The Transformative Teaching Model

(Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, and Yamauchi, 2000; Resnick, 1995; Dalton, 1998)

Theorists have explained that when experts and novices work together for a common product or goal and have opportunities to converse about the activity, learning is a likely outcome (Rogoff, 1990; Tharp and Gallimore, 1988; Wertsch, 1985).

The presence of an expert participant provides assistance that raises students' participation to more competent levels. Without an expert "other" to assist activity, understanding is less likely to increase (Vygotsky, 1978).

Ironically, a key lever in the standards-based reform strategy—the use of high-stakes external tests—has unwittingly provided teachers with a rationalization for avoiding or minimizing the need to teach for meaning and in-depth understanding. Teachers are more likely to spend time practicing for the test, covering many facts and procedures and using traditional lecture and recitation methods in the hope that more students will become proficient.

What evidence supports these contentions? A summary of the last 30 years of research on learning and cognition shows that learning for meaning leads to greater retention and use of information and ideas (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). One avenue of this research explored the differences between novices and experts in various fields. Psychologists learned that experts have more than just a lot of facts in their heads: They actually think differently than novices do.

According to the researchers, “expertise requires something else: a well-organized knowledge of concepts, principles, and procedures of inquiry” (p. 239). This finding suggests that students, to become knowledgeable and competent in a field of study, should develop not only a solid foundation of factual knowledge but also a conceptual framework that facilitates meaningful learning.



Is the curriculum relevant to the lives and perspectives of women, people of color, and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds?

Connecting curriculum to students’ lives and perspectives is a foundational element of many conceptualizations of good education (Gay, 2000; Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi, 2000). Meaningful curriculum taps students’ own experience, whether through flexible projects that allow them to make choices such as an investigation into an aspect of social history relevant to themselves—as Latino boys, as immigrant Asian girls, as working class European-American girls, and the like (cf., Sheets, 1999b). Teachers need to seek materials that both reflect the experiences of the students who will be using them and expand their understanding of people who are different from them.

Two decades ago an innovative educator named Emily Styles wrote a short article titled “Curriculum as Window and Mirror” (1988). In it she asserted the ...the need for curriculum to function both as window and as mirror, in order to reflect and reveal most accurately both a multicultural world and the student herself or himself. If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Styles, 1988, p. 6.