Directive vs. Indirective Teacher Practices

How marked is the difference between being taught something and learning something? With my own children, I never explicitly taught them to read; nonetheless, they learned to read. To what degree did the environment we created impact their ability to learn?

Educational researchers have sought to tease apart this distinction qualifying explicit teaching as "directive" and creating a learning environment as "indirect." With that distinction they contend the latter as superior for students living in materially poor neighborhoods.

An article by retired UW-Milwaukee School of Education professor, Martin Haberman titled "Pedagogy of Poverty vs. Good Teaching" from Phi Delta Kappan 1991, delineates how those differences might look in a classroom:

Directive teacher acts:

• giving information and directions, 
• assigning and reviewing homework, 
• giving and reviewing tests, 
• asking questions, 
• settling disputes, 
• punishing noncompliance, 
• giving grades and monitoring seatwork

Indirect teacher acts involved in creating a learning environment (many of these are rooted in the Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching practices we've adopted as a district)

• involved in issues they regard as vital concerns (school is living, not prep for living)
• involved in explanations of human differences
• being helped to see major concepts, big ideas, general principles (Essential Questions)
• involved in planning what they are doing
• applying ideas such as fairness, equity, justice
• actively involved
• directly involved in real-life experiences
• actively involved in heterogenous groups
• asked to think about an idea in a way that questions common sense, an/or related to prior learning (ie. KUDOS, Learning Targets)
• involved in redoing, polishing, perfecting their work
• involved with the technology

One of the examples provided was the use o f the "Stepping Stone Protocol" which allowed for group problem solving and strategizing around an open-ended question with multiple solutions. A vocal music teacher from MMSD rooted many of these concepts into a Hip-Hop in education course he developed at Cherokee Middle School.

This work was based on the Bringing Equity to Equations in Common Core Algebra presentation at the 17th National Symposium on Teacher Induction, 2015. Presenters included: Lybroan James and Kevin Drinkard, both of the New Teacher Center.