New Priorities for Teacher Training and School Curriculum

By Douglas Brown

This book had its origins in 1948 when I realized just how profoundly unprepared I was to teach the underachieving students for whom I was responsible. I knew I was only going through the motions. Consequently I developed an interest in pedagogy,* and particularly in testing the effectiveness of its precepts in the classroom. My Putting Minds to Work, Brown (1972), was an attempt to describe the components of a pedagogy that would help teachers be better prepared. Its underlying theme was the need for greater teacher sophistication in communication. However, a comment by Resnik (1987) on the hiatus in pedagogy between motivation and cognition, led me to realize the potential of communication to bridge that gap. More recently I realized that the New Taxonomy of Marzano and Kendall (2007) enabled me to resolve a problem I had with the Bloom (1956) definition of intellectual ability that appeared so incompatible with current understanding of information processing.

Explication of the interrelationships of communication, motivation, and cognition uncovered principles and practices of special significance for the teaching of students who are on the path of underachievement. I realized the insights gained from that perspective had general application, i.e., to all students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483662015

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Copyright © 2013 by Douglas Brown.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 06/26/2015

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Acknowledgement

PART 1

NEW PRIORITIES

Chapter 1   Introduction

Chapter 2   Primacy For Communication In Pedagogy Creates New Priorities For Teacher Training And The School Curriculum

Chapter 3   Pedagogy, Training, And The School Curricumlum Need A Makeover

PART 2

ESSENTIALS FOR EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Chapter 4   Empathetic Competence

Chapter 5   A Cognitive Lexicon

Chapter 6   Process As Content

Chapter 7   Leadership Responsive To Group Maturity

Epilogue

Appendix A   COMMUNICATING COMPREHENSIVE FEEDBACK TO INDIVIDUALS IN A CLASS

Appendix B   A RESOURCE WHEN INTERVIEWING TEACHER CANDIDATES AND EVALUATING THEIR TEACHING

Bibliography

References

Endnotes

To Hazel

Prologue

This book had its origins in 1948 when I realized just how profoundly unprepared I was to teach the underachieving students for whom I was responsible. I knew I was only going through the motions. Consequently I developed an interest in pedagogy,* and particularly in testing the effectiveness of its precepts in the classroom. My Putting Minds to Work, Brown (1972), was an attempt to describe the components of a pedagogy that would help teachers be better prepared. Its underlying theme was the need for greater teacher sophistication in communication. However, a comment by Resnik (1987) on the hiatus in pedagogy between motivation and cognition, led me to realize the potential of communication to bridge that gap. More recently I realized that the New Taxonomy of Marzano and Kendall (2007) enabled me to resolve a problem I had with the Bloom (1956) definition of intellectual ability that appeared so incompatible with current understanding of information processing.

Explication of the interrelationships of communication, motivation, and cognition uncovered principles and practices of special significance for the teaching of students who are on the path of underachievement. I realized the insights gained from that perspective had general application, i.e., to all students.

Though the present work has substantial content from the earlier book, the perspective is significantly different. And it leads to two complementary conclusions: (1) teachers are not properly equipped to promote achievement of the goals of the school curriculum, and (2) the present curriculum does not ensure that students are being equipped to be optimally responsive to their teachers.

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Douglas Brown

Christchurch, New Zealand

Acknowledgement

I am deeply indebted to Professor Emeritus Andrew Hanson of California State University, Chico, who has done so much to support completion of this book during the past year by way of critical comment and editing. He travelled to New Zealand to give me the advantages of face-to-face dialogue, and subsequently facilitated acceptance of the book for publication.

Douglas Brown

PART 1

NEW PRIORITIES

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Everyone agrees that successful educational achievement requires both motivation, and appropriate cognitive activity. Yet our theories implicitly treat motivation and cognition as if they worked independently to determine the nature and extent of learning. In fact, these traditionally separate factors appear far more intimately related than most research helps us to appreciate. Resnick (1987) My italics.

IT WILL BE ARGUED THAT:

o Pedagogy must give primacy to communication.

o Teachers need exceptional communicative ability if they are to be effective relative to the goals of the curriculum.

o Current teacher education programs do not adequately prepare teachers in training to be effective when the overarching goal of the school curriculum is a self-regulated learner.

o The existing university schools of education do not provide the personalized training for teachers to be effective in a collaborative relationship with students¹.

o The curriculum lacks provision for the development of certain student capabilities needed for them to be optimally responsive to best teaching practice.

o One condition required for optimal learning is for the teacher and the student to be able to communicate using a specialized cognitive lexicon to enable interactive communication in the cognitive domain.

o The lexicon enables teachers to address issues of motivation that impact on cognition.

o Accepting the primacy of communication in pedagogy provides new insights into the needs of the unacceptably large number of seriously underachieving students that are not being met.

IMPEDIMENTS TO CHANGE

From the perspective of a pedagogy that recognizes that motivation, communication and cognition are interdependent, correcting the deficiencies we address in the following chapters requires several significant changes.

o Intrinsic to the curriculum and its pedagogy is the belief that the ideal for teaching and learning is a collaborative relationship between teacher and student, but this belief does not recognize that collaboration must include communication about cognitive processesif the goal of self-regulated learner is to be realized.

o Presently the curriculum implicitly accepts a definition of intellectual ability as knowledge plus cognitive skills. This definition fails to include the mediating functions of communication and motivation in cognition.

o There is a reluctance to accept evidence-based research that is contrary to current policies and practice. Hattie (2003, 2009)

o Current teacher training significantly fails to prepare student teachers for the expectations of the school curriculum.

The exceptional communicative skill that teachers must have to be truly effective is not developed in teacher training; the curriculum fails to provide for the acquisition of certain knowledge and skills that students must have to be optimally engaged in learning to be a self-regulated learner. When intellectual ability is defined in terms of the interrelationship of knowledge, cognitive ability, motivation, and communicative skills, the priorities of curriculum planning must be reordered. Perhaps the greatest change for curriculum content follows from the realization that radically different instructional priorities are necessary for effective learning.

Chapter 2

PRIMACY FOR COMMUNICATION IN PEDAGOGY CREATES NEW PRIORITIES FOR TEACHER TRAINING AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

INTRODUCTION

Given the goals of the new curriculum, the level of the communicative competence required of teachers to be effective is under appreciated. The goals, for example, predicate: (1) a level of communicative competence well above that of everyday conversation, and (2) the enlargement of what has been designated academic language must include a cognitive lexicon.

Teaching is not restricted to schoolteachers. Everyone has succeeded or failed as a teacher because of a failure to communicate. Comments like: "We were really on the same wave length, and I just couldn’t get through to him," are evidence of success and failure.

While such observations are everyday experiences, they have special significance for the classroom. Teachers should be able to get on the same wave-length with students who have diverse personalities and capabilities. But all too frequently teacher-student talk is best described as talking at, talking to, or talking past each other. Teachers need exceptional communicative ability if they are to foster the interactive communication required for a collaborative relationship. Unfortunately, there is an implicit assumption in the teaching profession that everyday conversational ability, complemented by the lexicons of the subjects to be taught, is adequate preparation to communicate as a teacher. But is it?

Consider the demands on conversational ability demonstrated in the following description of best teaching practice as:

. . . fundamentally a social process involving communication and interaction between at least two people, a teacher and a student. It is a kind of dialectic in which both serve as teacher and student at different times and at different levels. A teacher is not only instructing a student, but is also learning about that student, and using what he learns in making decisions about what to do next in the course of his teaching. Similarly the student is not only learning, but is providing information to the teacher in the on-going interaction. Stolurow and Pahel (1963)

The social process involving interactive communication requires a relationship between teacher and student that is collaborative, and that depends on the capabilities of both teacher and student.

ESSENTIAL TEACHER AND STUDENT CAPABILITIES FOR COMMUNICATION IN A COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIP

EMPATHETIC COMPETENCE

Bishop (2003) interviewed both teachers and their underachieving Maori students to obtain their perceptions