Moore, Chapter 5: Using Direct Teaching Methods

The chapter contrasts and develops teaching strategies, converging on some best practices that are hypothesized to show increased/better student retention and engagement. There is a beginning with an examination of the “traditional” style of direct teaching, where the goal is to communicate material to students via direct exposure either by lecture or textbook. The benefit of this method lies in its efficiency in communicating material quickly and directly to students. The next step in teaching methods is that of exposition teaching. The core of exposition teaching is explanation. Models and other visual ties that illustrate material support the most effect modes of explanation. Questioning and waiting are two more facets that the chapter considers as being able to expand student understanding of material. These facets seem to have the function of pushing and pulling students into a better understanding of the material. The article converges the “best” practices to end on exposition teaching with interaction to be the best method.

While using sound logic, the work lacks on the support of itself in the way of case studies. Furthermore it operates in the ideal of a relatively homogeneous class of excited learners. And while I will not say that my classes are not full of excited learners, it they are far from homogeneous. It discusses the idea of Direct Teaching as being effective for students that are slow to understand, but I have see that modeling has been the best way for them, with my higher level students requiring little of me at all. This observation could be correlated to the article’s discussion of varied learners needing more or less of the teacher—I struggle to translate that into a succinct and single “one pill cure” teaching style. Perhaps further demonstration-illustration of the article’s concluding claim could convince me. Like Moore says, straight lectures can be “boring.”

Moore, Chapter 6: Using: Indirect Teaching Methods

This chapter examines indirect teaching methods that place more responsibility on students to drive discovery-based learning. This is characterized as by a less than active teacher hand in directing student learning. The teacher’s new role is that of constructing activities that anticipate student needs and possible pitfalls while working with self-directed learning. Student discussion is shown to be the motor behind this type of learning, with student discussion being broken into either that of the “entire class”/large group or with small groups—which the chapter favors as it promotes more student-to-student interaction.

The chapter continues to discuss Heuristic Models in which discovery based questions are used to promote higher thinking. This relies on the idea that the process allows for multileveled problem solving. In this as well the teacher’s role is limited to that of facilitating—this requires, as the chapter states, great deals freedom within the classroom culture.

The ideas of indirect teaching are very interesting and I feel have merit in their attempt to promote student honed learning. The discovery base of indirect learning allows students to take charge and responsibility of their learning. This allows inquiry that provides much more sustainable learning as there is not an absorbing of knowledge just being thrown at the students, but rather them reasoning into the knowledge—in my case being mathematicians as opposed to calculators. However there are weak points in these methods as well—that especially being the need to balance the role of the teacher as the facilitator and the introducer of the new material. My teaching style, which I have to admit has show me some great results lately, has become an attempt to straddle both indirect and direct teaching methods. I have seen this to allow students develop their own understanding while they model themselves on the teacher as an exemplar of understanding. Furthermore there is are the real issues of minority student dominance (even in small groups) or the fact that not all students can fully understand new concepts just by talking about them and in fact might benefit more from more direct strategies. This and the last chapter I feel are pointing out the benefits and weaknesses of both to come to some sort of conclusion mixing the both in the end.