1960), Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966), and On Knowing (1971), among other scholarly works, presents a constructivist theory of learning in which student s discover and actively construct their own formulations of concepts. By applying Bruner’s principles of discovery learning, I have formulated three short questions for judging the value of any teaching method I use: Is it simple (can it be presented so students can readily understand it)? Is it surprising (does it contain anything unexpected to stir wonder in students)? Is it useful (will they be able to apply it in the future)? Applying this rubric to an activity designed to teach stylistic maturity through the use of colons furnishes an apt illustration. I begin by asking students to write a sentence with a colon. From experience, I know that almost all students will write a sentence with a colon followed by a list. For example: "At the bookstore, I bought the following items: textbooks, legal pads, and LifeSavers." This sentence is fine, but I want my students to learn a new pattern, so I continue the activity by dictating sentences using colons in another way: Writing is important: it helps you think. One thing is clear: I am not the only watcher in the woods. (Erdrich 1995: 61) Sometimes an outline serves best as a cage to break out of: it makes you think of ideas that won’t fit inside but which otherwise wouldn’t occur to you. (Elbow 198 1: 49)
My students transcribe these sentences and discover for themselves that they illustrate a new way to use colons: to introduce an explanation. With some prompting (I ask what precedes each colon, and they recognize that a complete thought does), they learn the main rule for using colons: a complete thought must come before it. This rule also applies for any sentence containing a colon followed by a list. To reinforce the lesson, I ask students to write sentences illustrating the new colon structure, and then we share them aloud in a circle. The students may pass, but most are happy to read their work. I don’t like ice cream: it hurts the cavity in my bac k tooth. It’s too hot in the classroom: people are starting to sweat. Carnival people have small hands: they use them to make cabbage stew and to tinker with buttons. As these examples show, students tend to use the colon pattern to elaborate on an opinion. Regardless of the topic, however, the process of writing and sharing is fun. It appeals to hams and quiet students alike, and when a student’s sentence is humorous, like the last one, the class enjoys a moment of language play. To complete the lesson, I ask the students to revise a brief passage from a recent draft of their writing by using a colon to introduce an explanation. Most students readily do this: I was raised in an interfaith household. My mother is Jewish and my father is Christian. I was raised in an interfaith household: my mother is Jewish and my father is Christian. A third cause of our stereotype is derived from our music. We like it loud and obnoxious. A third cause of our stereotype is derived from our music: we like it loud and obnoxious. My mother already had a gloomy look on her face; she had been dreading my first day of college for the past three months. My mother already had a gloomy look on her face: she had been dreading my first day of college for the past three months. In the first two examples the colon signals a closer causal relationship between the two thoughts than a period does. The last example is more complicated because the original version of the sentence contains a semicolon (I had taught the students to
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