Are Some Practices Better Than Others?

By Author: Big Bang
Total Articles: 24
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Peter says that "different teachers may be more skillful with one approach than another due to their training, their dispositions, their experience, and other factors. As a result, what works best for me in my classroom might not work so well in yours". I believe him without question. If a teacher does not know how to use any given approach, especially a complex one, it is likely to fail in terms of student learning. No question.

The more important question is this: Does one method, practice, or paradigm work better for our students than another? This is a question that I will contend. I believe that practices or paradigms make huge differences, not only in student learning but also in student dispositions toward learning.

An example: My partner, Vera Wallace, and I prepared a unit on writing narrative at the request of Vera's principal to be taught at her Chicago high school. The unit was not developed in a vacuum but rather had been Vibram Fivefingers Shoes taught in many different forms by my students and me in Chicago schools for a period of nearly 20 years. The ...
... principal had seen the unit in action, had been impressed, and had asked that it be taught by all teachers in the department at the ninth-grade level. Vera and I spent several hours adapting the 1996 version of the unit for her teachers. She subsequently distributed the unit, and I received frequent reports about its progress. Teachers at the school were required to submit daily lesson plans that their chairs were to review. Vera invited me to visit one of her interviews concerning a lesson plan submitted by one teacher. This teacher we visited had departed from one of the key lessons in our narrative unit.

The lesson, which we have come to call the "sea shell lesson," focused on helping students learn to generate figurative language in their narrative writing. It began with examining univalve sea shells (not clams) in order to describe them in terms of what they looked like. The emphasis was on color, patterns, similes, and metaphors. The lesson, which I have reported in detail (Hillocks, Narrative), begins with the teacher asking students to suggest ideas about what a large helmet shell looks like. At this stage the shell garners many similes: like an athletic trophy, like an elf's hat, like a ball gown, like a large trumpet, like an ear, a shark's mouth, an evil smile, and so on. After this teacher-led discussion, the students work in small groups examining two shells, one of which the small group will write about with some help from the teacher, and finally to writing individually about one shell that is different from all other shells used in the class. In the latter, the compositions are redistributed to the class, the shells go onto a table, and readers of the compositions are asked to find Vibram Five Fingers On Sale the shell described in the composition from one of their classmates and provide feedback to the writers. My students have had great success with these activities. After uses in two inner-city seventh-grade classes, for example, we found that while none of our youngsters used figurative language on a narrative written as a pretest, 70% were using figurative language three to four weeks later on a posttest of narrative writing.