Active and Generative Teaching

Good (1983) has recognized the inadequacy of direct instruction as an all-purpose tool and has recommended active teaching as a broader term that describes the ideal way to teach. Teachers whose students learn effectively

are active in presenting concepts, providing appropriate engagement and practice activities, and monitoring those activities carefully;
actively look for ways to determine whether their students understand what they are doing;
actively assume partial responsibility for their students' learning and are prepared to reteach when it is necessary to do so.

The learning cycle (described in the next section of this chapter) is an example of a less direct but highly effective approach to active teaching in science education. Similar approaches to active teaching can be applied in other subject areas (e.g., the Missouri Mathematics Program (Good, Grouws, & Ebmeier, 1983)).

Generative teaching (Wittrock, 1990, 1991) is an approach to teaching that combines strategies that will be discussed in chapters 3 through 7 of this book. It attempts to help students become active and responsible for constructing meaning from class activities by building relations (1) across subject-matter concepts and (2) between the subject matter and students' existing knowledge.

With the generative teaching model, the teacher has the following responsibilities:

To teach students that learning with understanding is a generative (active) process.

To teach students that success in school begins with a belief in themselves, in their abilities, and in the value of effort.

To teach students to attend to the processes of constructing meanings for instruction and for subject matter.

To teach students to generate meaning for what they are studying. Teachers can do this by

first learning what models, preconceptions, learning strategies, attitudes, and beliefs the students possess that are relevant to what the teachers are trying to teach;

designing instruction that will enable the students to generate relationships among subject-matter concepts and between their models, knowledge, etc. (from Step a) and subject matter; and

teaching students metacognitive or self-control strategies that are useful for directing their own cognitive and affective thought processes.

In the preceding list of responsibilities, the word teach must be taken to mean more than tell. For example, when establishing motivation during Step 2, the teacher may find that students attribute failure to factors outside their control. When this happens, the teacher should counter this faulty attribution by choosing and assigning materials that students can successfully comprehend if they use generative strategies (over which they can exercise control).

When employing generative teaching, the teacher often uses materials and procedures such as those shown in Table 2.5 to stimulate the generation of relationships. Hyerle (1996) offers specific suggestions for using visual tools for constructing knowledge.

Table 2.5. Materials and Strategies to Stimulate Generative Learning (Based on Wittrock, 1989).
Material or Strategy	How It Could Be Used	How to Use Strategy to Study This Book	How to Be Ungenerative
Titles and Headings	Student looks for meaning behind titles, makes predictions, or invents titles for untitled passages.	Use titles and headings to predict what passages will be about before you read them. Then see if you were right.	Ignore the titles and headings; or at least don't wonder why they are there.
Questions	Teacher asks questions and students answer them; or students actively question themselves, their peers, or the teacher.	Answer the questions inserted in the text or in the workbook; or invent additional questions of your own.	Skip the questions; you know you could answer them if you really wanted to.
Objectives	Teacher states clear and specific objectives that students care about.	Examine the objectives at the beginning of each chapter and make it your goal to achieve these objectives.	Skip the objectives; if the paragraphs are well written, they'll contain the same information.
Summaries	Teacher presents a summary that students actively listen to and question; or students themselves generate a summary and check it for accuracy.	Carefully read the summaries at the end of the chapters; after each sentence, see to it that you understand why that statement was written; if you don't understand a statement, look back in the text to clear up the confusion.	Skip the summaries; they just say the same thing as the text anyway. (To be even more ineffective, read only the summaries.)
Graphs	Students read and paraphrase information presented in a graph; or students design their own graphs to present information that was not graphed in the text or teacher's presentation.	When reviewing, look only at the graphs and try to explain what they mean and what their importance is.	Skip the graphs; they only repeat what was in the text anyway.
Tables	Teacher presents information systematically in a table; students design tables of their own to summarize information; or students take information from a table designed in one way and invent a new table for it.	When reviewing, cover up part of the table and try to reconstruct it by looking only at the uncovered part. (With this table, cover all but the headings and try to reconstruct the other information.)	Skip the tables; if you do look at them, avoid looking for the logic by which the table was constructed.
Demonstrations	Teacher demonstrates concepts and students actively attend; or students demonstrate concepts to teacher or to peers.	Apply concepts in this book to your own professional life.	Keep the stuff in the book as distinct as possible from your real life.
Metaphors and analogies	Teacher uses metaphors and analogies that are meaningful to students to explain concepts; or students invent their own metaphors.	Make up metaphors and analogies for topics covered in this book. (In this chapter I invented a term called Baseball Learning Time; in chapter 3 I compare human information processing to computerized information processing.)	Don't invent any sort of comparison; you'll probably be wrong anyway.
Examples	Teacher gives examples that are familiar and meaningful to students; students make up examples of their own and verify that they are accurate.	Whenever a concept is introduced, think of an example of when you applied it or it was applied to you.	Don't invent your own examples; there are already plenty of them in the book, and they're probably better than yours anyway.
Pictures	Teacher shows pictures that exemplify concepts; or students find pictures that do so.	Look at the pictures in this book and see if you can see how they exemplify concepts discussed in that chapter.	Skip the pictures; they're only there as filler, so that the publisher can charge more for the book.
Applications	Teacher helps students apply concepts in practical settings.	Apply the concepts discussed in this book to your professional life.	Keep the stuff in the book as distinct as possible from your real life.
Interpretations	Teacher explains why something is true or asks students for explanations and gives them feedback.	Use the Interrogatory Elaboration exercises at the end of most chapters as a stimulus to generate explanations; then check the answers to verify your accuracy.	Never ask why; you may give yourself a wrong answer. If you do think up an explanation, don't bother to check its accuracy.
Paraphrases	Teacher asks students to paraphrase concepts; or teacher paraphrases statements made by students.	Try to restate in your own words the definitions of the key concepts covered in each chapter. (You can use the matching exercises in the workbook to do this.)	Don't bother restating things in your own words; the author is a genius who has already said it as well as it can be said.
Inferences	Teacher asks students to draw inferences - what will happen in a practical situation if something they have learned is true.	Make inferences about what will happen if you apply a concept discussed in this book, and then check to see if that really happens.	Don't try to think beyond what's in the book; you're likely to make mistakes and get confused.

This model of generative teaching is really a specific approach to active teaching. Its focus is on enabling the students to remain actively engaged and to use this engaged time as productively as possible.

Sometimes the generative teacher will use direct instruction; sometimes a more student-centered approach. However, this model assumes that even during direct instruction, effective learning will occur only if the learner generates relationships. That is, the student must actively make the connection among ideas if effective learning is to take place.

A student who looks at a table in a book and sees the information may generate relationships by seeing how the concepts in the table are connected. On the other hand, this student may fail to make connections, because the designer of the table has already done this, and there is no need for the learner to become active. If the teacher asks the student questions about the table or has the student himself or herself generate the table, then active thought about the relationships is likely to take place.

This active thought is what turns engaged time into effective academic learning time.

Online Links:

Generative Teaching

The Courage to Be Constructivist by Martin G. Brooks and Jacqueline Grennon Brooks.
http://www.ascd.org/frameedlead.html

These authors point out ways in which high-stakes state assessments pressure teachers to depart from instructional practices that foster meaningful learning.

MathWings: Effects on Student Mathematics Performance by Nancy A. Madden and Robert E. Slavin
http://www.csos.jhu.edu/_vti_script/default1.htm0.idq

This article describes and evaluates MathWings, a systematic approach to using constructivist approaches for mathematics instruction based on the standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). {Information about the NCTM standards can be found at http://www.nctm.org/standards/.} The MathWings curriculum focuses heavily on generative teaching and learning.

Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge by David Hyerle.
http://www.ascd.org/framebooks.html

You can't get the whole book online, but you can get some sample chapters with some excellent content. The online chapter discusses and gives examples of the dynamic use of visual tools to construct and explicitly show knowledge. This link won't take you directly there. But if you select The Brain and Learning from the main menu, you can select this title from the submenu.

Thinking Maps
http://www.thinkingmaps.com./thinking.htm

I really don't want to get into the habit of plugging commercial materials, and the people at this web site really do want to sell you something. But just perusing their web page will give you a better understanding of some of the visual strategies that students can use to stimulate generative learning. Materials of this kind are the focus of Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge by David Hyerle (cited above).

A Short Quiz on Direct Instruction and Active Teaching

{Answers are given after second question.}

1. Which of the following would least likely be listed as an essential component of direct instruction?

a. Set clear goals.
b. Be certain that the students are not over-anxious.

c. Present a sequence of well organized instruction.

d. Ask frequent questions.

e. Give the students frequent opportunities to practice what they have learned.

2. Which of the following is not considered to be an important responsibility of the teacher in generative teaching?

a. To teach students that success in school begins with a belief in themselves, in their abilities, and in the value of effort.
b. To foster cooperation among students.

c. To teach students to attend to the processes of constructing meanings for instruction and for subject matter.

d. To teach students to generate meaning for what they are studying.

e. To teach students that learning with understanding is a generative (active) process.

Answers:

1. b

2. b

Choose where you want to go next: