Chapter 9 Using Teacher Talk, Demonstrations, Thinking, Inquiry, and Games

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Chapter 9 Using Teacher Talk, Demonstrations,
Thinking, Inquiry, and Games

• ED 220 Middle School Methods

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Teacher Talk Formal and Informal

• Teacher talk encompasses both lecturing to
  students and talking with students.
• Cautions in using teacher talk
• Avoid talking too much
• Avoid talking too fast
• Make sure you are being heard and understood
• Just because students have heard something before
  does not necessarily mean that they understand it
  or have learned it
• To resist believing that students have attained a
  skill or have learned something that was taught
  previously by you or by another
• Talking in a handrum monotone

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Teacher Talk General Guidelines

• Begin the talk with an advance organizer
• Talk should be planned and organized
• Pacing is important
• Encourage student participation
• Plan a clear ending (closure)

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Teacher Talk Specific Guidelines

• In teacher-centered lessons students tend to lose
  focus after approx. 10 minutes.
• In general, when using teacher-centered direct
  instruction, with most classes you will want to
  change the learning activities about every 10 to
  15 minutes.
• In 60 min period you should adjust 3-4 times.
• Use notes for your talk.
• Never read from prose.
• TC---------SC--------TC
• Refer to pages 334-335 for graph representations

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Teacher Talk Specific Guidelines

• Avoid racing through the talk solely to complete
  it.
• Allow for think time.
• Carefully plan the content of your talk.
• Monitor your delivery.
• Use proximity as one way of preventing student
  misbehavior.
• All teachers teach aspects of language arts.
• For example introducing a science term, you may
  teach the history of the term and usage.

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Teacher Talk Specific Guidelines

• Provide information in digestible chunks.
• Use familiar examples.
• Consider student diversity.
• Establish eye contact.
• Be attentive to all student behaviors.
• Use overlapping

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Teaching Thinking for Intelligent Behavior

• Teachers should help students develop their
  thinking skills.
• In teaching for thinking, we are interested not
  only in what students know but in how students
  behave when they dont knowGathering evidence of
  the performance and growth of intelligent
  behaviorrequires kid-watching observing
  students as they try to solve the day-to-day
  academic and real-life problems they encounterBy
  collecting anecdotes and examples of written,
  oral, and visual expressions, we can see
  students increasingly voluntary and spontaneous
  performance of these intelligent behaviors. Art
  Costa

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Characteristics of Intelligent Behavior

• Persistence
• Decreasing impulsivity
• Listening to others with understanding and
  empathy
• Overcoming egocentrism
• Cooperative thinking-social intelligence
• Flexibility in thinking
• Lateral thinking

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Characteristics of Intelligent Behavior (contd)

• Metacognition
• Striving for accuracy and precision
• Sense of humor
• Questioning and problem posing
• Drawing on knowledge and applying it to new
  situations
• Taking risks
• Using all senses
• Ingenuity, originality, insightfulness,
  creativity
• Wonderment, inquisitiveness, curiosity

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Direct Teaching of Thinking and Intelligent
Behavior

• Because the academic achievement of students
  increases when they are directly taught thinking
  skills, many researchers and educators concur
  that direct instruction should be given to all
  students to think and behave intelligently.

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Research Imperatives for Teaching of Thinking (4)

• Cognitive view of intelligence asserts that
  intellectual ability is not fixed but can be
  developed.
• Constructivist approach to learning maintains
  that learners actively and independently
  construct knowledge by creating and coordinating
  relationships in their mental repertoire.

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Research Imperatives for Teaching of Thinking
(contd)

• Social psychology view of classroom focuses on
  the learner as an individual who is a member of
  various peer groups and a society.
• Information processing perspective deals with
  the acquisition, elaboration, and management of
  information.

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Inquiry Teaching and Discovery Learning

• Intrinsic to the effectiveness of both inquiry
  and discovery is the assumption that students
  would rather actively seek knowledge than receive
  it through traditional expository learning ( i.e.
  information delivery methods such as lectures,
  demonstrations, and text-book reading)

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Inquiry vs. Discovery

• Problem solving is not a teaching strategy but a
  higher order intellectual behavior that
  facilitates learning.
• The two major differences between discovery
  learning and inquiry learning lie in.
• Who identifies the problem
• The percentage of decisions that are made by the
  students.
• Table 9.1 shows three levels of inquiry, each
  level defined according to what the student does
  and decides. (p. 340)

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Inquiry vs. Discovery

• In true inquiry, students generate ideas and then
  design ways to test those ideas. The various
  processes used represent the many critical
  thinking skills. Some of those skills are
  concerned with generating and organizing data
  others are concerned with building and using
  ideas.
• One of the most effective ways of stimulating
  inquiry is to use materials that provoke
  students interest.
• Locating a Colony. Figure 9.4, p. 343 is a
  level II inquiry.

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Integrating Strategies for Integrated Learning

• In the area of speaking skills, oral discourse in
  a classroom has a growing research base that
  promotes methods of teaching and learning through
  oral language. These methods include cooperative
  learning, instructional scaffolding, and inquiry
  teaching.

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Integrated Learning Strategies

• Brainstorming
• Think-pair-share
• Chunking
• Memory strategies mnemonics, rhymes
• Comparing and contrasting
• Concept mapping---based on Ausubals theory of
  meaningful learning, concept mapping has been
  found useful for helping students in changing
  prior notions.
• Textbook study strategies SQ4R
• Vee mapping road map of learning
• Venn diagramming 3 circles

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Learning by Educational Games

• A wide variety of learning activities, such as
  simulations, role-play and sociodrama activities,
  mind games, board games, computer games, and
  sporting games, all of which provide valuable
  learning experiences for young adolescents.