A Theory of Teaching

As part of a class reading, we read the first two chapters of Strategic Reading, by Wilhelm, Baker and Dube, which discussed "A Theory of Teaching" and "A Theory of Teaching Reading." The first chapter discusses a lot about the 5-w's of teaching. The first thing is that you need to know what you want your students to know and knowing how to get that knowledge across. We have to know what we are trying to achieve and justify our methods of teaching.

Wilhelm, Baker and Dube also have this theory that teaching is scientific, like a research study. You have to know your experimental group, in this case the students - knowing and understanding childhood development and cognitive abilities. You don't know if lessons and learning will be successful, so we have to examine our instruction. We need to know what the bottom line is, where teaching/learning is headed, and if it is on the right track.



There is a strong connection between student and teacher. The teacher is responsible for student learning, but the students are responsible for participation. Teachers need to aid their students to reach higher levels of thinking, scaffolding them to help them learn in their Zone of Proximal Development. Learning can't occur if the material is too easy or too hard. Teachers also need to be able to pick up on student behavior to ensure that the student is understanding the material and not crying out for help. Once you get to know and understand your students, you can interpret their actions and behaviors in terms of learning hindrances and capabilities.

There is also a connection between students and reading. In order for students to be engaged in higher-level reading, the material needs to be something that the students can relate to and make a connection with. When the material is something that students personally understand, they can create a relationship and conversation with the text, making the reading more meaningful.

Guided reading is also important when students are trying to reach higher levels of reading. If a specific type of text is unfamiliar to a student, it is important to guide them through reading it so that information can be correctly interpreted. For example, Wilhelm, Baker and Dube share information about a class that is learning to read ironic texts, but they start students off small, with something they know - in this case, comic books. They give students the skills they need to bridge the gap in reading and understand the new information. By providing them with reading skills like that, the students can then apply those skills to other topics and translations later on, instead of just in the present. Reading strategies are important to develop in students so that they can understand and interpret what they are reading. Reading strategies help students build literacy skills.