TEACH 2ND EDITION JANICE KOCH

SOLUTIONS MANUAL
Full download at link:

Solution Manual: https://testbankpack.com/

Test Bank: https://testbankpack.com/

CHAPTER 4
Exploring the Nature of Teaching and Learning

HOW DO WE LEARN? WHAT DO WE TEACH?

This chapter addresses what psychologists and educators have discovered about the way people learn and
how that knowledge is translated into practice in our schools. Chapter 4 looks at learning theories—
formal ideas about how learning takes place—and then at the curriculum, the overall plan that includes
what your students will teach and how the material should be arranged and presented. The chapter also
discusses assessment as a process closely linked to curriculum and instruction.
The chapter emphasizes the following:
• According to the learning theory known as constructivism, knowledge is not passively received.
Rather, students actively construct their knowledge as they experience the world. This means that
teachers need to guide students in building ideas for themselves.
• The rise of national and state standards has created pressure to standardize the curriculum. Ideally,
though, the curriculum should serve as both a window and a mirror: a window into the worlds of
others and a mirror of the student’s own reality.
• Assessments are authentic when they ask students to perform tasks that relate to a real-world
situation. Such assessments allow students to express their own ideas and demonstrate their
understanding of the subject, rather than merely their recall of facts.

GOALS FOR STUDENT LEARNING

After reading and analyzing this chapter, students should be able to do the following:
1. Distinguish between the meanings of pedagogy and instruction, understanding that their pedagogy
becomes enacted through their instruction.
 Chapter 4: Principles of Teaching and Learning 16

2. Identify different learning theories, with the recognition that neuroscience has shed light on brain
function, allowing us to understand more fully the mental processes that occur during learning.
3. Examine the learning behaviors described by Bloom’s Taxonomy in its original and revised form.
4. Understand that learning is an active process involving interactions between the learner and the
social and physical environment.
5. Identify a mental scheme as an organizing structure in the brain that helps people make sense of the
world.
6. Recognize that, according to constructivism, learners process new ideas by finding ways to fit them
into existing mental schemes. This may require the learner to alter her or his mental schemes.
7. Understand that a curriculum is a plan of studies that organizes instructional content.
8. Recognize the formal, informal, and hidden curricula in a school.
9. Understand the relationship between the curriculum and national standards.
10. Recognize the importance of the curriculum’s serving as window and mirror so that students’
experiences become part of the life of the classroom.
11. Develop an assessment that asks students to perform a task in order to demonstrate what they know.
12. Contrast the large-scale standardized assessments in each state with an authentic assessment—and
recognize the need for many types of assessments.

STRATEGIES FOR DISCUSSING THE CHAPTER

This chapter addresses learning theories in light of what we currently understand from neuroscience about
how people learn. It is important that your students view learning as an active process of incorporating
new ideas into existing schemes. This understanding will inform their teaching practices. We live in an
ever-changing environment with many stimuli and more data than we ever imagined possible. As Chapter
7 will discuss, the teacher’s role is to understand how to sort through all of this information and help
students make meaning of the big ideas or core concepts that need to be addressed.
In its discussion of curriculum, the chapter invites the reader to explore the relationship between national
standards and local curriculum. Ask students to create a curriculum that focuses on a hobby or area of
personal interest. This assignment is an authentic assessment.
• Use the quotation from the beginning of Chapter 4 to stimulate a discussion:
If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had forty people in his office at one time—all of whom had different
needs, and some of whom did not want to be there and were causing trouble—and the doctor,
lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine
months, then he (or she) might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. —Donald D.
Quinn
Ask your students, “What does Donald Quinn mean by ‘different needs’?”
• Discuss the concept of a “subject area” expert and poll your students to see how many of them are
seeking licensure in subject area domains. Learn which areas, and then ask them what it would take
to feel like an expert in those areas. Next, remind them that being a content area expert is different
from being an expert teacher in that area.
Introduce the concept of pedagogical content knowledge, which is a combination of understanding
the “big ideas” students are expected to learn and the best strategies for engaging them in learning.
Then divide the class into working groups. In each group, the members should consider the different

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 4: Principles of Teaching and Learning 17

approaches they would use to (a) teach a seventh-grade class about To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper
Lee and (b) teach that same seventh-grade class the difference between matter and energy.
• Discuss with the students your own life as a learner. For example, when I was growing up,
information was scarce and new information was regarded as very valuable. We tended to memorize
facts and return to them at each grade level to make deeper meaning of them. There was simply less
to know. Today, there is so much knowledge in so many areas that it would not be possible for
students to learn enough by memorizing. Teaching now requires engaging students in meaningful
activities around core concepts that have been selected for them at each grade level.
• Discuss what it would mean to create a learning environment where students are free to think for
themselves. Ask students which philosophical reform movement would be most aligned with this
environment.
• Find the Video Case “Constructivist Teaching in Action: A High School Classroom Debate” on the
textbook website. View the video with the class, and spark discussion by using the questions from
the text:
• In what ways is the teacher, Ms. Levy-Brightman, promoting the tenets of constructivist
learning theory?
• How does she structure the learning experience?
• How does the carefully structured debate provide the students with a way to really learn the
material?
• What information does the teacher gather from the student debates?

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES
1. Discuss Judy Brown’s poem “Fire, found at http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Fire.html Ask students
to work in groups and respond to the following question: “What has this poem to do with teaching
and learning?”
2. Ask students to select a topic and grade level of their choice and develop an activity that would be
part of the informal curriculum. How could this activity act as a window and a mirror for students?
3. Divide the class into two groups. Have each group make a list of the skills necessary for graduation
from high school.
4. Ask students to develop their own curriculum that would help them to teach a favorite hobby or
interest of theirs Be sure that they indicate the grade level or age of the target students, the learning
outcomes, and at least one authentic assessment activity.
5. Have students select a content area of their choice and review the national standards in that area.
Then ask them to explore a local school’s curriculum for that subject area at a specific grade level
and compare the local curriculum to the national standards.
6. Ask students to describe a learning experience, inside or outside of school, when the “teacher”
engaged them in an experience in service to their learning, rather than telling them the answer. (See
the Teaching Story in the text called “Mental Schemes at Work,” about the author’s experience with
a mailbox.)
7. Ask students to visit an elementary school close to your university or college and explain that, for a
course project, you would like to examine the school’s language arts basal reader and/or its
literature series for the first through the third grade.
• What is your impression of the reading material being used for these early readers?
• Knowing what you do about the children who attend this school, in what ways do you think this
reading material may act as a window? As a mirror?
 Chapter 4: Principles of Teaching and Learning 18

8. Ask students to write a 500-word essay describing the ways, if any, in which this chapter’s approach
to instruction and curriculum differs from their own tacitly held beliefs about how people teach,
how people learn, and what should be learned.

Copyright © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

 Chapter 4: Principles of Teaching and Learning 19

CONCLUDING PERSPECTIVES
This chapter may be a surprise for students who harbor conceptions of teaching and learning that focus on
the transmission of data. The most important point embedded in this chapter is that people need to be
actively engaged in their own learning. The notions of mental schemes, a palette for learning, and the
metaphorical “space between the logs” may be difficult for your students to grasp. Remind them of the
amount of time they spend, independently, at the computer, exploring areas of interest in which they learn
new information constantly.
Be sure to examine learning from multiple perspectives. There are certainly times and topics that lend
themselves to pure transmission of data. These are areas where facts are important but no great depth of
learning is required.
Further, expose your students to the idea of assessment as a “performance,” a demonstration by the
student of what he or she has learned.
Ask students to answer this question: In what ways does this chapter help you understand how people
learn? Or in what ways is the author’s perspective different from your own ideas on the topic?

WEBSITES TO CONSULT
• Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
http://www.ascd.org/
The ASCD publishes Education Update and Educational Leadership. Both publications discuss
current topics in curriculum development and instruction.
• Curriculum Associates
http://www.curriculumassociates.com/
This website provides state-by-state links to the types of curricula and assessments that can be found
in each region. It offers resources and improvement tools in reading, math, language, and test
preparation. By the way, this is a good site to analyze critically with your students for its own
hidden curriculum.
• Phi Delta Kappa International
http://www.pdkintl.org/
This is the official website for Phi Delta Kappa, an international professional educator’s
organization. Important links provide timely information.