Teaching for meaning, preparing students for the varied worlds beyond school, fostering students' deep understandings of content areas, offering curriculum with both depth and breadth, leading students to achieve and to develop the disposition to want to achieve: Aren't these generally the uncontested purposes of our education system? Don't the liberals, the conservatives, and the moderates in between all want schools to serve these worthy goals? Don't virtually all private and public schools assert that their programs are based on these ideas? Are there any serious educators who, in principle, don't want teachers to teach for meaning or don't want students to construct deep understandings of content with enough breadth and depth to demonstrate competence in a number of disciplines? No one comes to mind.
Then why is there so much controversy over the strategies for and approaches to fulfilling these purposes and achieving these goals? We certainly know much about the characteristics of classrooms that foster meaningful student learning (DeLisi & Golbeck, 1999; DeVries & Kohlberg, 1987; Ginsburg, 1997; Wadsworth, 1989). Although there is a universe of unanswered questions about the workings of the human brain and the equally complex learning process, we nevertheless know how to create intellectually rich, rigorous classrooms that foster the desire to make meaning. The issue at hand isn't our lack of collective knowledge or ability. It's our lack of collective vision and will. We don't do a very good job of creating the classrooms we want.
The term “teaching for meaning” springs from the same line of thinking that evoked “vine-ripened tomatoes” and “juice, not from concentrate.” Tomatoes naturally ripen on their vines. It's the practice of picking them green, putting them in a truck, and pumping the trailer with ethylene gas while traveling at 60 miles per hour on an interstate highway that makes us refer to tomatoes that actually ripened on the vine as having done so. Juice? Only after we started to extract most of a fruit's water, combine it with concentrate made from fruit purchased from different regions, and then reconstitute it did we think of labeling freshly squeezed juice as “not from concentrate.”
Like agriculture, education has replaced natural processes with artificial ones. Over time, these artificial practices have become common. Implemented largely in the pursuit of higher profits in one field and higher test scores in the other, these practices have compromised essential foundational components of each system to such a degree that starting over may well be the best course of action. To use a computer analogy, maybe the hard drive of our education system has so many corrupted files that we just need to unpack those rescue disks, reformat, and start anew.
Searching for meaning is the purpose of learning, so teaching for meaning is the purpose of teaching. If teachers do not have meaning making at the core of their pedagogy and practice, then let's not call the activity teaching. Doing so demeans the word and the noble art and science it represents.
Teaching to the Test
Many recent federal and state regulations have called for single-event measures of accountability—tests—in the apparent belief that these assessments generate improved learning. Some observers cite improved scores as evidence that state tests have generated better instruction. Although that line of reasoning appears logical, it's an example of magical thinking: Wish it and it will be so.
Unfortunately, learning can neither be wished into being nor legislated. At best, the improving state test score evidence, which is specious at best, tells us that the new tests have prompted extended instruction targeted to the test and that higher scores indicate substantial test preparation and not much else. At worst, the evidence tells us that inappropriate management decisions and statistical manipulations can make negative outcomes appear positive.
Teaching is a complicated process, and it is imperative that we stop trying to make it appear simple. Many teachers readily acknowledge that for a variety of reasons, they engage in little meaning making with their students. Many acknowledge that they engaged in little learning for meaning when they were students. Consequently, few teachers have actually had the experience as students of discerning patterns among ideas, generating unifying principles, or identifying similarities and differences among events. Few teachers are able to imagine how such classrooms could operate. “This is really great,” they say, “and I'd love to teach this way, but we have to cover the curriculum.” Clearly, many educators don't see that the curriculum can be embedded in solving complex problems, nor do they recognize the skills that problem solving develops. On the other hand, many educators and members of the general public think it is appropriate for students to complete worksheets of multiple-choice questions in preparation for a test. We will never channel productive energy into creating the schools we really want unless we give up the magical belief that test preparation is a suitable surrogate for education.
Research-Based and Theory-Driven
It's time to replace magical thinking with the real thing: research-based, theory-driven instruction rooted in cognitive science (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994; Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988; Sweller, 1988). Much of this information has been available for years but has only sporadically been transformed into education practice. The newly emerging neuropsychological brain mapping studies—still in their infancy in terms of potential applicability to education settings—are adding compelling biological evidence to behavioral observations.
What do we know about research-based, theory-driven instruction? Empirical research supports a number of broad areas that guide pedagogy and align with constructivist learning theory.
Student Thinking
How learners conceptualize ideas has been a rich arena for investigation for many years. Research on children's conceptions of various processes and phenomena (Driver, Squires, Rushworth, & Wood-Robinson, 1994/1999) has greatly contributed to our knowledge base. Instructional practices such as seeking and valuing student points of view, adapting curriculums to student suppositions, posing problems of emerging relevance, structuring lessons around primary concepts, and assessing learning within the context of teaching have been shown to develop conceptual meaning and related skills in students (Brooks, 2002; Brooks & Brooks, 1993/1999).
College students in large introductory courses have exhibited gains in conceptual understanding through the regular use of ungraded one-minute papers. These short student responses to questions posed by professors aid in instruction by providing a window into student points of view, clarifying student conceptions and misconceptions (Almer, Jones, & Moeckel, 1998; Chizmar & Ostrosky, 1998). Secondary school sites within the Coalition of Essential Schools have consistently reported gains in conceptual understanding and test scores brought about by using interactive teaching methods rooted in big ideas and implemented with student suppositions (Bensman, 1994). The Higher Order Thinking Skills project, a computer-based thinking program for at-risk students in grades 4–7, employs a Socratic questioning approach in math and reading. The thousands of participating elementary and middle schools consistently report improved student skills in metacognition, inference from context, decontextualization, and information synthesis, along with significant standardized test score gains (Pogrow, 1988, 1990).
Big Ideas
Researchers have extensively studied concept mapping (Novak, 1991) and thinking maps (Hyerle, 1996)—pictorial representations of “big” relationships among ideas, objects, and events. Generating visual maps helps learners understand the concepts of similarities and differences, cause and effect, part as opposed to whole, and analogical sets. Understanding these types of relationships is an essential component of conceptual change and cognitive growth. In an elementary math class, for example, students may draw maps to describe the many ways a number, such as 24, can be represented. In a high school social studies class, students may map their understandings of the issues involved in the U.S. war with Iraq.
These visual mapping approaches are important classroom activities because they guide students in building organizing frameworks for their thinking (Ausubel, Novak, & Hanesian, 1978). One important but often ill-understood framework for thinking is subsumption, a process through which learners distinguish big ideas from details. Cognitive change and new learning involve building increasingly inclusive and robust concepts (Bruner, 1973).
In a middle school social studies class, for instance, students may begin studying the controversial topic of globalization by identifying the Pacific Rim countries that belong to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative and by searching for patterns within and among those countries. Students look at globalization as a force that involves international trade, investments, and flow of money. They also see it as a set of social and cultural threads knit together by the world's expanding ability to communicate. As students begin to consider the history of transportation, trade routes, and technologies, they may subsume conceptions of globalization under a more inclusive idea, such as interdependence.
Research-based, theory-driven instruction is invitational. Teachers set the stage for learners to build increasingly sophisticated conceptualizations by encouraging discussion of the big ideas, spiraling class discourse into higher levels of inclusive ideas, providing learners with the resources they require, and empowering students to regulate their own learning.
Problems of Emerging Relevance
Problem-based learning (Gordon, 1998) is now part of education settings in elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and professional schools, such as those for medicine and law. The teacher presents a problem that becomes the motivation and context for learning, and whose solution requires students to synthesize ideas and develop conceptual and technical skills.
For instance, a 6th grade class learning the terms “recyclable” and “biodegradable” grapples with the task of deciding on a town policy for recycling. This simulation engages learners in a number of investigations: distinguishing a recyclable item from a biodegradable one, understanding the different types of plastic packaging resins as indicated by the triangle codes, and calculating the percentage of waste that is currently biodegradable. All this takes place within the big idea of “closing the circle” for nonbiodegradables, a systems approach that looks at the interdependence of biological organisms, geographic locations, and manmade objects. The simulation also addresses the economics and technology of recycling: What does the recycling cost? Is there a market for the recycled commodity? Teachers who create settings in which learners consistently conceptualize new ideas within a larger system of related ideas provide a standards-based learning environment.
I was recently with a group of students who were reminiscing about how they used to pour salt on slugs. When I shared my disapproval of this activity, one student earnestly asked, “What's so bad about that? What value does a slug have?” That question brought us to some words from The Lion King: “We're all food for earthworms.” We discussed the interconnectedness of the organisms in the food web, soil aeration and its effect on plant growth, population changes in niches, and how slugs contribute to the balance of life on our planet.
Teachers and Teaching for Meaning
Teachers often struggle with the concept of teaching for meaning. Many grew up in an education system in which teachers told their students what to think. Teaching for meaning requires the teacher to become a mediator of thinking.
Teachers are increasingly realizing that engagement coupled with student understanding is key to student learning. One new teacher reflected on a meaningful mathematics lesson on multiplication and long division that she observed in her mentor's 4th grade class:Why do we “carry the one” or “bring down the next number”? We all automatically do these things, but did anyone ever help us figure out why we do them? I remember learning how to multiply and divide, but I didn't fully understand the operations until I watched this class.
Teachers who teach for meaning also make time for wonder. This means not rushing headlong through lessons to get to the next one. Said one new teacher,I want my students to look at a tree and think of the leaf patterns and the golden ratio, how the chlorophyll changes with the seasons, how trees fit in the ecosystem. Our job is to get students to love learning and wonder why and how things work.
All of us want to know how our world works: why a piece of music is beautiful to one person and cacophonous to another, how engines are able to make cars move, why green leaves turn brown and helium balloons stay aloft, or how new languages develop. Living means perpetually searching for meaning. Schools need to be places that keep this search alive.
