Terry, you have taken one particular approach to teaching/reading and demonstrated how instructional practices in general are difficult to spread and scale without losing its effectiveness. Good food for thought for teachers and leaders.
That's what I hoped to do; your reflecting my larger aim back to me is quite helpful. It's interesting that educators are in this position and hard to discern what might change the circumstances for the better.
Dear Terry, What clear and thoughtful writing. I wish more academics could write penetrating syntheses of research, pulling out the most important points, as you have done here. I worked with Ann both on the here Community of Learners work (and classrooms that used reciprocal teaching) as well as on the "How People Learn" committee she chaired. You explain the idea of lethal mutations better than I've ever come across. Bravo!
Wow! Very cool! Thanks, Sam. I appreciate the validation and am happy to know I'm representing these ideas clearly without distortions. My hope is to write such essays that work as bridges between what's gone before and where we need to go in terms of learning to read and reading to learn
Love this, hate tickboxes, and your article helps me understand why.
I wonder about:
"The teacher who can do this work is doing the same work Palincsar’s teachers were doing with Sara in 1984 — hosting a novice inside a discourse she is gradually internalizing, increasing the demands one stage further into the zone of proximal development as the novice becomes capable of more."
And whether AI, of some sort, could do the teacher work in hosting those conversations or whether there is some fundamental difference that makes that unlikely or impossible... shared rather, than simulated, emotional -experiential grounding of language maybe...
I've been trying to write something recently on my perception of this problem - form an Anglo-English perspective.
Through doing so and then reading this post. It's got me thinking at some point somewhere along the development of the professional principles of an educator. The pedagogy is leading the knowledge as opposed to the other way round.
A major problem with is that the "internal mechanism" of knowledge are either obscured or taken for granted.
In England, we discuss these internal mechanism as being a form of powerful knowledge.
We need a major what feels like global reflection on the role of knowledge in the working life of a teacher.
Thanks, Henry. Tell me more about powerful knowledge. The phrase is one of those semantic captures that can draw commitments from teachers. "The role of knowledge in the working life of a teacher" and the professional ecology that can support its growth over a career--I think that ought properly be the center of attention right now
You're right about semantic capture. I believe it's intellectual origins were an attempt to bring emancipatory educational theories together ones which focused on specialisation.
However, the capture all has had contrasting effects in the public, policy domain.
I believe in sociology it would be best described as social realism, a kind of branch of critical realist philosophy applied.
At the heart of it, Powerful Knowledge is neo-Durkheimian/neo-kantian reading of what knowledge is. From this perspective, we need to develop a relation to knowledge, not a reading of it.
As such, teachers through their professional careers should undertake a journey, from an everyday understanding of knowledge through increasingly abstract realisation as they develop.
I think we're someway from this - but it's good to meet like minded people on here.
I refer to E.D. Hirsch in my piece released today. It would be good to hear your thoughts on its application.
GREAT Post! Love posts that cite research, and I'm familiar with all your sources, and with these research articles!
I've used Brown's 1983 steps, as cited by Tim Shanahan in my own Question-Answering materials - and found that students did learn how to "find the main idea" in a text, and also "write their own main idea" for a text that didn't explicitly state any main idea - students had to think and infer, from exactly those strategies...
Thanks for this important reminder and also as an option to apply this using Reciprocal Reading, and Rosenshine's review...
In schools, I found that some teachers could use Reciprocal Reading, and others struggled - and I think that's my way of confirming those mixed results from the later mixed meta-analysis, albeit from my own small, anecdotal sample of teachers I tried to support?
My doctoral research focussed on ONE part of Reciprocal Reading, namely questioning - which I designed parts of that intervention in Question-Answering, using QAR (Question-Answer-Relationships), with Rosenshine's explicit teaching and Engelmann's principles for content and sequencing of lessons...
I really like how you applied it to the LLMs and AI... I think we (teachers and parents) HAVE to start to support students to work WITH AI, rather than "outsource" their learning! THANKS!
Terry, you have taken one particular approach to teaching/reading and demonstrated how instructional practices in general are difficult to spread and scale without losing its effectiveness. Good food for thought for teachers and leaders.
That's what I hoped to do; your reflecting my larger aim back to me is quite helpful. It's interesting that educators are in this position and hard to discern what might change the circumstances for the better.
Dear Terry, What clear and thoughtful writing. I wish more academics could write penetrating syntheses of research, pulling out the most important points, as you have done here. I worked with Ann both on the here Community of Learners work (and classrooms that used reciprocal teaching) as well as on the "How People Learn" committee she chaired. You explain the idea of lethal mutations better than I've ever come across. Bravo!
Wow! Very cool! Thanks, Sam. I appreciate the validation and am happy to know I'm representing these ideas clearly without distortions. My hope is to write such essays that work as bridges between what's gone before and where we need to go in terms of learning to read and reading to learn
Love this, hate tickboxes, and your article helps me understand why.
I wonder about:
"The teacher who can do this work is doing the same work Palincsar’s teachers were doing with Sara in 1984 — hosting a novice inside a discourse she is gradually internalizing, increasing the demands one stage further into the zone of proximal development as the novice becomes capable of more."
And whether AI, of some sort, could do the teacher work in hosting those conversations or whether there is some fundamental difference that makes that unlikely or impossible... shared rather, than simulated, emotional -experiential grounding of language maybe...
Love the post Terry.
I've been trying to write something recently on my perception of this problem - form an Anglo-English perspective.
Through doing so and then reading this post. It's got me thinking at some point somewhere along the development of the professional principles of an educator. The pedagogy is leading the knowledge as opposed to the other way round.
A major problem with is that the "internal mechanism" of knowledge are either obscured or taken for granted.
In England, we discuss these internal mechanism as being a form of powerful knowledge.
We need a major what feels like global reflection on the role of knowledge in the working life of a teacher.
Thanks, Henry. Tell me more about powerful knowledge. The phrase is one of those semantic captures that can draw commitments from teachers. "The role of knowledge in the working life of a teacher" and the professional ecology that can support its growth over a career--I think that ought properly be the center of attention right now
Hi Terry.
You're right about semantic capture. I believe it's intellectual origins were an attempt to bring emancipatory educational theories together ones which focused on specialisation.
However, the capture all has had contrasting effects in the public, policy domain.
I believe in sociology it would be best described as social realism, a kind of branch of critical realist philosophy applied.
At the heart of it, Powerful Knowledge is neo-Durkheimian/neo-kantian reading of what knowledge is. From this perspective, we need to develop a relation to knowledge, not a reading of it.
As such, teachers through their professional careers should undertake a journey, from an everyday understanding of knowledge through increasingly abstract realisation as they develop.
I think we're someway from this - but it's good to meet like minded people on here.
I refer to E.D. Hirsch in my piece released today. It would be good to hear your thoughts on its application.
GREAT Post! Love posts that cite research, and I'm familiar with all your sources, and with these research articles!
I've used Brown's 1983 steps, as cited by Tim Shanahan in my own Question-Answering materials - and found that students did learn how to "find the main idea" in a text, and also "write their own main idea" for a text that didn't explicitly state any main idea - students had to think and infer, from exactly those strategies...
Thanks for this important reminder and also as an option to apply this using Reciprocal Reading, and Rosenshine's review...
In schools, I found that some teachers could use Reciprocal Reading, and others struggled - and I think that's my way of confirming those mixed results from the later mixed meta-analysis, albeit from my own small, anecdotal sample of teachers I tried to support?
My doctoral research focussed on ONE part of Reciprocal Reading, namely questioning - which I designed parts of that intervention in Question-Answering, using QAR (Question-Answer-Relationships), with Rosenshine's explicit teaching and Engelmann's principles for content and sequencing of lessons...
I really like how you applied it to the LLMs and AI... I think we (teachers and parents) HAVE to start to support students to work WITH AI, rather than "outsource" their learning! THANKS!