What Is A Practice?

By Author: Stephen Covey
Total Articles: 74
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Peter discusses three models, or paradigms, of teaching English. He claims that the one he attributes to me has been the most effective for him. It has certainly been most effective for me and for many of my students. When I arrived at Chicago, I was primarily interested in the design of curriculum and instruction. Since my arrival there, a good deal of my work has attempted to investigate and the effects of the practices I taught my students. I had to ask, is it better to teach them how to lecture effectively or how to run effective small-group discussions? Is it better to spend time on how to craft clear objectives and criteria that permit judging when the objectives have been met, or is it better largely to ignore the complexities of structuring clear objectives and their criteria and simply allow any sort of statement of Tag Heuer Grand Carrera Replica goals including those about the glories of literature and cultural heritage that I heard as a beginning teacher? Is it better to analyze thoughtfully the tasks you hope students will learn to deal with successfully, or should you simply ...
... assign the tasks believing that those who can do them will and those who cannot will fail? Is it better to assign a story for reading right out of the book, or is it better to invent an activity designed to capture students' interest and engage prior knowledge as a means of introducing the story and setting up a central problem for interpretation?

After my first two years of teaching, long before I arrived at Chicago, I began to elect small-group discussion, clear objectives and their criteria, task analysis, and gateway activities over activities against which they are juxtaposed, even as I was learning how to do them. Subsequently, I have argued that these are all highly interrelated. The analysis of the task reveals the objectives and their criteria. Both of these are fundamental to inventing an effective gateway activity. All are mandatory to ensuring effective daily small-group discussions in which students discover, for themselves, the processes they will need to meet the objectives: to interpret the relationships among characters, to interpret the symbolic relationships among images To the extent that practices disallow students the possibility of pursuing these discoveries themselves, the practice will be less effective. When my objectives are not clearly thought out, the tasks in which I engage students will not be clear. When the task is not clear, students will likely have difficulty and I will provide inappropriate feedback, often providing the "correct answers," thus putting an end to student thinking and rendering the process of thinking through solutions unnecessary. When I provide answers, rather than encourage my charges to develop their own solutions, I deprive them of the opportunity of learning the processes for developing those solutions, which, I am convinced, is what English teaching should be all about.

It has become clear to us, from our earliest workshops, that for teachers to adopt such practices they had to believe the practices would result in increased learning for most, if not all, of their students. The corollary, more fundamental, belief is that, with appropriate instruction, all or nearly all students are capable of learning what our strongest students learn. (See Benjamin S. Bloom for a full argument about this issue.)

But all these "practices," "best" or not, can hardly be seen as one practice, let alone a "silver bullet" (Smagorinsky 15). It is unlikely, for example, that having clear objectives and criteria, in itself, as a practice could facilitate effective small-group discussion. A well-thought-out and accessible task has to go with it. In addition, the teacher needs to know how to ask questions and suggest problems for discussion; how to group students; how to move students in and out of groups efficiently; how to move from small group to small group observing each and making suggestions as necessary while continuing to watch the whole class; how to provide feedback Tag Heuer Replica Watches efficiently; how and when to encourage students; when to call an end to the discussions; how and when to allow students to share their group ideas with the whole class; and how to lead the class to develop interpretations and arguments as a whole. (Some of my students have written an excellent book about these practices: Talking in Class: Using Discussion to Enhance Teaching and Learning by McCann, Johannessen, Kahn, and Flanagan.) Each of these is a practice that we can code as a result of interviews with teachers and classroom observations. Discussions of such practices and their coding appear in Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching (Hillocks).