Learning for Keeps

Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners

Rhoda Koenig

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781416610854
• eBook ISBN: 9781416611950
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning for Keeps answers the questions teachers frequently ask about how to provide the explicit strategy instruction that supports the higher-level skills students need to meet the rigorous demands of the Common Core Standards. Teachers recognize that students often do not come to our classrooms with the skills necessary for the activities and projects that require solving problems, reading deeply, responding to higher levels of text complexity, communicating well- developed ideas, and performing the many cognitive behaviors necessary for long-term intellectual development.

Here's a highly practical book that gives teachers the specific knowledge and larger vision needed to demystify essential strategies with explicit instruction. The reader will come away with a tutorial in breaking down complex strategies into incremental parts; models of scripted explicit strategy lessons; examples of coaching transactions that mediate students' application of strategies; and scaffolded activities that integrate content and process. Learning for Keeps is an indispensable tool for enabling all students to independently select and apply the behaviors needed for becoming highly literate and thoughtful citizens prepared for college and 21st century careers.

Chapter 1
Laying the Foundation for Mediation That Makes a Difference

Bringing about transformative changes in our students' cognitive behaviors requires some introspection on our part. We first have to check the efficacy of our core beliefs and teaching practices. This chapter focuses on three orientations to teaching that are essential for the development of substantive improvement in our students' reading, writing, and problem-solving behaviors. Looking beyond the goal of reaching a higher level of literacy, we are about to chart a course for mediation that taps into what is unique about each of our students and brings out their capacity to be self-guided thinkers and problem solvers.

Replacing Transmission Instruction with Transactional Instruction

The professor of my graduate reading course, an aging academic rock star, cast his sweeping gaze over the two dozen young women assembled before him as if he were searching the night sea for floundering vessels. And floundering we were. "Why do you teach reading the way you do?" he had demanded. When the absence of a response was clearly established, he began a systematic inquisition. Beginning at one tip of the squared configuration of tables, he positioned himself in front of each student, looked her squarely in the eyes, and waited. One by one came the barely audible words "I don't know." Some, myself included, managed to embellish. "I use the basal reader I was given. My principal gave us guidelines to follow for students reading below, on, and above grade level."

That scene and my professor's question (circa 1965) have stayed with me throughout my long career as a teacher, their implications too profound to dismiss. We were practicing teachers who had not taken the responsibility to explore our instructional options and make choices that would be in the best interests of our students. Were we not curious enough, not caring enough, or just ignorant in a domain that demanded our expertise?

I believe another reason explains our disturbing responses that day. Viewing teaching as an act of faithfully following a teacher's edition is a legacy that can be traced to Edward Thorndike, who in the 1920s espoused the theory of behaviorism. He derived his philosophical principles or "laws of learning" from behavioral psychologists and his own laboratory experiments with animals (Goodman, Shannon, Freeman, & Murphy, 1988). Behaviorism held a mechanistic view of teaching and learning that was perfectly suited for the social and economic context in which it arose. It was an assembly line model for an industrial age—piecework done for the explicit purpose of producing predetermined products. America needed schools that would produce a workforce prepared for conformity, speed, and competition.

Thorndike's Laws of Learning

• Law of Readiness: Learning is ordered; efficient learning follows one best sequence. This principle resulted in readiness materials and the tight sequencing of reading and writing skills.
• Law of Exercise: Practice strengthens the bond between a stimulus and a response. The common use of workbooks and skill sheets resulted.
• Law of Effect: Rewards influence the stimulus-response connection. Lower-level discrete skills are taught prior to rewarding the learner with actual reading and writing that reflected those skills.
• Law of Identical Elements: The learning of a particular stimulus-response connection should be tested separately and under the same conditions in which it was learned. This principle resulted in testing isolated skills that resemble the practice materials the students had completed.

In the "State of Behaviorism," instruction is provided primarily in a lecture/ recitation mode. The teacher is the purveyor of information, and students are recipients who are expected to recall and repeat the information imparted to them. A metaphor for this model is the learner as empty vessel to be filled— John Locke's tabula rasa. Content is king, and the teacher's edition, with its neatly sequenced instruction, is the source. The orderliness of this paradigm is appealing to administrators, teachers, and parents alike. The management and monitoring of "learning" is facilitated by the prepackaged materials. The teacher's edition embodies the publisher's sanctification of the curriculum; instruction can take place in a climate of certitude. Consequently, teachers are tacitly encouraged to park their own observations, judgments, and creativity outside their plan books.

The behavioral or transmission model dominated the pedagogy in U.S. schools for most of the 20th century. The inherent simplicity, convenience, and security afforded by this highly structured approach have, I believe, contributed to the failure of other innovations in education to survive and thrive in American classrooms. The notion that teaching equals learning and learning equals recitation and reproduction became as ingrained in the culture of our schools as popcorn in movie theaters. As a consequence, the focus of instruction was the content of learning, not the learner.

Behaviorism, functioning more as a well-worn hand-me-down than a time-worn cherished heirloom, still has a strong influence on teachers and teaching today. To support our students with the procedures presented in this book, we must recognize which teaching strategies stem from the transmission model. Then we must understand why those practices are not compatible with teaching that is committed to empowering students so they can become self-guided learners and problem solvers who can understand, select, and apply the processes they need for expertise and a high level of literacy in a complex and challenging world.

The Case for Constructivism

Whereas behaviorism is predicated on the notion that sensory information "deposited" in a learner will become a part of that learner's knowledge, constructivism is based on the understanding that the sensory information a learner receives will be sorted, selected, interpreted, altered, matched, connected, used or not used, remembered or forgotten.

We can understand how idiosyncratic the processes of learning and making meaning are, with a level of certainty Jean Piaget could only have dreamed of, owing to the brain imaging technologies that have emerged over the last 40 years. Noninvasive techniques called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have been used to construct images of the neuronal activity in the brain related to attention, language processing, and memory (Lowery, 2001; Wolfe, 2001). Neuroscience makes a resounding case for the basic tenets of constructivism.

We now know that the brain, starting with the act of paying attention, attempts to match incoming sensory stimuli with information already stored in circuits or networks of neurons. If there is a match, the information makes sense or has meaning. Therefore, although the brain is always paying attention, a student may not be paying attention to what we think is relevant and important (Wolfe, 2001).

Students' perceptions are influenced by stored information. Two different students can perceive the same information differently. A teacher talking about a shepherd may be understood to be talking about a dog to one child and a person who tends sheep to another child. To a child who has no stored knowledge regarding shepherds, the information would be meaningless.

Memory, too, is a product of a series of choices. Patricia Wolfe (2001), writing in Brain Matters: Translating Research into Classroom Practice, explains:

Most scientists agree that memory is a multifaceted, complex process that involves activating a large number of neural circuits in many areas of the brain. The path to long-term memory is shaped by the learner's unique neuronal map. The part of sensory memory that captures the brain's attention becomes "working memory." Working memory allows us to integrate current perceptual information with stored knowledge, and consciously manipulate the information (think about it, talk about it, and rehearse it) well enough to ensure its storage and long-term memory. (p. 92)

Wolfe adds, "We now know that memory is not formed at the moment information is acquired; memory is not a simple fixation process. Rather, it is dynamic, with unconscious processes (called consolidation) that continue to strengthen and stabilize the connections over days, weeks, months, and years (Gazzaniga, Ivry, & Mangun, 1998)" (p. 125).

When teaching with a constructivist orientation (see below), we recognize that learning and understanding is a somewhat chaotic process that the teacher participates in but does not control. The teacher assesses how students think and what they understand and then proceeds to support and guide them with questions, additional information, examples, and feedback. When students experience confusion, when they have difficulty constructing meaning from text, when their writing fails to communicate clearly, when they are unable to solve problems, teachers use their observations to plan and provide mediation.

Principles of Constructivist Learning

• Learning involves not the mastery of isolated facts but the construction of concepts.
• Learning is not ordered or linear, even though the teaching may have been.
• Learning is idiosyncratic because learners must construct concepts for themselves.
• Learning proceeds best when learners find the learning personally meaningful in the here and now and when they know they can experiment and take risks.
• Learning proceeds best when it is relatively "natural," as when people want to learn to do something outside school.
• Learning typically proceeds best for young learners from whole to part. As they mature, some individuals will develop the ability to learn from part to whole, in a more linear and analytical fashion.
• Learning proceeds best when others provide support or scaffolding so the learner can succeed in doing things that he or she would not yet be able to do alone.
• Much learning occurs through the observation and osmosis that are facilitated by demonstrations.
• Learning is also facilitated by direct instruction. However, direct instruction typically has the most permanent effect when provided in the context of the whole activity that the learner is attempting and is most effective when offered within the context of the learner's interest and need. (Weaver, 1996, pp. 153–155)

Transactional Instruction

How do the tenets of constructivism inform our practices? Constructivist principles can be actualized in the classroom by using a transactional approach to instruction. At the core of the transactional instruction paradigm is the understanding that learning, as opposed to replication and imitation, arises from a complex interplay of meaning-making transactions between teacher and students. Characteristics of these transactions are as follows:

• Explicit focus on the processes (strategies) of learning
• Thinking, reading, and writing that engages students in meaningful problem solving
• A high level of student engagement
• Teacher interactions with students that support the construction, as opposed to the transmission, of meaning
• Flexible, multifaceted, and balanced responses to text
• A dynamic approach to learning strategies that gradually releases initiation and control to the learner

In summarizing the practices that characterize transactional comprehension instruction, Pressley and Harris (2006) write:

Pressley, El-Dinary et al. (1992) coined the term transactional comprehension strategies instruction to emphasize that teachers and students often flexibly interacted as students practiced applying strategies as they read. Students in transactional strategies instruction are encouraged to use the comprehension strategies that seem appropriate to them at any point during a reading. There is dynamic construction of understanding of a text when small groups of children make predictions together, ask questions of one another during a reading, signal when they are confused, seek help to reduce confusion, and make interpretive and selective summaries through a reading and as a reading concludes. (p. 22)

The research literature of the last two decades has consistently confirmed the efficacy of strategy instruction for improving reading and writing achievement. Many of the conclusions are drawn from comprehensive and broad-ranging studies. The specific teaching strategies advocated in Learning for Keeps are supported by the positive outcomes reported in these studies as well.

There is also ample evidence that achievement gains resulting from transactional strategy instruction (TSI) are reflected on standardized tests and other measures. In one study, 80 percent of TSI students demonstrated gains on reading comprehension subtests. Direct or explicit instruction has been found to generally produce better scores on standardized tests of basic skills than do other approaches. Research also shows that the increased teacher/student interaction is correlated with increased student achievement. Appendix A contains brief summaries of the most comprehensive TSI achievement studies.

Transactional instruction is one of the two contrasting teaching modalities used in this model for strategy mediation. A teacher-directed demonstration of a strategy begins instruction; a student-centered transactional approach is used for the practice and application phase of mediation. The teacher's focus is on the learner: what processes the learner is using to make meaning, what the learner understands, and what knowledge and interactions the learner will need to overcome the obstacles being encountered.

When a teacher puts the focus on the learner as opposed to what is being learned, the interaction with the student takes on a different tone, a different time frame, a different line of questioning, and a different set of responses. The students' answers to the questions they were asked are the starting point for instruction instead of the end point. Instruction pursues the student's line of thinking in order to clarify and develop strategies. The distinction between the teacher-student interactions that take place when teaching with a transmission approach and a transactional approach is illustrated with the following scenarios in which the teacher is going over numerical sequence problems that the students worked on independently:

Transmission Model

Teacher: We are going to check your answers to the sequence problems you did. The first problem was 2 7 4 9 6 11 8 13 ___ ___ ___. Who would like to tell us what answer they got?

Student 1: I got 10, 15, and 12.

Teacher: Excellent! How many people got 10, 15, and 12? Who would like to tell us how you got that answer?

Student 2: I followed the pattern of the even numbers first so the next even number was 10, and then I did the odd numbers so the next odd number was 15 and the next even number was 12.

Teacher: Well done! Raise your hand if you got the same answer. Let's go on to the next problem.

Transactional Model

Teacher: We are going to take a look at the sequence problems you did. Let's see what we can learn about solving problems when we have to identify patterns to make predictions. The first problem was 2 7 4 9 6 11 8 13 ___ ___ ___.

Student 1: My answers are 10, 15, and 12.

Teacher: Would you think aloud so we could learn the strategy you used to get your answers?

Student 1: I read all the numbers from left to right. I see they go even, odd, even, and odd all the way through. I see the even numbers are counting by 2s. I want to see if that's true for the odd numbers—7, 9, 11, and 13. It is. Now I can finish the pattern. After 13 comes an even number 2 more than 8. That's 10. After 10 comes an odd number 2 more than 13. That's 15. After 15 comes an even number 2 more than 10. That's 12.

Teacher: So what I heard you say was, first you got the big picture by reading all the numbers. Then you separated the problem into parts—the odd and even numbers. … You examined each part. You saw the even numbers increased by 2s. Then you saw the odd numbers increased by 2s. Then you had enough information to fill in the missing numbers. How many of you approached the problem the same way? Was there one strategy that you feel was particularly helpful?

Student 1: I think reading all the numbers first helped me to see the pattern.

Teacher: Gathering all the available information is important for any kind of problem solving. The other strategy you used that is also excellent for problem solving was breaking the problem into smaller parts.

Student 2: I got the same answers as Student 1, but I didn't separate the odd and even numbers. I didn't notice that pattern.

Teacher: You used a different strategy and you got the same answer?

Student 2: Yes. I went from number to number to see how much the difference was between the numbers—if there was a pattern. Going one number a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Laying the Foundation for Mediation That Makes a Difference
• Chapter 2. The Dynamics of Changing Complex Behaviors
• Chapter 3. The Instructional Plan for Explicit Mediation
• Chapter 4. Task Analysis: Crafting Explicit Mediation
• Chapter 5. Sample Lesson Plans for Explicit Mediation
• Chapter 6. Looking Under the Hood: Key Reading Strategies
• Chapter 7. Looking Under the Hood: Key Writing Strategies
• Chapter 8. Looking Under the Hood: Key Problem-Solving Behaviors
• Chapter 9. Setting the Stage
• Chapter 10. A Bird's-Eye View
• Appendix A. Summaries of Major Studies on Explicit Transactional Strategies Instruction
• Appendix B. Rationale and Research for the Components of the Explicit Transactional Mediation Model
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Study Guide
• Copyright