Implementing Pedagogy Standard V: Teaching Through Conversation

Recommendations for Implementing the Five Standards

The impact of the five standards on students' learning outcomes depends on the implementation of all of the standards. The standards are presented in this book in a sequence that teachers are recommended to follow for implementation. Each standard inserts a layer of the system that is vital to the functioning of the whole. When the standards are fully installed and working together, teachers are assisting students' learning in an extraordinarily powerful way.

Teachers are encouraged to take the time they need—up to seven weeks at the beginning of the school year—to develop a five standards classroom, especially if the teacher and students are new to using the system. Teachers decide how much time to devote to the implementation of each standard in response to the students' needs and their own. For example, some teachers implement the first standard in order to carefully build the foundation for the other standards. Then they present each of the other standards individually until everyone is comfortable. These teachers might be described as using a stage for each standard. However, once the teacher implements the fifth standard on a regular basis, the system is implemented.

Other, more experienced teachers combine, for example, the second and third standards. The second standard's language levers use the contexts in the third standard to make meaning. This process makes for a three-stage implementation schedule. A teacher typically practices IC with selected students during the implementation of the fourth standard. The teacher practices student grouping and routing to bring students into the instructional activity setting for IC. When the teacher shifts into routine IC use, the standards are in full implementation. Table 8.6 contains recommendations for standards implementation with prioritized emphases for each standard.

Dialogue, such as IC, is essential to learning. As a premier teaching strategy since the Greeks first recorded its use, IC is based on centuries of effective teaching practice. The five standards support IC in contemporary classrooms with a system for organizing instruction and using routines. In addition to strengthening the predictability and coherence of classroom teaching, five-standards pedagogy prepares and assembles students for learning primarily through dialogue in IC. The power of the five-standards pedagogy for teaching and learning converges in the use of IC to teach.

Summary

Teachers welcome miracles, but their work is about effects—on students' language development, thinking levels, and academic achievement. Teachers who use the five pedagogy standards, especially IC, continually learn about their students' learning progress. They use this knowledge to provide responsive assistance in their students' zones of proximal development.

The five pedagogy standards support teachers in doing what many already do, but more systematically and routinely. Many of the standards and their indicators reflect familiar approaches to classroom teaching, but the power of these approaches to support teaching may not previously have been clear. The indicators' purposes are clear and specific. With the implementation of each standard through the indicators, the teacher combines pedagogy with teaching to build a system. At first the system might seem to be merely an organizational improvement. Yet as teachers continue to install the standards, particularly IC, the benefits of pedagogy for teachers—knowing more about students—and for students—understanding more about how to work with the teacher and their peers—are clear. When IC is routine, teachers listen to and guide every student, and students know that they will receive responsive assistance from their teacher.

When the five standards are in place, the system is charged for teaching that is not only upgraded but also substantively different from other models. The standards support teachers in making possible conditions in which teachers may teach using many approaches—most beneficially, dialogue with every student. The system's increased academic dialogue opportunities, instructional routines, and joint productive activities with teacher and peers combine to make teaching and learning more robust. Five-standards teachers can set goals for students' learning with the confidence and satisfaction that come from having both tools and a system for accomplishing those goals.

Conclusion

Teaching and pedagogy are ordinarily associated with instruction in classrooms. The extraordinary power of their association to influence learning is less commonly noted. Even at the level of increasing the frequency and predictability of teaching, the benefits of pedagogy are clear. At the level of inclusive teaching that uses responsive assistance, pedagogy's benefits may be surprising. When teaching's influence on students' higher order cognitive development is recognized, pedagogy's role in supporting teaching becomes profound.

To ensure students' language, literacy, numeracy, and cognitive competency for handling complex problems both now and in the future, teaching must provide robust learning experiences for all students. Teaching is strengthened for the goals it sets when pedagogy is intentionally installed to support it. The transmission model demonstrates an association of teaching and pedagogy that is powerful and persistent. The five pedagogy standards provide the same power for aligning teaching with modern understandings about how knowledge is acquired and who is to acquire it.

Teaching has overshadowed pedagogy for centuries. The traditional transmission model has been in place for so long that pedagogy disappeared—or so it seemed. Now that teaching seeks new and effective forms for meeting students' vast array of needs—from varied backgrounds and talents to differing cultures and languages—pedagogy, and even lack of pedagogy, is more visible—if teachers know how to see it.

The following chart shows elements of teaching and pedagogy that are involved in the shift from a transmission to a transformative model:

The chart shows that the elements of teaching and pedagogy change dramatically in the shift from one model to another. Transformed teaching that is interactive, activity based, and outcomes oriented continually provides teachers with information about students' learning progress. Through students' participation and work products, teachers collect a variety of data on which to base their decision making. They shift their pedagogy from assigning solitary tasks to designing collaborations and sustained dialogue in manageable, teacher-assisted groups. They tailor tasks both individually and by groups to suit students' differentiated learning needs. They encourage students to interact over learning material in academic conversation with both the teacher and their peers. JPA and contextualization ready students for assistance in their zones of proximal development. In the IC, teachers responsively assist all students in taking their language and cognitive skills to more complex levels.

Five-standards pedagogy has yet to serve K–8 or K–12 teachers in the ways in which it has the power to do so. This pedagogy has mostly been used in graduate education programs in America's prestigious universities. It is also familiar in the nation's preschools, where students' cognition and language are nurtured in activity-based settings. But in the educational settings between kindergarten and graduate school, effective pedagogy has rarely been called on to support teaching to the degree to which it is capable. Where there is no system or where pedagogy is ignored, the impediment to classroom teaching and learning is practically insurmountable. Instead of being dismissed to an incidental or content-limited role, pedagogy must be recognized and applied as influential assistance for teaching.

The five standards are research based, anchored in psychology and education theory, and affirmed by effective practice. They express the powerful relationship between teaching and pedagogy in a set of principles or standards that every teacher can understand and apply as a system in the classroom. Teachers who begin to use the pedagogy standards can expect to feel a surge in the power of their teaching—that's what pedagogy does. The experience of teaching with pedagogy calls to mind the popular song about eagles flying high on the wind beneath their wings. Teaching's wings are what pedagogy safely lifts for soaring.