SED 407 Reading Response: Wilhelm – ‘Strategic Reading’ Chapters 1 & 2

While reading these chapters by Wilhelm, I kept thinking of that question that has come up in every education class I’ve taken so far (as it should): What kind of teacher do you want to be? Wilhelm essentially begins this book by asking that question. Specifically he is asking, ‘As a teacher, what will guide what happens in your classroom?’ Will you be a teacher who sees their role solely as content-deliverer, following a curriculum dictated by a textbook? Or will you be a teacher guided by a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning?

Though my enrollment in the RITE program is the beginning of my formal training as a teacher, I have taught in various contexts throughout my professional career and I have always thought of myself as a “naturally” good teacher. However, when I think of this now, I wonder if what I really mean is that I am simply good at explaining things so that people can understand them – not a bad thing, but there is clearly more to teaching than that. Though I think there is more going on when I teach then simple direct transmission of content (as in the curriculum-centered model that Wilhelm writes about), I have never really thought about what I am doing when I teach and why I think what I am doing will work or not. As Wilhelm points out, a teacher’s most important job is to teach students how to get and process information, to read and write, to master literacy and problem solving skills and strategies that they can carry out of the classroom and apply in a wide variety of contexts – to teach them “the rules so they can play the game.” Though I think the way I teach gets at this kind of learning in some ways, I have never been clear in setting such objectives. And now, when I think about explicitly teaching literacy, I admit that I feel unprepared and a little overwhelmed. I appreciate that even as a science teacher, I will be teaching literacy – both general and content-specific – and I am eager to learn more about how I can do so successfully. I want to be a “wide awake” teacher with a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning that, while it may (and should) evolve over time, guides what happens in my classroom – I agree with Wilhelm that to have such a theory, to teach to it, makes one a better teacher. (As Wilhelm points out, most teachers hold implicit theories about teaching and learning that inform what they do without their being aware of it – I think this is dangerous teaching.) I found these chapters by Wilhelm to be an excellent starting point for developing my own theory of teaching and learning, as he puts forth a model that makes a lot of sense to me.

I enjoyed the scenario ranking activity in the first chapter, and find the question that it raises very interesting – ‘Can learning usefully be separated from the teaching that engenders that learning?’ This question threw me off at first, but as I read the scenarios, I began to see what Wilhelm was getting at by asking it. For example, in scenario 4 where Tom learns to play his piano piece “exactly the way his teacher did” – his teacher was teaching, but did Tom really learn? His behavior changed, but did his understanding? And if Tom didn’t really learn, I guess this begs the question, did his teacher really teach? In scenario 5, with Jude in the student-centered classroom in which her teacher did very little actual teaching, was she really learning if she couldn’t articulate what she felt she had learned? Could she not have learned a lot more if her teacher had actually taught? Complicated questions, but important to think about.

I ranked scenario 6, in which Arlene learned about electricity in a real-world context with the guidance of her uncle, as the scenario in which the best teaching and learning was happening. It seemed like such an ideal situation to me that I didn’t even notice at first what was said about Arlene being burnt-out by the experience. (I can see how such burnout is something of a downside, but I think despite it, Arlene learned things that will stay with her and be applicable in other contexts, even if she steps away from the topic of electricity.) Arlene’s scenario exemplifies the Vygotskian perspective of teaching and learning and George Hillocks’ model of environmental teaching, both the basis for the model put forth by Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube in their book. (Side note: I was really glad to see Vygotsky in a deeper context, beyond just the passing knowledge I gained about his theories in Ed Psych last semester.) This “community of learners”, teaching/learning-centered model sits well with me, as opposed to the teacher/curriculum-centered or student-centered models it is compared with. While I do see a teacher as “a more capable other” with a responsibility to share their knowledge and experience with their students, I don’t think teaching and learning should be passive as they are in the curriculum-centered model in which teachers lecture and students memorize. Also, while I see value in giving students opportunities to naturally explore and guide their own learning experiences, as they do in the student-centered model, I don’t think this is enough on its own for real learning. The teaching/learning-centered model is exciting to me as it proposes that teaching and learning is a two-sided collaborative process through which both the student and teacher can be transformed. In this model, teachers work, play, and problem solve alongside their students, letting students make mistakes and discoveries, and giving them support when they need it. Learning begins with modeling, continues with guided practice during which support scaffolding is gradually removed, and ends with students working independently, having mastered or internalized the skills initially modeled by their teacher. The concept of scaffolding was made much clearer to me by Wilhelm than it was when I first encountered it in Ed Psych – I have this clear image now of a student building their cognitive abilities from the ground up, with the teacher supporting their cognitive structure as it grows. Scaffolding is gradually removed as one set of skills is internalized (becomes part of the student’s zone of actual development) and new scaffolding is built when the student is ready to take on a new skill set (work in their zone of proximal development). An excellent concept, but I am now eager to see scaffolding in action. While I appreciate the specific literacy and reading strategies Wilhelm outlines – guided reading, the Inquiry Square, Tharp and Gallimore’s six methods for teaching reading strategies – it’s difficult just reading about them to really understand how they pay out in the classroom. I hope to get to observe these strategies in action.

I think one of the most powerful things about the Vygotskian perspective and the model proposed by Wilhelm is that it encourages teachers to approach teaching by first recognizing their students’ current strengths and abilities and building on them, versus the more common approach of seeing students as having weaknesses that need to be remedied. Such a simple change in perspective, but so powerful in shaping the kind of teacher one can be. However, I recognize the significant challenge it must be to identify the ZPD of each student you encounter as they will each be at different levels in different cognitive areas. The goal is to recognize each student’s current skill set and provide a structure in which they can successfully build to the next level, to keep each student challenged and engaged, but not frustrated by being asked to do something they are not yet ready for – not easy to do when you will likely be working with something like 100 students a day.

There’s so much more in Wilhelm’s chapters that I could respond to … the major theories about learning to read and their parallel literary theories – the idea that “all reading and writing begin with inquiry” and how this can shape a teacher’s approach to teaching literacy – how teaching reading is especially challenging because the processes are internal or abstract – how reading support usually ends after elementary school even though middle and high school students need support as they encounter more varied and complex texts – the idea that what is learned must be taught (and subsequently why it is so important for pre-service teachers to think about the literacy skills that we have internalized and take for granted) – the idea that language is “the tool of tools” – the challenge of putting content into a real-world context and making learning “play that does work” … but this blog post is already so long that no one will want to read it, so I’ll stop here and save the rest of it for class – looking forward to the discussion!