The Difference Between A Paradigm And A Practice

By Author: Elizabeth
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What Peter calls Structured Process is not so much a discrete practice as it is a group of practices that appear in conjunction with each other and the belief that nearly all students can learn, a paradigm of teaching that is quite complex. Three decades of helping my Chicago students learn even one part of that paradigm, how to operate small-group discussions, have taught me that learning all this is no simple task. In the University of Chicago MAT English program, learning how to run effective group discussions began in the fall workshops with planning, using, and critiquing such discussions and then doing it again and again. The work continued through MBT Kaya tudent teaching, usually with good results.

Further, small-group discussion is only one part of the paradigm. The small-group discussions are in service of reaching larger goals, which are always focused on developing students' abilities to deal with tasks of increasing complexity independently. One of the first units I worked on with such a design was developed collaboratively by four teachers in Euclid, ...
... Ohio, for ninth-grade honors students. The unit focused on satire and the final evaluation involved students' reading a satiric work independently that they were to interpret in an essay written independently. We wanted to determine if students had learned strategies and skills for reading and writing that they could apply in a new task. It appears that most teachers do not use such evaluation procedures. Rather, they hold students responsible only for what has been "covered" in class. According to Elizabeth A. Kahn, tenth-grade teachers in the cohort she studied used test content as a kind of bargaining chip to help control their classes. Teachers promised that if students paid attention in class, they would be able to pass the tests. Kahn studied the teachers' quizzes, unit tests, final exams, and composition assignments. She found that about 65% of the points available for the semester were based on multiple-choice, matching, or true/false items, most involving literal information that had been presented in the textbook or by the teachers in class.

Many teachers have told me that it is simply unfair to test students on material that has not been "covered" in class. They conceptualize teaching as a matter of arranging material in sequence of some sort, presenting bits and pieces of information about the material, including interpretations, and testing to determine if students have learned that material. There is little or no thought about preparing students to do more and more complex tasks independently or about evaluation procedures MBT Chapa to determine if students have gained in their ability to work with those problems. These practices are characteristic of what Peter and I both call presentational teaching.

On the other hand, the objective for the final unit evaluation of the satire unit was as follows:
To write an essay interpreting the satire of a play, novel, or a series of essays or short stones by a single author. Students could not use material studied in class. List included some no satiric work, e.g., The Jungle.
Criterion statements: the student must
a. Decide on the basis of criteria in a definition whether or not the work is satiric.
b. Identify the targets of satire and explain why they are satirized.
c. Explain how plot, character, imagery and satiric technique provide the satire.

Four teachers worked on the original design of the unit in 1959- All of us were pleased with the results. In our judgments our ninth-grade honors classes in three schools had fulfilled the objectives. Students were able to read satire independently, identify the targets of satire, explain the satiric techniques, and so forth. I hasten to add this does not occur by magic. The unit begins with sarcasm that students use in their everyday language, moves to simple cartoons using exaggeration, to fables using exaggeration and simple symbolism, to cartoons and fables using both of these and irony, and thence to relatively simple poems using irony and other techniques, and finally to plays and novels— all prior to the independent reading and writing. At every stage we paid close attention to the writing problems involved in these simpler tasks. For example, students wrote about interpretations of cartoons, fables, poems, short stories, and of the shared major works. Eventually, students wrote original parodies and satires. (See Hillocks, McCabe, and McCampbell for much more detail.)