Turning Points Chapter 4: Designing Instruction to Improve Teaching and Learning

Turning Points Chapter 4: Designing Instruction to Improve Teaching and Learning
This chapter dealt with how to design instruction so that the students will be able to learn the information that they need to be effective students. One of the big topics in the chapter was a set of criteria for teachers in order to get their students prepared. These criteria were: students should be able to produce knowledge instead of repeat information back; students need to be involved in work that makes them think; students’ achievements should show that they have gained a life skill instead of being nothing more than a measure of their competence. The chapter also talks of the importance of using differentiated instruction to help all students be able to learn the information – a big issue with this is to make sure that you do not give some students work that is too easy and you should also avoid giving more work to students who are above average. The chapter also talks of the importance of technology – they warn teachers to make sure that computer use if for higher-order thinking and not just to play games on. When technology is used correctly, then students exhibit higher grades and more involvement, which is exactly what a teacher wants to see.
Once again, this was not totally new to me, but I did find two sections of the chapter very fascinating. They once again talked about the notion of tracking which is definitely a hot-button issue. In a perfect world, tracking should be used to make sure that students with the same abilities are in the same room in order to maximize learning – but in actuality, tracking prevents students from working hard and there is also evidence that minority groups are overrepresented in lower tracks in school; this is what makes tracking such a terrible thing to follow. When it came to technology, there was one thing that stood out to me; it talks about how most black students are asked to do much more lower-order thinking, such as playing games, than their white counterparts are. That very fact is quite sad and needs to be corrected, but I am curious why that is the case. I assume it happens because many more black students are in lower tracks, and the teachers must just assume that they cannot do any work by themselves or at least any work that requires real thinking. And some people think that America’s racial problems are over!