Learners and Learning: Section Five, How can teachers structure learning?

Learners
and Learning
Section Five: How can teachers
structure learning?
Writers | Ian Moll, Jill Bradbury, Gisela Winkler,
Maggie Tshule, Merlyn van Voore, Lynne Slonimsky
Editor | John Gultig

The SAIDE Teacher Education Series

Learners and Learning
ISBN 978 0 620 46731 5
© 2010 SAIDE
This work, a digital version of the SAIDE/Oxford publication of 2002, is
released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

1ST EDITION SERIES EDITOR: John Gultig
1ST EDITION AUDIOTAPE: George Lekorotsoana (producer) and John Gultig (concept and script)
DESIGN FOR DIGITAL VERSION: Michelle Randell
ILLUSTRATIONS: Andre Plant

SAIDE
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The first edition was funded by the WK Kellogg foundation. This digital
version has been funded through the International Association of
Digital Publications.

section five

How can teachers
structure learning?

5.1 Introduction . ...................................................................................... 149
5.2 Finding out what learners don’t know . ..................................... 150
5.3 Working with what learners already know . ............................. 157
5.4 Teaching strategies that bridge the gap ................................... 167
5.5 OBE and the role of the teacher ................................................... 176
5.6 Conclusion and key learning points ........................................... 179

Introduction 5.1
What will you learn in this section?
In this module we have argued for a constructivist approach to teaching and learn-
ing. But in doing so, we have warned against an approach which suggests that
learners are capable of learning all they need to know completely naturally, and that 14
schools or teachers are unnecessary.
Instead, we have encouraged you to think about learning in a systematic and Week 14 begins.
theoretical way.
• First, we introduced you to the learning paradox and the difficulty of becoming a
learner.
• Section Two explored ways in which learners can construct their own knowledge
as they journey from the known to the unknown.
• We then focused your attention on the particular nature of school learning in
Section Three.
• In Section Four we discussed the great potential and specific demands of reading
for learning.

Now it is time to shift our attention away from the activities of learners and focus
more directly on the role that teachers play in learning. We will investigate how
teachers can structure learning opportunities in such a way that learners can access
all their available resources to help them learn. We argue strongly that even in a
learner-centred curriculum it is the teachers’ responsibility to teach so that learners You might want to relisten to
learn. the audiotape and note down
In order to achieve this we have to construct learning activities in such a way that in your workbook any ideas
speakers have given you about
we achieve the right balance between challenge and support. how to structure learning;
about how to teach. This
section builds on these ideas.
Some half-truths to guide your study
Before you begin, read and think about the following statements about how teach-
ers can structure and direct the learning process.

Statement about learning What is true about the What is inaccurate or false
statement? about the statement?
Teachers should avoid conflict
at all times as it blocks
learning.
Learners should be
encouraged to ask questions.
Learning is best undertaken in
a structured, orderly manner.
The learning process should
be designed to move learners
from the easiest and most
familiar tasks through to the
most difficult and least
familiar ones.
The teacher’s role is best
understood as one that
facilitates learning, rather
than one that teaches.

Finding out what learners don’t
5.2 know
As teachers we cannot learn for our students. We also can’t transmit what we know
directly into their heads. We can only create conditions that are necessary for them
to learn and construct their own understandings.
But what sorts of conditions, what sorts of tasks and teaching strategies, enable
good learning?
Read through the following learning moment. This description of learning from a
South African learner may draw your attention to strategies that teachers can use to
intervene in the learning process and promote effective learning.

Learning moment 1
‘Can I remember something that happened to me in class that changed my
learning? Yes, there’s one thing that I remember very well. Even now, about
six years later, I can remember it so clearly that it’s almost like it happened a
few minutes ago.
It was in my Std 6 History class. We were doing all that stuff that we had
done over and over again almost every year since I was in primary school –
the Great Trek and why the trekkers left the Cape and all that. It was so
boring and I already knew all about how the Xhosa used to steal cattle from
the boers and how the English taxed them too much. All the stuff you were
supposed to know if you were a good white South African kid.
And now we were doing it again. The eastern frontier problem, again.
And even if it was boring, I still accepted it all: that the Xhosa were the bad
guys and the boers were the good guys.
Then the teacher said something, which kind of changed the way I
thought. It really was an awesome event for me in my learning. We were
looking at our textbook, which had a chapter called ‘The Eastern Frontier
Problem’, and he said:

Let me ask you this question. Maybe it wasn’t really an eastern frontier problem.
Maybe it was a western frontier problem. What do you think?

how can teachers structure learning? 151

He didn’t even make us answer the question. He just asked it slowly and
then kept quiet for a while. I think, maybe he was too scared to do anything
else because teachers could get into trouble for not sticking to the sylla-
bus.
Suddenly, I could see that History wasn’t just about facts, but it was about
having different views of the past. I could see that when we learnt the
‘eastern frontier’ and the ‘Great Trek’ over and over again, it might have
been just to teach us a lie. I think that a lot of my critical thinking about
History started right there.
It was only at University that I learnt about the Mfecane and things like
that, but I already somehow knew that History was about different views of
our past, even if I didn’t know all the right words to say it. It was my Std 6
teacher who taught me that, just by asking one little question. I reckon I’ve
got a lot to thank him for.’

Stop. Think.
What is the teacher doing to make learning happen? What moves is the
learner making alone? What challenge does the teacher present to the
learner? How does the learner meet the teacher’s challenge?
Before you continue, reread ‘Learning moment 1’. Then see whether you Take some time to reflect on the
issue being raised here.
can answer these questions. Make notes in your workbook.

Using tasks to create learning gaps
This experience in a history classroom illustrates how important it is that learners
experience a gap between what they know and what they must get to know. It also
shows that these gaps don’t always occur naturally; they are carefully set up through
a challenge by the teacher.
In everyday situations we usually experience a real gap in our knowledge when
we encounter practical problems that require immediate, practical solutions. These
problems present themselves unexpectedly in a spontaneous, unstructured way. In
school, however, the learning problems are very different. The gap between the
known and the unknown may be of no practical consequence to the learner. It is an
artificial gap, which the teacher sets up with the help of a carefully-structured task.
This task – this gap – exists in and through language only; it occurs in the form of
words and isn’t a concrete reality. So, in order to solve it, learners must understand
the language being used.
The quality of school learning is greatly influenced by how teachers design gaps
to create a conflict between what learners already know and can do with their
words and ideas, and what they should know and should be able to do soon. But
designing a learning task of this kind is difficult! Let’s read to see whether we can
find some ideas to guide us as we design these tasks.

Activity 43
1 Turn to Reading 9 ‘Education for all’ by Craig. Read the introduction and
the section called ‘Basic principles for cognitive change’. They will give
you a good idea of what the whole article is about.
2 Once you have done this, carefully reread the first two principles of Spend about 90 minutes on this
cognitive change and the section entitled ‘Conflict’. Then answer these activity.
questions:
a State these two principles clearly in your own words.
b How do these two principles of cognitive change apply in ‘Learning
moment 1’?

152 how can teachers structure learning?

Manipulating form and content in task design
The content of the lesson in Learning moment 1 was very familiar to the learner. The
teacher was probably aware of this and had thought about the boredom such famil-
iarity would create. He needed to do something that would focus the attention of
the learners on something new.
• By rephrasing the problem of the ‘eastern frontier’ as a question about the ‘western
frontier’ he introduced a gap in the learners’ understanding of history.
• The content of the usual history story was questioned, or understood in a new
way, by changing the perspective from which it was told. By shifting the perspec-
tive, the teacher created an internal conflict for the learners.

If their all-too-familiar understanding of the frontier wars suddenly became only
one of many perspectives, how would they know which version of the story is really
true? Learners were suddenly forced to think, both about this content and about
how they would set about convincing people of the strength of their particular
perspective.
You can also imagine how, in the absence of this conflict, the thinking of these
learners had remained static for many years. They probably thought they knew and
understood all there was to know about this part of South African history. But as
soon as the history task was designed in such a way that the familiar content was
presented from an unfamiliar perspective, a whole new way of thinking about
historical events became possible.
The unfamiliar ‘form’ of thinking about history – history as several possible and
often conflicting versions of events rather than a list of facts to memorize – is high-
lighted for the learners. They experience a shift in thinking that ‘really was an
awesome event for learning’.

Creating learner uncertainty
Learning moment 1 also illustrates the second principle of cognitive change, namely
that learners have to discover the limits of their knowledge through their own
actions before they can explicitly be taught about the task.
Once the teacher had set up the conflict, he did not resolve it himself. As the
learner recounts, ‘He didn’t even make us answer the question. He just asked it slowly
and then kept quiet for a while.’ This silence meant that the learners had to act them-
selves, not physically but mentally. They had to weigh up this new possibility of
thinking about familiar facts in a very different way. They had to decide for them-
selves if they stood on the eastern or the western frontier line.
By acting upon the uncertainty that the teacher’s question created, the learner
was introduced into the critical discourse of history. This introduction was so power-
ful that years later he claims, ‘I think that a lot of my critical thinking about History
started right there.’
The above discussion of Learning moment 1 echoes our debate about everyday
and school learning on pages 81–82, where Floden and Buchmann argued that
teachers should not always start where learners are at, but that school learning can
also begin with very unfamiliar material that has no apparent connections to learn-
ers’ everyday lives.
They argued that a deliberate break with everyday knowledge would create
greater opportunities for learning. However, in the light of Craig’s discussion we can
see that the quality of the break is very important. The gap between what learners
know and don’t know will only encourage learning if it creates an internal conflict
that learners want to, and feel able to, resolve.
As teachers we have to deliberately create a gap between the learners and the
intended learning outcomes, but it is also our responsibility to structure the gap in
such a way that it is not too vast (and if it is, we need to provide resources to enable
learners to construct bridges of learning).
Here is another learning moment. Before you read it, scan the questions that follow
the description on page 154. Use these to guide your reading.


The gap must provoke
action rather than a
passive sense of
complete confusion.

Learning moment 2
‘I was excited when our new teacher finally arrived. We had been without
one for a while. I got on well with the teacher we had before. I did well in
most subjects. The new teacher was, however, very different. I noticed that I
was struggling to write creatively. I started being frightened of writing. The
kind of writing this new teacher demanded was not familiar to us. Our
writing for the previous teacher focused mainly on writing friendly and
formal letters. We were always given a topic to write about, and the teach-
er’s mark indicated that she considered grammar, spelling, and the logical
flow of ideas to be important. These letters were easy. I did very well.
The new teacher introduced something completely different. We had an
exercise book called our “journal” in which we had to write our own poems
or stories. We had to write at least two things every week. She took the jour-
nals in and checked what we had written, but it was not for marks. I could
not think of things to write, but I did not want to be exposed. So I used to
copy from other books and magazines and pretended it was my original
writing. There was a poem that I copied from the newspaper, about men
digging in the street in Johannesburg. I remember some of it, “jackham-
mers pound, muscles gleam, to aid our traffic’s angry stream”.
My teacher must’ve known it was not mine, but she did not say anything.
I also copied some stories from magazines and a poem from a birthday
card. I tried to write my own but I could not do it. I used to be able to write.
Our old teacher used to tell us what to write about. She gave us the form,
and we had to fill in the details: beginning, middle, and end. We were given
the topic and we knew what the correct language to use was and how many
paragraphs to include. In essence, we just had to fill in our own sentences.
We did not know how to write something completely new by ourselves.
Then one day I observed something that changed my approach to
writing. I noticed that this teacher had a particular way of organizing infor-
mation when she was teaching. She did not speak to me about how to write,
she did not even punish me for copying and cheating, it was just the way she
taught. Every lesson she presented was organized in the same particular
way. She introduced the topic as a debate. She gave views in favour of the
topic, and views against it. Then she would look at the evidence. At the end,
she would reach a conclusion and say where she stood in the debate. This
observation helped me a lot. It was the first time I had an idea of how to
write confidently. I started writing like that. Soon I could write my own
essays and I could even add my own ideas. In matric, I wrote an essay on
censorship in the examination and I got a good pass.’


Stop. Think.
• What is the teacher doing to make learning happen?
• What moves is the learner making alone?
• What challenge does the teacher present to the learner?
Take some time to reflect on the • How does the learner meet the teacher’s challenge?
issue being raised here. • Compare the nature of the challenge in Learning moments 1 and 2. Do
you think the two teachers were equally effective?

Creating gaps that don’t overwhelm learners
Learning moment 1 was a good example of the power of conflict in learning.
Learning moment 2, however, presents us with a learning experience that nearly
went wrong. Initially the learner felt so overwhelmed by the task, that she began to
cheat and copy rather than attempt any work of her own. In the end, however, she
did learn to write in a new way. But what does her initial reaction mean? Did the gap
the teacher constructed help or hinder learning?

Activity 44
1 Reread Learning moment 2. Also read over your responses to Learning
moment 1.
2 Answer the following questions when you have finished:
Spend about an hour on this a Use the principles of cognitive change from Craig’s article ‘Education
activity. for all’ to explain how the learner in Learning moment 2 was able to
change the way she was writing.
b you think every learner in the class made similar observations
Do
about the teacher’s method? If not, what implications does this have
for their learning?
c you think it was good that the teacher did not say anything when
Do
the learner was cheating and copying?
d you think the teacher offered enough support for the writing
Do
process? Explain your thoughts.

This activity reveals another difficulty teachers face as they think about constructing
the learning process. It is not enough to set up a conflict to generate an internal
crisis for learners. Too much insecurity and conflict can result in learners avoiding
the task by cheating or copying. Conflict has to be balanced by support.

Scaffolding the gaps: supporting learners
Gaps, as we know, are places into which one can fall! We need support to traverse
them.
The same is true in learning. Although creating a conflict in the learners’ minds, or
a gap in their understanding, provokes them to look actively for new ideas, it can
also demoralize learners if we provide no support. A good learning task has to be
designed in such a way that it provides two things:
• a sufficient gap between the known and the unknown to make learning neces-
sary;
• enough scaffolding to make learning possible.

Wood described the dual responsibility of teachers to challenge and to support in
terms of two rules of teaching:


‘The first [rule] dictates that any failure by a child to bring off an action
This quotation is from D. Wood,
after a given level of help should be met by an immediate increase in ‘Aspects of teaching and
help or control. Thus, if the teacher, say, had provided the child with a learning’ in P. Light, S. Sheldon,
specific verbal instruction and then found that the child did not succeed and M. Woodhead (eds.),
Learning to Think (London,
in complying with it, the appropriate response is to give more help. […] Routledge, 1991), p. 104.
The second rule concerns what should happen when a child succeeds
in complying with an instruction. This dictates that any subsequent
instruction should offer less help [than before]. In other words, after
success the teacher should give the child more space for success (and
error). […]
Stated simply and boldly, the rules of contingent teaching sound
easy. However, […] it is difficult to teach all children contingently all the
time. […] Effective teaching is as difficult as the learning it seeks to
promote.’

The idea that teachers have to play an
active role in constructing the kind of
gap between the known and the
unknown that will support and not
hinder learning, should by now be very
familiar to you. But, as Woods
indicates, doing this is no easy task.

Activities 29 and 30 in Section Three introduced you to the notion that teachers can
scaffold learning. At this point you might want to reread the article entitled
‘“Scaffolding” learning in the classroom’ (Reading 7). Also take another look at your
notes on Activity 30.
Do you recall that scaffolding (like many other ideas in this module which focus
on the responsibility of teachers to support learning) builds on Vygotsky’s idea of
the zone of proximal development (ZPD)?
The ZPD is the gap (or zone) in which learners can shift from solving problems
initially only with the help of the teacher (or more capable peers), to solving them on
their own. In other words, the ZPD represents the kind of gap between the known
and the unknown in which learning can take place. The idea of the zone of proximal
development is very important in conceptualizing the teacher’s role.
• It shows how important teachers are to the learning process, despite the fact that
learners have to actively construct their own understanding of the task.
• Vygotsky argues that learners will not move from the known to the unknown
unless they have a chance to actively observe and participate with their teacher
(or peers) doing something they cannot yet do on their own.

In other words, while learners and teachers are busy on a task, the teacher can
encourage learning by modelling actions that will arrive at the solution. However,
imitation alone does not constitute learning. The learners still have to internalize
the model of the teacher by reconstructing it in their own minds.

Designing tasks that disrupt familiar thinking patterns
In addition to providing a model for imitation, teachers must create conditions and
opportunities for movement and change in learners’ actions. By designing tasks that


require new kinds of actions from learners – tasks that disrupt their use of familiar,
old patterns of thinking – teachers will help learners to negotiate the zone of proxi-
mal development.
As we have seen in Section Two, the teacher can support this process by:
• asking questions and interpreting the questions of learners;
• using what is known to help students imagine new things;
• encouraging guessing and risk-taking, and helping to interpret mistakes in order
to draw attention to the important features of the task.

Finally, learners need to be encouraged to use their newly-constructed knowledge
creatively and apply it independently to new problems and tasks.
True learning is a developmental process and cannot be achieved in a single
task.
However, the role of the teacher is to structure each task in such a way that the
True learning is a task itself becomes an opportunity for development to occur. The notion of the
developmental zone of proximal development helps teachers to think about the developmental
process and cannot be quality of learning tasks in very particular ways and to make choices about three
achieved in a single important aspects of their work:
task. • First, teachers have to choose how they use what learners know. (What do learn-
ers already know and what can they already do on their own?)
• Second, teachers have to decide how they focus the attention of the learners on
the rules, language, and expectations of the task. (What aspects of the task need
to be modelled or mediated? In what way must learner activity be constrained or
restricted and focused?)
• Finally, they have to choose specific strategies to bridge the gap between the
learners and the task. (Do the learners have enough opportunities to imitate,
internalize, and apply what they are learning?)

In the remainder of this section we will investigate each of these choices in more
detail.

Working with what learners
already know 5.3
One requirement, if we are to use the idea of the zone of proximal development to
inform teaching practice, is that we have insight into what learners already know.
Teachers have many ways of probing their learners’ understanding, but most teach-
15
ers use direct questions such as ‘Do you know?’, ‘Why do you say so?’, ‘Why did you do
that?’, or ‘How would you explain that?’.
Probing alone, however, often leads to a dead end and fails to move learners Week 15 begins.

beyond a certain level of explanation to a new way of thinking. Here is an example
of this:

What makes things fall to the ground? When you let them go.

What is it about letting go that makes them fall to the ground?

When you let them go they hit the
ground. Sometimes the loud noise
does it. The wind blows things to
the ground too.

Why do these things fall down
instead of going up?

Because they can’t float?

In this dialogue both teacher and learner are stuck, because the teacher is only
using one kind of question (‘What makes things fall to the ground?’) to find out what
the learner knows about gravity. By rephrasing and repeating this one question over
and over again, the teacher gives the impression that he is looking for the correct
answer rather than for the learner’s ideas and understanding. In other words, he is
using the question to test the learner’s knowledge rather than to understand what
the learner knows and why he thinks about things in this way.
This might be one reason that explains why the teacher fails to build on what the
learner knows and move him beyond his everyday understanding of gravity. What
do you think?


Using questioning thoughtfully
Here is another transcript from a lesson. In this case the lesson is on safety in the
home, and the tutor is trying to build on what learners already know. Think about
whether this teacher does it more successfully than the previous teacher.

Activity 45
1 Carefully read the following transcript:
Tutor: (Looking around the group.) Before we start, can anyone give
me any ideas of the kinds of accidents that might happen in
Spend about 30 minutes on this
the home?
activity. The transcript is from
N. Mercer, The Guided Kay: Leaving toys on the stairs.
Construction of Knowledge
(London, Multilingual Matters, Tutor: That’s good. Anyone else?
1995), pp. 34–35.
Steve: Trailing wires such as on an iron …
Tutor: Fine.
Steve: … where a little child can pull it down.
Tutor: Pull it down. Yes, fine. Can you think of anything, Amanda?
Amanda: Just leaving things hanging around and everywhere, putting
pots away …
Tutor: Mmm (nods).
Amanda: … and things like that.
Tutor: So being tidy is one of the main areas. I agree with you.
2 Reread the transcript, this time paying particular attention to the moves
the teacher is making. Consider the following:
a How is the tutor using what learners already know?
b Will this help the tutor to understand what learners can or cannot do
on their own?
c Can you think of any other methods the tutor could have used to find
out what the learners know about safety in the home?

Teachers’ questions
The teacher in Activity 45 uses a fairly traditional approach to her lesson. She tries to
begin where learners ‘are at’ and then tries to find out what they know about safety
in the home. She draws out their ideas by asking direct questions (‘Can you think of
anything, Amanda?’), indirect questions (‘Anyone else?’), and by confirming what
they say (‘That’s good.’).
All her questions are factual questions and in the end, she reformulates what
learners have said into a generalized point about home safety: ‘So being tidy is one
of the main areas’. In other words, she uses what learners know to illustrate or exem-
plify the general point she has chosen to teach.
Although this teaching approach is popular (the lesson about electricity in Section
Three, for example, has a similar structure), it has several shortcomings:
• First, it concentrates on facts and does not explicitly challenge learners to draw on
their network of knowledge in a relational way.
• Second, it does not generate a conflict or problem that challenges learners to
rethink their perceptions of safety in the home.
• Third, the teacher (and not the learners) asks all the questions, so in the end it is
difficult to know what the learners can or can’t do on their own and where they
need help from the teacher.

Are there any other ways in which we can use questions to evoke learning?


Teaching learners to question
As we showed in Section Two, learner questions are powerful tools for learning: we
found out that they can reveal what learners know as well as what they don’t know.
Let’s see if we can redesign the task in Activity 45 to allow learners to ask ques-
tions and use what they already know about safety in the home to challenge and
extend the way they think. Here is one example:

Step 1:
The teacher hands out a short accident report card and asks the learners to work in
small groups and imagine an accident that happened in a home. They then use their
imagined accident to fill in the report card.

Learners actively use their knowledge and their imagination to produce a coherent,
meaningful scenario about the lack of safety in the home. They work in a group so that they
can collaborate and support each other in a potentially daunting task. The accident report
card constrains their activity and helps them to pay attention to the structure of the task.

Step 2:
The groups exchange their accident reports. They then read through the new report
they have received.

By exchanging the report cards, learners are suddenly confronted with unfamiliar ideas they
have to ‘explain’ (unfamiliar content, familiar form).


Step 3:
Each group now works with the new report. They imagine themselves as people
who have to investigate the household accident. Learners are asked to generate a
few probing questions for their investigation.

In the role of ‘investigators’ they have to generate their own questions. They already know the
facts on the report card and so the ‘investigative’ questions have to be relational, explanatory,
or evaluative in nature. By influencing the kinds of questions learners ask, teachers can
encourage them to enquire further about the problems of safety in the home.

The teacher in this example uses three deliberate steps to structure the learning
situation. This structure allows learners to focus all their attention on the important
features of the learning task. In addition to the very structured teaching sequence,
this teacher also encourages learners to move to a qualitatively new position in their
thinking about accidents in the home by:
• providing them with a model (using report cards to be filled in);
• allowing learners to internalize the problem (imagining themselves as investiga-
tors of the accident);
• asking them to apply their knowledge creatively (generating new and complex
questions).

The task turns learners into questioners. Learners not only construct the content of
the lesson (case scenarios), but also create a problem for investigation. As investiga-
tors of the ‘accident’, they find themselves in a ‘real’ yet carefully-designed confron-
tation with the unknown (their knowledge of home safety), and they are guided
into using the power of their imaginations and their questions to learn.

The importance of thinking about the process of teaching
When we compare the above example with the first transcript in Activity 45, we are
able to see how the choices of the teacher (in this case about the way in which to use
what learners already know about accidents in the home) influence the structure
and focus of the learning process. The method a teacher chooses makes a difference
because it affects what is learnt and also how it is learnt. This is true not only for


individual lessons, but also for longer-term programmes.
Turn to your Reader and read a little more about how the choice of teaching
method influences what and how learners learn.

Activity 46
1 Turn to ‘Developing communities of reading and learning’ by Brown and
Campione (Reading 17).
2 Look at the headings and subheadings before you begin to read. You
have already studied a part of the article in Section Four. However, reread
Spend about an hour on this
the first few pages to get a sense of what the Reciprocal Teaching activity. Once you have
Programme is about. completed the reading and
3 Now carefully study the section under the heading ‘Reciprocal teaching answered these questions,
listen to Part 5 of your
of coherent content’ and answer the questions below: audiotape. First, Moll and
a What problem or gap did the learners face? Lazarus draw from theorists like
b What methods do the facilitators of the programme use to bridge the Vygotsky to explain what good
teaching is. Then Tshule and
gap? Adler use these ideas to provide
c How did they structure student learning? us with a number of practical
d What do you think was the secret of their success? teaching ideas. Does the tape
add anything to your
understanding of the Brown
All of the above examples illustrate how teachers are able to make choices about and Campione reading?
how they use what learners know. They are choices about the process, rather than
the content, of the learning situations and have a powerful impact on the structure
of the learning task.

Teaching learners to analyse tasks
Craig makes it clear that it is important for learners to be able to focus on the rules,
language, and expectations of any learning task. In the previous section you had an
opportunity to work with signal words in a text. Your work illustrated how a specific
language feature of a text can influence the way in which we think.
Awareness of language and how it works, according to Donaldson, is also an
important part of intellectual self-control, as it allows us to make choices about our
mental processes. This means that the language we use in a learning task (be it oral
or written) should not be incidental, and as teachers we need to become aware of
the choices we make in this regard.
Language awareness for the teacher only, however, is not enough:

‘As we help students acquire information, ideas, skills, values, ways of This quote comes from B.
thinking, and means of expressing themselves, we are also teaching Joyce, E. Calhoun, and D.
Hopkins, Models of Learning -
them how to learn. In fact the most important long-term outcome of Tools for Teaching (Buckingham,
teaching may be the students’ increased capabilities to learn more easily Open University Press, 1997).
and effectively in the future, both because of the knowledge and skill
they have acquired and because they have mastered the learning proc-
esses.’

Understanding the demands of the task
Ultimately we want learners to become aware of their own thinking and so we need
to find ways of focusing their attention on the discourse of the learning task.
Many learners are unaware of the way in which school discourse works and there-
fore struggle to understand exactly how they should use language to meet the
demands of a particular learning task. A common problem, for example, is the use of
new technical terms.
In order to support learners, we therefore need to understand how we as teachers
can focus the attention of our learners on the more formal features of the task. Let us
once again begin by looking at how this is commonly done.


Teacher: A string. Yes. In this case it’s a …?
She holds up the pendant’s chain.
Children: Chain.

This comes from N. Mercer, The Let’s have a closer look at this pendulum. Right. Now then. What
Guided Construction of does a pendulum have to have to be a pendulum?
Knowledge (London,
Multilingual Matters, 1995),
p. 36.

String.

Teacher: Chain. So it has to be suspended doesn’t it?
She raises and suspends the pendant by its chain.
Anthony: A weight.
Teacher: has to have a weight, doesn’t it? A mass at the end which this
It
one has.
The discussion continues …
Karen: It has to hang straight down.
Teacher: has to hang straight down, Karen. There it is. So that’s right isn’t
It
it? So it has to hang from a fixed point. It has to be suspended
from a string or chain or whatever and it has to have a mass at
the end. Right.
Towards the end of the lesson the teacher checks that the
children are able to use these terms themselves.
Teacher: Now what did we say they had to have?
Jonathan: A pendulum? A weight at the bottom.
Teacher: Yes and yours has, OK? Yours is a washer.
Jonathan: Hmm.
Teacher: Right. David, what else does a pendulum have to have?


David: A mass.
Teacher: Jonathan’s mentioned that.
David: A string.
Teacher: string or a chain or some means of hanging it down. Right. And
A
Anthony what was the third thing it had to have?
Anthony: Suspended.
Teacher: Right.
Anthony: A fixed point.

Activity 47
1 Take a critical look at the above classroom transcript. We have drawn
your attention to the use of technical terms by printing them in bold.
2 Answer the following questions when you have finished:
a How does the teacher focus the attention of the learners on the
language requirements of the task?
b Is she successful? How did you decide?
c you think the learners are aware of the importance of using tech-
Do Spend about 30 minutes on this
activity.
nical terms? Explain your answer.
d Can you think of an additional task that would show you whether all
learners are able to use the technical terms correctly?

The transcript of the science lesson shows how once again the teacher is asking all
the questions. This time she has chosen to draw the learners’ attention to the scien-
tific definition of a pendulum (a mass suspended from a fixed point) by providing the
technical terms and then expecting the learners to imitate her use of the words. This
strategy seems successful, as the learners are able to name and recall the terms at
the end of the lesson. Learning new terms by rote certainly is an important part of
learning something new.
However, we can’t be certain that all the learners have understood the concepts
that these terms refer to. For example, David did not notice that mass and weight
refer to the same idea, namely that a pendulum needs ‘something heavy at the end’.
If we wanted to be sure that learners like David understand the idea (and not only
know the words), we would need to construct an additional task that allows them to
apply the new concepts without guidance from the teacher. Such a task would
present a real challenge (conflict) and in the process of application (action) the
teacher and learners would come to know the difference between the ideas the
learners can only apply with help, and the ideas they can already use on their own.
Here are some ideas for the additional task:
• The application could take the form of a model-building activity, where the learn-
ers construct and label a pendulum.
• The task could also be structured as a problem-solving activity where the learners
have to repair a pendulum that does not work and explain what needed to be
fixed and why.
• A third possibility would be to ask the learners to find objects in the school that
make use of the principle of the pendulum (a clock, a bell, a metronome etc.) and
explain how they work.


It is important to note that all three of these examples involve a level of explanation
by the learners. In other words, it is not enough for them to build the model, fix the
pendulum, or find the object. The real learning task lies in the explanation – learners
have to use language to help them make explicit links between the words they use
and the ideas they present.

The importance of language support
Language is important in all kinds of learning, both the language used by teachers
and the language competence of learners.

But in South Africa this poses
a real difficulty. Many learners
study in a language that is not
their home language and this
limits their access to learning
tasks.

In other words, the language
itself can create a barrier
between the learners and the
task and make it impossible
for learners to succeed.

Before we can find solutions to this problem, we need to have a good understand-
ing of the particular issues involved in language and education.

Activity 48
1 Turn to Reading 8, ‘Eager to talk and learn and think’ by Macdonald. The
article is based on research done in South Africa from 1985 to 1990,
which investigated bilingual primary education and its effect on learn-
Spend about 90 minutes on this ing and thinking.
activity. 2 Answer the following questions when you have finished reading:
a Why does Macdonald suggest that children should first become liter-
ate in their mother tongue? What reasons does she give?
b Do you agree with her? Explain your answer.
3 Now carefully look at the table that shows a model of thinking skills for
science learning.
a what level of thinking are the learners engaging with the lesson
At
about the pendulum?
b What would the learners need to do in order to show that they can
apply the concept of a pendulum?


As Macdonald points out, it is vital that teachers be aware of how many South African
learners feel unsure about the language of learning and who will therefore struggle
to do the task. They will struggle to explain their thoughts or ideas. In such a situa-
tion the teacher has a dual responsibility towards learners:
• First, the learning tasks have to be constructed in such a way that they offer explic-
it language support.
• Second, they must provide support for the thinking process that has to happen in
and through the language of learning.

In Reading 9, ‘Education for all’, Craig refers to this dual responsibility as ‘consolida-
tion’. She argues that:

‘at best this involves … exposing the rules which constitute the task and
which demand certain operations. This could be achieved through
modelling mental processes, i.e. showing how one must operate to
engage in the task appropriately and successfully. I think that this work
is at best done through materials which bridge/support/scaffold learn-
ers’ task engagement.’

Would the learning material below and on page 166 meet her criteria?

This learning material comes
from L. Marneweck etal.,
Making History 4 (Centaur
Publications, 1992), pp. 40–41.


Activity 49
1 What do you think of the way in which the above history task is construct-
ed?
2 How does it challenge learners?
Spend about 30 minutes on this 3 How does it support them?
activity. 4 How does the task use what learners already know?
5 How does it draw attention to the technical language needed for the
task?
6 What aspects of the task coach the learners to use language in a particu-
lar way?
7 Do you think this material shows learners how they must operate to
engage in the task appropriately and successfully?

Teaching strategies that bridge
the gap 5.4
At the beginning of this section we reminded ourselves that while we can’t learn for
our students, as teachers we play a major role in making sure learning does indeed
happen. 16
Joyce et al. describe this responsibility in the following way:
Week 16 begins.
‘As we teach, we try to find out what learning has taken place in our
classrooms and what readiness there is for new learning. But teachers
cannot crawl inside students’ heads and look around – we have to infer
what is inside from what we can see and hear. Our educated guesses are
part of the substance of our profession as we try to construct in our minds
This is taken from B. Joyce, E.
the pictures of what our students are experiencing. The never-ending Calhoun, and D. Hopkins,
cycles of arranging environments, providing tasks, and building pictures Models of Learning – Tools for
of the minds of the students make up the character of teaching. […] The Teaching, (Buckingham, Open
University Press, 1997).
challenge of designing learning experiences is the central study of the
substance of teaching.’

Over the years, teachers have developed a vast selection of teaching methods and
have chosen a variety of strategies to support learners as they move into the
unknown.
We will look at some of the most popular and enduring approaches used by
teachers around the world and ask ourselves how these approaches enable learners
to do things they cannot do on their own. In other words, we will focus our attention
on those aspects of each strategy that allow learners to learn with the help of others,
rather than alone.

Questioning
In Section Two we investigated how learners can use questions as a powerful tool to
help them make their way from the known to the unknown. It is therefore not
surprising that questioning is also an important and popular strategy amongst Not every question
teachers. Some researchers estimate that twenty percent of teacher talk involves that teachers ask will
the use of questions. achieve the correct
As we have already seen in the transcripts in this section, not every question
balance between chal-
teachers ask will achieve the balance between challenge and support that leads to
learning. Let us therefore investigate the kinds of questions that seem to facilitate lenge and support that
learning. leads to learning.
In her book, The Teaching of Science, Harlen points out that teachers ask ques-
tions for many purposes:

‘for pupil control, for information, to check on or test recall, to provoke
thinking, to prompt and lead in a certain direction, to reveal children’s
ideas’.

Teachers need to think carefully about the consequences for learning different kinds
of questions have. In particular, says Harlen, ongoing reflection on the difference
between productive and unproductive questions will assist teachers greatly. As we
have seen in Section Two, questions should deliberately seek to provide pathways
from the known to the unknown for the learner. The content and nature of ques-
tions asked, as well as their timing, is crucial.
Harlen cites the following anecdote to illustrate the difference between produc-
tive and unproductive questions:
‘I once asked a class of children, “Can you make your plant grow side-


ways?” For a short time they had been studying plants growing in tins,
pots, boxes, and other contraptions made of plastic bags. I was just a
little too anxious and too hasty and, quite rightly, I got the answer, “No
we can’t.”
So we patiently continued with scores of “what happens if ...” experi-
ments. Plants were placed in wet and dry conditions, in dark and in light
corners, in big boxes and in cupboards, inside collars of white and black
paper, upside down, on their sides, and in various combinations of these.
In other words, the children really made it “difficult and confusing” for
the plants. Their plants, however, never failed to respond in one way or
another, and slowly the children began to realize that there was a rela-
tionship between the plant and its environment, which they controlled.
Noticing the ways in which the plants responded, the children became
aware that they could somehow control the growth of plants in certain
ways [...] When the question, “Can you find a way to make your plant
grow sideways?” reappeared later, there was not only a confident reac-
tion, there was also a good variety of attempts; all sensible, all based on
newly-acquired experience, and all original.’ (Elstgeest, 1985, pp.
39–40)

Productive and unproductive questions
Did you notice the crucial difference between the first time the question about
growing plants sideways was asked and the second time?
• At first, it was a question that already assumed understanding of a new concept,
and was therefore unproductive. The learners were simply confused by the ques-
tion, and it did not encourage learning. Or, in the terms that we used earlier when
we discussed the learning paradox, the question simply reinforced the children’s
existing understanding that plants did not grow sideways. This is a misunder-
standing that was strongly and confidently held by the learners and so acted as
an obstacle to further learning.
• Only once the children got active (through systematic observation) did they
acquire the means to develop a new understanding. When the question was
asked the second time, it was a productive one.

Later in her book, Harlen outlines a number of questions that she considers to be
productive in the context of an extended classroom activity in which various plants
are grown from seeds.
Children planted a number of different types of seeds in soil in plant pots, watered
them each day, and observed them closely. The teacher’s questions were designed
by Harlen to encourage the children to use six key process skills related to the devel-
opment of scientific concepts (more specifically, the development of an under-
standing of the scientific method). The six key process skills are:
• observing;
• hypothesizing;
• predicting;
• investigating;
• interpreting findings and drawing conclusions;
• communicating.

Carefully read Harlen’s ‘questions for developing process skills’ on the next page
(these are from W. Harlen, The Teaching of Science (London, David Fulton Publishers,
1992), pp. 109–116.)


Questions for developing process skills

Productive predicting
Productive observing questions
questions What do you think the seeds
Productive hypothesizing questions will grow into?
What do you notice is the
Why do you think the seeds are not growing now? What can we do to them to
same about these seeds?
What do you think will make them grow faster? make them grow faster?
What differences do you
Why would that make them grow faster? What do you think will
notice between seeds of
Why do you think the soil helps them to grow? happen if they aren’t in soil
the same kind?
and later when seeds have been planted and are but get some water in
Could you tell the
growing another way?
difference between them
Why do you think these are growing taller than those? and, in relation to growing
with your eyes closed?
What do you think has happened to the seed? plants
What happens when you
Where do you think these leaves have come from? What do you think will
look at them using the
lens? happen if we give them more
(or less) water/light/warmth?

hypothesize

predict
observe

communicate
investigate

interpret
Productive questions for
communicating
How are you going to keep Productive investigating questions
a record of what you did in What will you need to do to find out ...
Productive questions for interpreting (if the seeds need soil to grow)?
the investigation and what
findings and drawing conclusions How will you make it fair (i.e. make sure
happened?
Did you find any connection between ... (how that it is the soil and not something else
How can you explain to the
fast the plant grew and the amount of water/ which is making the seed grow)?
others what you did and
light/warmth it had)? What equipment will you need?
found?
Is there any connection between the size of What will you look for to find out the
What kind of a chart/graph/
the seed planted and the size of the plant? result?
drawing would be the best
What did make a difference to how fast the
way to show the results?
seeds began to grow?
Was soil necessary for the seeds to grow?


Activity 50
1 Read through Harlen’s questions for developing process skills in the
science classroom on page 169 again.
2 Use your knowledge about questions from Section Two to identify the
Spend about an hour on this relative power of each question used by the teacher to encourage the six
activity. key process skills. In other words, consider:
a Which questions are relational? Which are explanatory? Which are
evaluative?
b Which questions set up gaps and challenges?
c Which questions allow for mistakes and encourage learners to take
risks?
d Which questions encourage the use of imagination or analogy?
e Which questions encourage the learners to make links between
everyday knowledge and school knowledge?
f Which questions focus the attention of the learners on specific
features of the task?

What did we think?
You should have noticed in the above activity how different questions encourage
different qualities of thinking.
Questions by their very nature set up gaps between the known elements of the
question and the yet unknown answer. They also establish a learning relationship
between the one who asks and the one who answers. The developmental potential
of this learning relationship depends on two things:
• the nature of the questions asked;
• the quality of the feedback the teacher gives to the replies.

Teachers who only ask questions to get correct answers will tend to use unproduc-
tive, closed, and subject-centred questions. These kinds of questions will give them
very little insight into the thinking behind the learners’ responses, thus limiting the
constructive feedback they can give when learners make mistakes.
By contrast, productive, open, and person-centred questions all have a relational
or explanatory focus and so encourage the teacher and learners to pay attention to
the learning process rather than the content of the question. That is why they are
better tools for teaching.
Although Harlen’s examples concentrate on teacher questions that help learning,
we have illustrated with earlier activities that learner questions are equally powerful
tools for learning. Both teacher and learner questions have their place and can be an
effective strategy for promoting learning, provided they contain elements of chal-
lenge and support for the learning process. As teachers we cannot control learning,
but we can increase the probability that learning will occur through our use of well-
designed questions.

Group work
Group work is another common and, if used well, effective strategy used by teachers
to promote learning. It is particularly popular with teachers who share a constructiv-
ist view of learning. Group work limits the time the teacher talks in class, and so
allows learners more opportunity to be active, to clarify their thoughts, and to learn
from each other.
Group learning, however, does not occur naturally. It is a complex strategy that
involves more than simply dividing learners into groups and presenting each group
with a task. Instead, teachers need to understand issues like:
• how talk and the sharing of ideas – key characteristics of group learning – help
learners learn;


• how to manage group dynamics so that learning is maximized and conflict mini-
mized;
• how to ensure that all learners are intellectually engaged and not just physically
active.

Let’s explore some of these issues.

Activity 51
1 Study this picture carefully. It shows a group of learners working togeth-
er on a reading and writing task.
Spend at least 30 minutes on
this activity.

Group learning does
not occur naturally. It
2 Now think of your own experiences of group work and use them to is a complex teaching
answer these questions. Write down your thoughts as you go along. strategy involving
a Can learners working in a group do exactly as they like, or do they more than simply
have certain responsibilities in the group? What would these be? dividing learners into
b What attitude/s would help them to benefit from working in a groups and presenting
group?
c What do you think would happen in a group if one learner had a
them with tasks.
completely different understanding of the text to the rest of the
group?
d What skills do learners need before they can truly help each other
learn?

Facilitating good group learning
The fact that these learners are reading as a group gives the impression that they are
busy with collaborative learning. By talking to and questioning one another, the
learners experience a process of enquiry that allows them to link their own ques-
tions and ideas to the text in a truly open-ended way.
Group work also creates opportunities for collective problem solving. The teacher
doesn’t provide the answer to the questions learners have asked of themselves.
Instead, learners are given the time to engage with the problem, make mistakes, talk
about their thoughts, and construct their own solutions.
If learners bring misunderstandings or misconceptions to the task, other members
of the group can effectively challenge these, either by asking for an explanation or


by providing an alternative view. The conversations that take place between the
learners are usually more open and exploratory than the discourse of a class that is
controlled by the teacher’s voice.
But when learners work in a group they shouldn’t be able to do exactly as they
please. They are part of a disciplined enquiry. It is only by working together and
learning to share their knowledge and skills that the good of the whole group is
served. But in order to work together successfully learners need certain skills and it
is a teacher’s responsibility to ensure they have these. Some of the necessary skills
are:
• listening to each other;
• waiting their turn to speak;
• focusing their ideas and comments on the task;
• being serious about the ideas shared by other members of the group.

Some dangers of poor group work
Many learners, however, don’t benefit from collaborative group work. Group work
can also be an experience of wasting time and sharing ignorance.
This sometimes occurs when one learner emerges as dominant and tells every-
body else what to do and how to think. The problem with dominant members like
this is that they block other people’s ideas by suggesting that they have the only
correct solution for every problem. Less confident group members increasingly
withdraw from the debates and so don’t really have a chance to develop their own
understanding of the task.

Group work can also fail when there
is nobody in the group who can
contribute expertise or leadership.
These kinds of groups often
engender feelings of insecurity
among learners, who will then
struggle to move beyond what they
already know.

Effective group work must be designed so that learning is supported. Teachers need
to think carefully about how the individuals in a group are likely to relate, and what
different strengths they bring to the group. Groups require what Vygotsky calls more
capable peers who can guide the group as a whole. These learners are knowledge-
able, but are also able to facilitate group discussion in a way that:
• maximizes involvement by all learners; but
• moves in a clear direction.

In addition, it is important that the teacher structures clear and thought-provoking
tasks for group discussion. Well-structured tasks can act as another group ‘facilitator’
by guiding learners’ thinking and debate. Poor tasks – either those that only require
simple recall answers (and so don’t provoke debate), or those that are complex and
confused (and so overwhelm learners) – don’t provide the required support.

The strengths of good group learning
The power of collaborative learning lies in the fact that learners interact with each
other on a task and pool their expertise, thereby constructing an understanding of
their task that is far more complex than any work they would do on their own. As
learners ask questions, listen, and talk to each other they can refine and extend their


ideas beyond their personal limits, and group work can have a supportive or scaf-
folding effect on their learning.
Although group work allows for increased activity of the learner, teachers none-
theless play an important part in making collaborative learning a reality in their
classes. On the one hand, they need to stand back and allow learners the freedom to
take control of their own learning. On the other hand, they need to focus the task in
such a way that it supports the development of group skills and enquiry skills which
are necessary if group work opportunities are to be made truly collaborative learn-
ing experiences.
Once again we need to point out that this will not happen naturally. Carefully-
designed learning tasks that train and practise efficient collaboration are needed.
Have a look at this example of a group task.

Group 1
Animal Talk
Before you start, check that there are four members in your group. Decide
on the following:
• Who will be the secretary and keep notes?
• Who will make sure everybody has a chance to talk and keep order in the
group? Teachers play a vital
• Who will be the timekeeper? role in making collabo-
• Who will report to the class? rative learning a
Once you have made these decisions you can begin your task. successful reality in
their classes.
Your task:
Step 1 (spend 5 minutes on this):
Pretend that you are all animals attending a meeting. Every member of the
group must say:
• what animal they would like to be;
• where they live;
• what they eat.

Step 2 (spend about 10 minutes on this):
You are all – as animals – meeting because you have a problem. The
problem is that human beings have moved into your area and are making
your life difficult. You must discuss this problem. Begin the discussion by
allowing every animal to answer this question:
How do human beings harm us?

Stop. Think.
Reread this task. Don’t rush to read our comments before you can explain
to friends how this task scaffolds learning.
Take some time to reflect on the
This is a very simple example of a teacher scaffolding discussion through her instruc- issue being raised here.
tions on a worksheet. You will notice that the teacher has not only focused on the
content of the lesson (how humans harm animals), but has also provided clear guid-
ance for the behaviour of the group. She has used the task to model effective group
learning behaviour.
This has several powerful effects. Through this carefully-designed task, the
teacher:


• introduces learners to the discourse and discipline of collaborative enquiry;
• addresses a number of attitude and value questions by encouraging learner inde-
pendence, modelling a respect for dignity for all, suggesting that social enquiry is
a way of life, and developing interpersonal warmth and affiliation.

If used well, group learning is a highly versatile and comprehensive model of learn-
ing and teaching, as it blends the goals of academic enquiry, social integration, and
social process learning. If used in an unconstrained and unfocused way, however,
chaos erupts and no learning can take place.

Peer coaching
Teacher questioning and group work present two very different approaches to
providing learner support. But as we have shown, both can be very effective ways of
keeping the learners actively involved in the learning process, provided the teacher
knows how to ensure that learners focus on the learning task.
To conclude this section we would like to look briefly at peer coaching as a third
strategy for helping learners in class. Peer coaching is commonly used by good
teachers. These teachers realize that competent learners are often the best tutors of
struggling learners.
But the strategy is also popular among learners. In the following example two
children, Kathy and Ryan, are working on the problem ‘What multiplied by three
gives us eighteen?’
The dialogue begins when Kathy has solved the problem and spontaneously
proceeds to explain it to Ryan.

I tried sixes. What’s three plus three?

Six.

What’s six plus six? Okay, six plus six is twelve. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.


See, it’s six. Three times six. Yeah, but I’m supposed to do the
problem myself.

Activity 52
1 Carefully reread the exchange between Kathy and Ryan.
2 Answer the following questions:
a Is Kathy scaffolding Ryan’s learning? Why? Why not?
b What do you think about this kind of peer coaching? How effective is Spend about 30 minutes on this
it? What are its limitations? activity. Do it with fellow
teachers. You may want to
c Use Vygotsky’s notions of mediation and internalization to explain reread Vygotsky’s ideas (in the
this situation. Why is this good or bad teaching? Learning Guide on pages 93–94
and in Reading 4) before you
tackle question 2c.
What did we think?
Kathy is clearly Ryan’s more capable peer and shows a clear intention to help Ryan
succeed. She shows Ryan how she solved the problem by guiding him through her
own thinking steps. This gives Ryan an opportunity to follow her thinking and imitate
her method.
Ryan, however, is not entirely satisfied with this. He responds with ‘Yeah, but I’m
supposed to do the problem myself’. This shows that he feels Kathy did it for him and
that he has not internalized the problem-solving skill.
Kathy and Ryan’s interaction reveals two significant limitations of the peer coach-
ing strategy:
• First, peer coaching often only offers opportunities for imitation, but not for inter-
nalization. As a result it is difficult for teachers to tell if learners are meaningfully
imitating a process (which can lead to internalization of a new skill) or merely
copying the content mindlessly. This is important: imitation is an important step
in internalizing new skills. We imitate when we learn a language, learn how to play
soccer from a star, or when an expert shows us how to use a computer. But this is
different from copying. Imitation ultimately must lead to the imitator being able
to do these things independently.
• Second, a child like Kathy is not in a position to offer carefully-structured support
and guidance. She can show Ryan what she has done, but does not draw his
attention to the salient features of the task or make explicit links between the
specific example she uses (why three plus three?) and the general principle of
multiplication they present. These explicit links are critical for the internalization
process. In order to understand and internalize we need to understand the under-
lying principles of, for instance, mathematical concepts like multiplication. We
must know more than simply the procedures involved in multiplying, and this is
really all that Kathy can offer Ryan at this stage.

Thus peer coaching is a useful strategy for supporting learning, as long as the teacher
can ensure that learners also have enough opportunity to engage with the general
principles of the task. This usually requires some intervention by a knowledgeable
teacher.

5.5 OBE and the role of the teacher

Teachers: facilitators not deliverers
See the National Department
When the Department of Education called for a new way of looking at learners, it
of Education, Curriculum 2005 spoke simultaneously of ‘a new way of looking at teachers’ in the context of OBE.
Orientation Programme (Media Traditionally, teachers had been considered to be deliverers of learning, whereas in
in Education Trust, poster 5d
and resource 3.1., 1997) for
OBE teachers were facilitators of learning. According to the national Department of
more detail about this new Education teachers should now be:
identity for teachers.

‘guides for the learning process, and not transmitters of knowledge’.

This general idea of teaching has gained respectability all over the world. Learning
is understood to be much more meaningful when learners are allowed to experi-
ment and reconstruct on their own rather than merely listen to the teacher lectur-
ing. It follows that the teacher should, in any learning situation:
• assess the children’s present levels of understanding and their strengths and
weaknesses;
• design activities and learning tasks that give learners the opportunity to commu-
nicate with each other, to argue and debate issues.

In this framework, teaching is regarded as the work of presenting learners with inter-
esting learning materials, evocative learning situations, and learning tasks that allow
them to discover new knowledge for themselves. The teacher’s role during the
learning process is that of guiding and managing the learning process.

The debate about teachers-as-facilitators
This notion of teaching as facilitation has led to an important debate amongst
teachers in South African schools.
On the one hand, many believe that outcomes-based education requires that
learners be entirely free to learn in whatever way they choose. In this view, teaching
becomes, to recall the words of Carl Rogers, a relatively unimportant and vastly
overrated activity.
The proponents of this view argue that formal instruction should no longer play
a direct role in the learning process. It is also assumed that teacher talk always leads
to passive learning. As a consequence, neither formal instruction nor teacher talk are
regarded as acceptable by these educators. Teachers are no longer considered to
have a central part to play in learning. Instead, they now play a background role of
organizing and setting up appropriate learning environments. Self-motivated learn-
ing, they argue, arises in activity-based learning, group work, content that links with
everyday life, and through practical involvement with the community.
On the other hand, others argue that teacher instruction and the active media-
tion of knowledge by teachers remain part of good OBE practices. They argue that
while the notion of ‘facilitation’ is important, it is only one facet of the work of a
teacher. One teacher put it as follows:

‘To my mind, reducing the teacher to a facilitator greatly oversimplifies
the complex roles that most teachers play every day – sometimes facili-
This quote is from E. Potenza, tating, sometimes mediating, and sometimes doing a bit of good old
‘Outcomes-based education:
will it benefit our children?’ in
teaching.’
Fairlady (21 January 1998),
p. 51.


Our understanding of teaching and the role of teachers
In this section, our focus has been on the role of the teacher in structuring learning
experiences for the classroom. We saw that the relationship between a teacher and
a learner is vital to the classroom. It creates the necessary condition for learning to
occur, namely the experience on the part of the learner of a gap between the known
and the unknown.
Concepts like the zone of proximal development and scaffolding helped us to
understand how teachers challenge learners with new knowledge. We also saw the
important role of teacher questions in informing and supplementing learner ques-
tions. It became clear that while teachers cannot learn for their students, they play
an indispensable role in making sure that learning happens.
From a broad constructivist point of view, teachers are actively and necessarily
involved in the kind of learning that is envisaged by OBE. In order to do this they will
play different roles, as Potenza suggests.
• Sometimes they will explain or question.
• At other times they will construct good activities or tasks that guide group discus-
sion.
• And at other times they will work individually with learners to explain their learn-
ing difficulties.

Common to all these actions by teachers, though, is the fact that the teacher under-
stands that learning must happen in the learners’ heads, and she or he acts so that
the learners’ minds are activated and this occurs.
In the above debate, we come down firmly in favour of the latter position.

Misunderstanding constructivism
There is a common misunderstanding of constructivist views that suggests that the
teacher is not necessary to the learning process. Here is one sweeping version of
such a mistake:

‘Teacher lectures, demonstrations, audio-visual presentations, and
programmed interactions are some of the teaching methods that do not
You will find this statement in
fit in with Piaget’s ideas. Piaget believes in active discovery within a Gauteng Department of
learning environment – the schools. Children’s learning experiences Education, Theories of Teaching
should be planned to facilitate assimilation and accommodation. and Learning Facilitator Guide
(Johannesburg, 1999), p. 15.
Children should be allowed to explore, manipulate, experience, and
question. Instruction should be individualized. Teachers should just
facilitate [our emphasis].’

But as Piaget himself puts it when he discusses ‘active methods of education’:

‘[there is] the fear (and sometimes hope) that the teacher would have no
role to play in these experiments and that their success would depend on
See J. Piaget, To Understand is
leaving the students entirely free to work or play as they will. It is obvious to Invent (New York, Grossman,
that the teacher as organizer remains indispensable in order to create 1978), p. 16.
the situations and construct the initial devices which present useful
problems to the child. Secondly, he is needed to provide counter-exam-
ples that compel reflection and reconsideration of over-hasty solutions.
What is desired is that the teacher cease being a lecturer, satisfied with
transmitting ready-made solutions; his role should rather be that of a
mentor stimulating initiative and research.’

If there is a sense in which Piaget can be said to view teachers as facilitators of knowl-
edge, then this is it. From the point of view of the theory of equilibration, teachers
have an important role to play in learning.
When we bring Vygotsky’s ideas into play alongside those of Piaget, then it is clear


that teachers are active participants with learners in constructing learning. They set
up interesting tasks that encourage and facilitate learning, exactly as described on
page 177 in relation to Piaget’s view of teaching, by creating conditions to provoke
appropriate action.
But Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development takes our thinking
even further. Now we understand that teachers participate deliberately in learning
activities with learners, and respond to their dilemmas and questions in the context
of joint activity. They:
• identify the gap between the known and the unknown which will best challenge
learners to learn;
• design appropriate learning tasks;
• guide learners through the tasks, and mediate new knowledge to them as they
need it.

Conclusion and key learning
points 5.6
Reassessing the half-truths
Stop. Listen. Think.
We have come to the end of another section. Before you proceed, we’d like
you to go back to the five half-truth statements at the beginning of this
section and decide if you still agree with your original responses to them.
Are there any statements that seem to have changed their meaning for Take some time to reflect on the
issue being raised here. Relisten
you? Why? to Part 5 of your audiotape
before you re-assess your initial
responses to the half-truths at
the beginning of this section.
Key learning points
The purpose of this section was to allow you to make explicit links between theo-
retical ideas about learning and the practice of teaching. We pointed out the choices
that teachers make when they translate theory into practice, and showed how these
We used to think about
choices affect the construction of learning tasks. We also discussed particular strate-
gies teachers use to promote effective learning. slow learners and fast
Ultimately it is our professional responsibility as teachers to teach for learning. learners, intelligent
This means we have to construct learning activities in such a way that we achieve and less intelligent
the right balance between challenge and support. children. Today we
know that opportuni-
Here is our summary of this section’s key points: ties to learn are more
• Teachers cannot guarantee learning, but they can design learning activities in such a important than how
way as to effectively promote it. bright you seem to be.
• Teachers can use the notion of the zone of proximal development to deliberately Any teacher should
create gaps between the known and the unknown.
think, “What opportu-
• Two important principles for cognitive change are conflict and activity.
nities to learn has this
• Learner questions may be more powerful tools for learning than teacher ques-
tions.
child had so far?” If you
• The way teachers use what learners know influences the structure of the learning
do not ask that ques-
task. tion you will invariably
• Teachers have to make choices about the process as well as the content of the make false judgements
learning situation. about children and
• Teachers use language to help learners become aware of their own thinking. what teaching they
• In South Africa many learners have to study in a language that is different from need.
their home language and this limits their access to learning tasks.
• Learning tasks have to be designed in such a way that they support the language
and the thinking processes of the learners.
• Teachers cannot control all aspects of the learning process nor determine that
learning will definitely happen. However, through well-designed tasks that focus
learners’ attention in particular ways, they can increase the probability that learn-
ing will occur.
This quote comes from M. M.
• Collaborative learning can support and challenge learners beyond their individu- Clay, ‘How children learn to
al limits. read: an international
perspective’ a paper presented
• OBE tends to over-emphasize the learners’ potential and freedom and under- to the All Africa Conference on
emphasize the important role teachers have to play in structuring learning situa- Children’s Reading (Pretoria,
August 1999).
tions.

Learners and Learning: Section Five, How can teachers structure learning?

Learners and Learning: Section Five, How can teachers structure learning?

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