Model of Teaching

What would you do if you found a list of scores of teaching strategies that are available for teachers?

How would you present these strategies to an interested person in a meaningful way?

This was the question that Bruce Joyce and his associates faced when their data collection resulted in an overwhelming number of teaching strategies resulting from extensive research through classroom observations.

To come up with a list of the best strategies, Joyce and colleagues identified certain selection criteria.

It was important that the strategies

 

1. accomplish most of the common goals of schools

2. include the major philosophical and psychological orientations toward teaching and learning

3. have coherent theoretical bases

4. have long histories of practice

5. are versatile—can be adaptable to any learning situation and levels of students

 

Utilizing the criteria to select the best strategies reduced the number to about two dozens.

Even then the question remained, How can these strategies be meaningfully organized?

Joyce and colleagues came up with four groupings based on attributes which were similar among strategies.

They were able to form a framework to connect these groups of strategies in the overall technical aspects of teaching. Please study the Advance Organizer below that gives you a clearer picture of what Joyce and colleagues did. ​

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As you can see above, strategies (which are the focus of our study in this course) can be grouped into four groups or families: Personal, Information Processing, Behavioral, and Social. Joyce called it Models of Teaching. Each family of strategies has the main goal. Check out The Four Families of Models of Teaching to find these goals as well as the sub-goals of strategies. You may also be interested in looking at the proponents of these strategies which are included there.

 

By now you must be wondering as to what is unique about each of these families of strategies. Read A Summary of Models of Teaching and you will find this information.

 

We discussed DoL a while ago. Now you are wondering, How do Models of Teaching connect with DoL? Very well, yes, they are closely connected and fit into each other meaningfully. Do you remember the levels of thinking/learning that we talked about in DoL? No doubt, to teach to any particular level of thinking/learning, a teacher has to select a suitable strategy. Where can a teacher select strategies from? One good option is the menu—Models of Teaching. For example, when you are working on forming positive attitudes and perceptions about learning, isn’t Cooperative Learning a good option? Or, while working on acquiring and integrating knowledge, why not use Concept Attainment? To form productive habits of mind, Synectics may be a good option.

 

Are you beginning to make a connection between DoL and MoT? Of course, several more strategies not mentioned in the Models of Teaching that fit a particular dimension of learning exist. KWL is one example. This strategy fits under acquiring and integrating knowledge of DoL but is not listed in MoT. But if one wishes to place it in MoT, it fits under the family of Information Processing.

 

We have come to the last section of this unit—the Training Model (TM). At the onset, you were told that this course deals with both theory and skill. One of the major goals of this course is an improvement of your teaching through the use of teaching strategies. Training Model is just the package that fits our situation. Showers and Joyce’s research on training teachers helped them see the futility of holding training sessions or workshops for teachers which did not result in a transfer of learning. Read about it in Why Do We Need Five Steps?

 

What is a transfer of learning? In this context, transfer of learning happens when teachers who are trained in strategies will utilize these skills in their regular classrooms after the training is over. The usual steps of presentations--theory, modeling, and practice with feedback did not seem to result in sufficient transfer of learning. The magic, according to Showers and Joyce, was to introduce coaching and study teams. Look at the incredible result in terms of percentages as shown in the following table.

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