August 20, 2001
Transforming the classroom is key to educational reform, author says
By Barbara McKenna
When schools open this fall, the majority of students across the country will fall
into orderly rows and line up for their daily dose of learning. But Roland Tharp,
a leading educational researcher, calls this scenario the "cemetery model"
of education, and he is challenging educators to do a better job.
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| Tharp proposes alternatives to the traditional system of teacher-led instruction. |
Tharp, director of the UCSC-based national Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE), believes that restructuring the classroom is the key to effective educational reform.
Tharp is coauthor of the book Teaching Transformed: Achieving Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony (2000, Westview Press), which outlines a classroom-reform model that has been used successfully to help all students improve their learning, including the growing number of "at-risk" students hampered by linguistic or cultural differences, poverty, or geographical isolation.
"The dominant model of teacher-led instruction, in which students quietly and passively receive knowledge, has been in use since at least the time of the Civil War," said Tharp.
Yet numerous studies have shown that in such a classroom it is mainly students in the mainstream--culturally, economically, and academically--who succeed in school.
As debate continues on how to help more of America's students succeed in the classroom, Tharp's book offers valuable answers. At the core of Tharp's classroom model is what Tharp and his coauthors call "Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy." These standards are:
- Teachers and Students Producing Together
- Developing Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum
- Making Meaning: Connecting School to Students' Lives
- Teaching Complex Thinking
- Teaching through Conversation
Teaching Transformed, coauthored by Peggy Estrada, Stephanie Stoll Dalton,
and Lois Yamauchi, presents real-life examples of transformed classrooms. In these
classrooms students often work in small groups. Sometimes groups are formed based
on skill level or language ability, while others intentionally mix students of varied
skills and different native languages.
In classrooms with such structures, children tend to focus intently on their projects,
share ideas, take on leadership roles, and achieve high levels of comprehension.
While each group focuses on its assignment, the teacher sits with one group at a
time, functioning as a facilitator rather than an authority.
A leading education reformer and a professor of education at UCSC, Tharp has spent
decades studying and developing effective standards for learning. Along with his
colleagues, he has implemented these strategies in schools throughout the country
with great success. An advantage the standards have over curricular reform is that
they are applicable across grade levels, student populations, and subject matters.
Teachers in classrooms across the country have applied the Five Standards, and researchers
from CREDE have been working in close collaboration with demonstration schools in
Wastonville and Wai'anae, Hawaii, to comprehensively implement the Five Standards.
Teaching Transformed has received high praise from other experts in education.
"In stark contrast to the dogmatic, reductionist, controlling, 'one-size-fits-all'
curricular prescriptions that have gained so much favor in the field of education,
these authors propose a pedagogy that actually respects the intellect of teachers
and students, and that advocates building on their sociocultural resources in creating
advanced, flexible, and diverse circumstances for learning," says Luis C. Moll,
professor of education at the University of Arizona.
The book presents the authors' vision of an ideal classroom, reviews theory and research
supporting their model, and offers a process for transforming any traditional classroom
into one structured for the successful learning of a diversity of students. Along
with theory, the book offers examples, guidelines, and other resources for creating
a transformed classroom.
