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ROUSING SCHOOLS
TO LIFE
BY ROLAND G. THARP AND RONALD GALLIMORE
Go back in memory, to the school of your childhood
Go farther, if you can--travel back in time, to the
North American classrooms of your great, great grand-
motherx Go back a century. The trick would be to keep
your eyes closed, Of course there are fewer jeans, and
the skirts are different. Textbooks are less brightly
colored. But just listening to the teachers and students,
you might not notice the time warp.
Before the Civil War:
Young teachers are very apt to confound rapid
questioning and answers with sure and effective
teaching. (Morrison, 1860, p.303; quoted in
Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969, p. 153.)
At the Turn of the Century:
Sara Burstall, an Englishwoman, visited Amer-
ican Schools in 1908 and was struck by the ubiq-
uity of the "time-honoured" question-answer
Roland G. Tharp and Ronald Gallimore are authors of
Rousing Minds to Life
(Cambridge University Press,
1989), from which the ideas of this article have been
drawr~ Both were long associated with "KEEP"---the
Kamehameha Elementary Education Project---and
have published extensively on issues of multicultural
and effective education, as well as theoretical issues of
child and cognitive development. Tharp is dean desig-
nate o f the School of Human Behavior at United States
International University, San Diego, and professor of
psychology at the University of Hawaii, where he
teaches in the preservice teacher education and com-
munity psychology prograrrL Gallimore is professor of
psychology, Department of Psychiatry and Bio-
behavioral Sciences, and a professor at the Graduate
School of Education at UCLA, where he teaches educa-
tional and developmental psychology and the role of
culture in socialization and behavioral change.
recitation .... In the European schools the
teacher was at the center of the learning process;
he lectured, questioned the pupils, and "buil[t] up
new knowledge in class." In contrast, in the Amer-
ican classroom, "clearly... the master is the text-
book." The teacher does not really teach but "acts
rather as chairman of a meeting, the object of
which is to ascertain whether [the students] have
studied for themselves in a textbook." (BurstaU,
1909, pp. 156-58; quoted in Hoetker & Ahlbrand,
1969, p. 150.)
And Today:
The writer is William Bennett, former Secretary
• of Education:
In three major studies, the National Science
Foundation found that most science education fol-
lows the traditional practice: 'At all grade levels,
the predominant method of teaching was recita-
tion (discussion) with the teacher in control, sup-
plementing the lesson with new information
(lecturing) The key to the information and basis
for reading assignments was the textbook" (Smith,
1980, p.166) If science is presented like this, is it
any wonde~ that children's natural curiosity about
their physical world turns into boredom by the
time they leave grade school--and into dangerous
ignorance later on? (Bennett, 1986, p.26.)
"Recitation." Everywhere in North American schools.
"Recitation." The most frequently reported form of
interactive teaching. "Recitation" has been described in
the educational literature for over ninety years and con-
tinues today as a major portion of all student and
teacher interactions.
What is this ubiquitous "recitation"? It consists of the
teacher assigning a "text" (in the form of a textbook or a
lecture)~ followed by a series of teacher questions that
20 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
require the students to display their mastery of the
material through convergent factual answers. Recitation
questioning seeks predictable, correct answers. It
includes up to 20 percent "yes/no" questions. Only
rarely in recitation are teacher questions responsive to
student productions. Only rarely are they used to assist
students to develop more complete or elaborate ideas.
This dismal portrait does not describe only schools of
time past, nor some few unlucky or deprived cOmmu-
nities of the present. Goodlad (1984) reported a similar
picture in his broadly based survey of thirty-eight Amer-
ican schools, in thirteen communities, and seven
regions of the United States. Teachers emphasized rote
learning and immediate responses, a pattern rather like
television game shows. On the average , only seven of
150 minutes of the school day involved a teacher
responding to a student's work. Most of the time, teach-
ers talked. Almost never were there opportunities for
give and take between a challenging teacher and learn-
ing students. The student role was passive, and few
teachers made any effort to adapt instruction to individ-
ual differences.
Even the contemporary enthusiasm for effective
teaching "scripts" has not changed the nature of stu-
dent-teacher interaction. In its worst forms, scripted
teaching is little more than the recitation script of ear-
lier eras. It emphasizes rote learning and student pas-
sivity, facts and low-level questions, and low-level
cognitive functions. It does little to promote intellectual
development, cultural literacy, and thoughtful cit-
izenship of the kinds thatA Nation atRisk identified as
crucial. Are recitation and scripted teaching the best we
can do?
No.
Vygotsky's insights have the most
profound implications for how we
think of teaching.
A NEW DEFINITION OF
TEACHING
The human sciences of the last half-century have
made it possible to define another kind of teaching and
to help teachers do it. What has galvanized research on
teaching in the past few years are some linchpin con-
cepts from recently translated works of a Russian psy-
chologist who ran afoul of Stalinist repression and who
died more than fifty years ago. L. S. Vygotskyg ideas are
profoundly affecting our understanding of teaching,
learning, and cognitive development through the work
of many "neoVygotskian" researchers in various nations
who now elaborate, correct, and develop this body of
work.*
Much of this work has focused on "natural teaching"
of home and community. It is now clear that long before
they enter school, children are being "taught" higher-
order cognitive and linguistic skills. Their teaching
takes place in the everyday interactions of domestic life.
Within these goal-directed activities, the teaching con-
sists of more-capable family and friends assisting chil-
dren to do things the children cannot do alone. In such
teaching, the subject of direct instruction are the tasks
themselves, not communication or thinking skillsper se.
Yet the pleasures of the social interaction seem sufli-
"See Tharp and Gallimore (1989)
Rousing Minds to Life Teaching
Learning and Schooling in Social Context
NY: Cambridge University
Press.
22 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
cient to lure a child into learning the language and
cognition of the caregiver.
Vygotsky's insights have the most profound implica-
tions for how we think of teaching. In his theory, the
developmental level of a child is identified by what the
child can do alone. What the child can do with the
assistance of another defines what he called the zone of
proximal development. Distinguishing the proximal
zone from the developmental level by contrasting
assisted versus unassisted performance has profound
implications for educational practice. It is in the prox-
imal zone that teaching may be defined. In Vygotskian
terms, teaching is good only when it "awakens and
rouses to life those functions which are in a stage of
maturing, which lie in the zone of proximal develop-
ment" (Vygotsky, 1956, p.278, quoted in Wertsch and
Stone, 1985, italics original)
We can, therefore, derive this general definition of
teaching: Teaching consists of assisting performance
through the zone of proximal development. Teaching
can be said to occur when assistance is offered at points
in the ZPD at which performance requires assistance.
Teaching must be redefined as assisted performance.
Teaching consists of assisting performance. Teaching
is occurring when performance is achieved with
assistance.
Teaching is not only assessing learners, it is assisting
them.
From
Natural Teaching to Instructional
Conversation
There are many ways to assist performance.
Behavioral and cognitive science have studied several in
detail: modeling, contingency management, feeding
back, directing, questioning, and explaining. Many
properly conducted classroom activities provide assist-
ance: lectures, demonstrations, cooperative learning
groups, and textbook reading can all assist learning, and
even the judicious use of recitation and assessment are
necessary elements of the assisting classroom. But for
the development of thinking skills, in particular the
abilities to form, express, and exchange ideas in speech
and writing, the critical form of assisting learners is
through dialogue, through the questioning and sharing
of ideas and knowledge that happen in conversation.
Conversation that assists performance appears in sev-
eral guises. In successful students' homes, it appears as
storybook and story telling, as helping mother or father
with the accounts, or older sister or brother with the
grocery lists. It is the way that parents teach their chil-
dren language and letters. In the workplace or the ath-
letic field, it is disguised as the chatter that accompanies
action. It appears as the "natural conversational"
method of language instruction advocated by many lan-
guage specialists. It can wear the mask of a third-grade
reading lesson or a graduate seminar. It can be the
medium for teacher training. Its generic name is the
SEFI1NGS THAT GWE LFARNEVG A CHANCE
AS
SISTANCE OF child learning is
,accomplished by creating
activity settings in the classroom
that maximize opportunities for co-
participation and instructional con-
versation with the teacher, and
frequently with peers.
Although activity settings can be
subject to abstract theoretical anal-
ysis, they are as homely and
familiar as old shoes and the front
porch. They are the social furniture
of our family, community, and work
lives. They are the events and peo-
ple of our work and relations to
one another. They are the who,
what, when, where, and why, the
small recurrent dramas of everyday
life, played on the stages of home,
school, community, and workplace
--the father and daughter collabo-
rating to find lost shoes, the
preschooler recounting a folk tale
with sensitive questioning by an
adult, the child who plays a board
game through the help of a patient
Excerpted with permission from
Rousing Minds to Life.
brother, the Navajo girl who assists
her mother's weaving and who
eventually becomes a master
weaver herself. We can plot our
lives as traces of the things we do,
in dissolving and recombining
social groups and energy knots.
Those are activity settings.
Like all institutions, schools are
constituted of activity settings: The
classroom, playground, cafeteria,
nurse's office, and auditorium
evoke, even in aging graduates,
images of place and event. These
shared memories reflect school
activity settings that have been as
stable as a rock and have been
sources of dismay to succeeding
generations of reformers. To secure
change requires that the school's
activity settings be understood and
altered so they will give rise to the
desired assistance of performance.
The criterion for activity settings
is that they should allow a max-
imum of assistance by the members
in the performance of the tasks at
hand. They must be designed to
allow teachers to assist children
through the zone of proximal
development (ZPD) toward the
goal of developing higher-order
mental processes. These settings
engage children in goal-oriented
activities in which the teacher can
participate as an assistor and/or co-
participant as the need arises. The
purpose of these settings is prin-
cipally to assist the child through
the stages from other-regulation to
self-regulation and thence to inter-
nalization and full development.
Other activity settings allow assist-
ance from child to child.
When teachers are engaged with
their students in this way, they are
aware of the students' ever-chang-
ing relationships to the material.
They can assist because, while the
learning process is alive and unfold-
ing, they see and feel the child's
progression through the zone, as
well as the stumbles and errors that
call for support. Schools must be
re-organized to allow more activity
settings with fewer children, more
interaction, more conversation,
more joint activity. []
SUMMER 1989 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 23
instructional conversatior~
The concept itself is a paradox: "Instruction" and
"conversation" appear contrary, the one implying
authority and planning, the other equality and respon-
siveness. The task of teaching is to resolve this paradox.
To most truly teach, one must converse; to truly con-
verse is to teach.
In the instructional conversation, there is a funda-
mentally different assumption from that of traditional
recitation lessons. Parents and teachers who engage in
conversation are assuming that the child may have
something to say beyond the "known answers" in the
head of the adult. They occasionally extract from the
child a "correct" answer, but to grasp the commu-
WHY DOF THE RECITATION SCRIt PERSIST?
A
S COMMON as assisted perfor-
mance is in the interactions of
parents and children, it is uncom-
mon in those of teachers and
students. Study after study has doc-
umented the absence in classrooms
of this fundamental tool for the
teaching of children.
The absence of assisted perfor-
mance in schools is all the more
remarkable because most teachers
are members of the literate middle
class, where researchers have most
often found such interactions. Why
is it that this adult-child pattern--
no doubt a product of historical,
evolutionary processes---is so sel-
dom observed in the very setting
where it would seem most appro-
priate? Such interactions can be
found in every society, in the intro-
duction of children to any task. But
this basic method of human
socialization has not generally
diffused into schools. Why?
There are two basic reasons.
First, to provide assistance in the
zone of proximal development
(ZPD~ the assistor must be in close
touch with the learner's rela-
tionship to the task. Sensitive and
accurate assistance that challenges
but does not dismay the learner
cannot be achieved in the absence
of information. Opportunities for
this knowledge, conditions in
which the teacher can be suffi-
ciently aware of the child's actual,
in-flight performing, simply are not
available in classrooms organized,
equipped, and staffed in the typical
American pattern. There are too
many children for each teacher.
And even if there is time to assess
each child's ZPD for each task,
more time is needed--time for
interaction, for conversation, for
joint activity between teachers and
Excerpted with permission from
Rousing Minds to Life.'
children. Occasionally, now and
through history, these oppor-
tunities have existed: the classical
Greek academies, Oxford and
Cambridge, the individual tutorial,
the private American school with
classes of seven or less. But all
involve a pupil-teacher ratio that
exceeds the politicians' judgment
of the taxpayers' purse. Public edu-
cation is not likely to reorganize
into classrooms of seven pupils
each.
This does not make the case
hopeless. Emerging instructional
practices do offer some hope of
increased opportunities for assisted
performance: the increased use of
small groups, maintenance of a
positive classroom atmosphere that
will increase independent task
involvement of students, new mate-
rials and technology with which
students can interact independent
of the teacher. Later in this book,
we describe one system of class-
room organization (by no means
the only one possible) that does
allow for a sharply increased rate~Pf
assisted performance by teachers
and peers.
T
HERE IS a second reason that
assisted performance has not
diffused into the schools. Briefly
stated, it is simply because teachers
have not been trained to do any-
thing but the traditional recitation
script. Even when instructional
practices allow for increased use of
assisted performance, it will not
necessarily appear as a regular fea-
ture of a teacher's activity. It may
not be practiced even by those
teachers who are from homes and
communities where, outside of
school, such interactions are com-
monplace. It will not necessarily be
forthcoming from teachers who
themselves provide assisted perfor-
mance for their own children. Even
with the benefits of modern
instructional practice, there is still
too large a gap between the condi-
tions of home and school. Most
parents do not need to be trained
to assist performance; most teach-
ers do.
By "training," we mean that
teachers cannot rely on lay skills
that are sufficient for parental
socialization of offspring. Lay or
parental skills provide a foundation,
but they are not enough. Teachers
need a more elaborate set of skills
in assistance, and they need to be
more conscious of their applica-
tion.
For pedagogical skills to be
acquired, there must be training
and development experiences that
few teachers encounter---oppor-
tunity to observe effective
examples and effective practi-
tioners of assisted performance,
and opportunities to practice nas-
cent skills, to receive video and
audio feedback, and to have the
gentle, competent "coaching" of a
skilled consultant.
If the recitation script is to be
changed to responsive teaching, we
must construct activity settings that
will assist teachers to perform the
new script--to adopt a role in
which teachers assist students in
the ZPD.
Current means of staff develop-
ment cannot provide for the
development of teaching skills
required to meet this criterion of
assisting performance in the ZPD.
The major barrier to change in
teaching practices is the absence of
activity settings in public schools
that would provide for assisted per-
formance of those acts that must be
employed in the classroom in the
presence of students. Teachers, like
their students, have ZPDs; they, too,
require assisted performance. []
24 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
Parents and teachers who engage
in conversation are assuming that
the child may have something to
say beyond the "known answers" in
the head of the adult.
nicative intent of the child requires the adult to listen
carefully, to make guesses about the meaning of the
intended communication (based on the context and on
knowledge of the child's interests and experiences~ and
to adjust their responses to assist the child's efforts---in
other words, to engage in conversation.
Teachers, of course, should not act like parents in all
ways. The large numbers of pupils, the restricted and
technical curriculum, the complexity of institutional
restraints of schooling require that teaching be highly
deliberate, carefully structured, and planned. Assisting
performance through conversation requires a quite
deliberate and self-controlled agenda in the mind of the
teacher, who has specific curricular, cognitive, and con-
ceptual goals. This requires highly developed profes-
sional competencies, of which there are many kinds:
positive and efficient classroom and behavior manage-
ment, provision of effective and varied activities,
orderly monitoring and assessment of progress.
So the skills of parenting are not enough to bring to
the task of teaching. We are not advocating the casual
"spontaneous" chat that is pleasant and appropriate in
the home. While good instructional conversations often
appear to be "spontaneous," they are not----even though
young students may never realize it. The instructional
conversation is pointed toward a learning objective by
the teachers' intention; and even the most sophisticated
learners may lose consciousness of the guiding goal as
they become absorbed in joint activity with the mentor.
In American schools, assisted performance through
instructional conversation is rare indeed. Durkin
(1978-1979) observed 18,000 minutes of reading com-
prehension instruction and found less than 1 percent
dealt with units of meaning larger than a word. But if we
take Vygotky's insights seriously, a major task of school-
ing is creating and supporting instructional con-
versation, among students, teachers, administrators,
program developers, and researchers. It is through the
instructional conversation that babies learn to speak,
children to read, teachers to teach, researchers to dis-
cover, and all to become literate. All intellectual growth
relies heavily on conversation as a form of assisted per-
formance in the zone of proximal development.
Let us watch one teacher learn to conduct instruc-
tional conversations. This example illustrates not only
the nature of such conversations but shows how teach-
ers, students, and all of us learn and develop through
assisted performance.
GRACE AND STEPHANIE: A
CASE STUDY
This is the case of two teachers working together in a
mentoring relationship. Both were working in a
research and demonstration school operated by the
Kamehameha Elementary Education Program (KEEP)
The students enrolled in the school were minority, at-
risk children, largely of Native Hawaiian origin. Grace
was a first-grade teacher in her first year. She had com-
pleted a workshop phase of training and had worked in
the classroom for a few months when the initial con-
sultation sessions began. Her assigned mentor, Steph-
anie, had worked as a teacher in the same elementary
(Continued on page 46)
SUMMER 1989 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 25
ROUSING SCHOOLS TO LIFE
(Continued from page 25)
school for three years and had completed a training
course in consultation skills. Her work with Grace was
one of her first full-fledged team projects. For each
session, Grace videotaped one of her recent reading
comprehension lessons. She controlled the VCR and
stopped the tape when she wanted to discuss an epi-
sode. She also sometimes stopped the tape to talk about
episodes at Stephanie's suggestion.
The goal of this mentoring was to assist Grace in
conducting instructional conversation by using
"responsive teaching" rather than recitation teaching.
These responsive, instructional conversation skills were
to be learned and practiced in Grace's small-group first-
grade reading lesson. At KEEP, the reading program was
focused on building children's comprehension skills,
and responsive conversational interaction with the stu-
dents was the central instructional strategy for each
teacher.
The First Goal: Getting Students Involved
with Story Comprehension
Grace had already acquired a certain level of skill in
conducting the instructional conversation. For exam-
pie, early in the first session with Stephanie, she talked of
the value of guiding discussions with the students about
the story they were reading by selecting a
theme,
which
would provide a goal toward which she could assist
student comprehension. This theme could also serve to
guide choices among alternative lines of discussion dur-
ing the lesson.
As Stephanie and Grace discussed a lesson on the folk
tale
Billy Goats Gruff,
Grace reported that she had
selected the "greediness of the troll" (who kept waiting
for a bigger goat to come by) as the central theme. In
this first consultation session, Stephanie and Grace were
watching the videotape of Grace teaching her first
lesson about the trolls and goats. For a few minutes,
Grace is able to stick to her planned "script," but when
the children begin to join the conversation with some
vigor, she completely loses the reins:
GRACE: Why, why, what was the problem with the troll?
KANANI: He wanted to eat .... He was greedy.
GRACE: Greedy. Are you greedy?
CHORUS: Noooooo!
GRACE: What happens to you if you're greedy?
LOUISE: You going to come mean and you going to
get spanking from your Mommy.
GRACE: Does the troll have a Mommy?
LOUISE: No [giggles].
SHEIDA: He's all by himself He's lonely. He can't find
an equal, with no body.
KANANI: His Mom dies. He killed his Mom.
SUMMIE: He doesn't have food.
GRACE: All right, so we know we think ... you're
thinking, that's your idea.
KANANI: He killed his Morn.
GRACE: He's that greedy and that mean? All right, we
learned something about the troll yesterday. We did find
out one thing about him. What did we find out about
him from our reading yesterday?
In this excerpt, Grace's questions are responsive, in
the literal sense, but to no clear purpose. She produces a
string of questions and answers that are linked to one
another, but they are not tied by a line of thought, and
certainly not tied to the preselected theme of "greed-
iness." As a result, they are quite similar to the classic
recitation script, and unlike a conversation. For exam-
ple, Grace asks if the troll has a mommy in response to
the child's connecting of greediness with parental
punishment. The child responds with an elaboration
that adds details not found in the text nor in the usual
versions of the myth. Grace recognizes that she has
elicited some original thought, but she does not know
what to do with it. She comments once on the child's
idea, and then changes the topic.
Why? Though a newcomer to this program, Grace
was a highly motivated and dedicated professional. She
had completed workshop training and knew the pro-
gram principles well enough to talk about them intel-
ligently. How did this aimlessness come about? More
importantly, as we shall see, how is it that Grace per-
ceived what occurred in the lesson?
Later in this first session, an answer began to emerge:
A major issue is Grace's approach to the text itself She
treats the text as consisting of the literal details pre-
sented in the primer, organized by her single theme of
greediness. Grace herself needed a deeper understand-
ing of the text. The opportunity for Stephanie to provide
some assistance arose with the following exchange on
the tape:
GRACE:
Okay.
We know that it has something to do
with...
CHORUS: The troll.
GRACE: The troll, and what belongs to the troll?
CHORUS: The bridge.
GRACE: The bridge. Okay, we know something...
SHEIDA: What belongs to the goats?
GRACE: What belongs to the goats?
TOSUFA: The grass.
GRACE: The grass belongs to the goats.
SHEIDA: Not all of it. The village has.., you got to
share the grass.
GRACE: Who has to share the grass?
CHORUS: The goats.
The tape is stopped. Stephanie recognized a positive
achievement and followed that up with a suggestion.
STEPHANIE: That seems to be a moment of [con-
versational] responsiveness, Grace ....
GRACE: [responds favorably and at length] .... I
thought it was kinda' neat when Sheida brought up what
belongs [to the characters]. I think it's neat when the
kids can start asking questions about what they're [read-
ing] and that we are trying to .... take the purpose from
them .... I thought it was a good question for her to
bring up .... I thought it was kind of neat to pick up on
what she was saying.
STEPHANIE: Yeah. It's because it could relate to some
bigger concepts in the story. In fact, [you could begin]
the investigation of the character of the troll in terms of
why is he acting this way. One reason may be that he is
plain hungry. Another reason might be that he is [being
territorial] and they are invading his place. And [there
46 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
Grace's questions are responsive,
in the literal sense, but to
no clear purpose.
are] other things that you know about animal behavior
that make them operate in certain ways ... [but] his
nature may not be exactly as they see here. There may
be other things that are making him act the way he does.
[You're] starting to touch on some items that later you
might want [to use].
GRACE: [Grace, however, does not think so. She objects
by complaining about the story. [ The story is very--it's
very shallow. All it says is: The goat comes along and is
going to eat grass. [The troll says] "No, I am going to eat
you." [The goat says[, "Don't eat me. Wait for the bigger
one who's coming behind me." [Grace continues para-
phrasing text[ .... And this is all the kids get ....
Grace's comment that the story is "very shallow" is a
key to understanding the early phases of the con-
sultation. Her initial problem in conducting the com-
prehension lesson has more to do with subject matter
knowledge than pedagogical method. She cannot carry
on an instructional conversation until her own under-
standing of the story is deeper.
Integrating Subject Matter and
Pedagogical Knowledge
Stephanie now faces a problem. Grace must be
brought to a higher content-skill level--for example, to
be able to perceive more than one theme in a story and
SUMMER 1989
to relate them structurally. In addition, Grace also needs
more skill development in pedagogy. However, content
knowledge and pedagogical knowledge do not separate
as simply as it seems. Grace must also learn to encour-
age and elicit theme identification in students---a hybrid
of pedagogy and content. Stephanie must assist Grace to
develop this hybrid skill; but Stephanie makes the (cor-
rect) training decision to address first the content
knowledge: She assists Grace through a theme-and-
structure analysis of Billy Goats Gruff After that basic
skill is acquired, she will be in position to address
Grace's need to shift from the role of analyzer-of-
themes to the role of assistor.of-children-who-ana-
lyze- themes.
Now their discussion began to sound more like a
seminar on children's literature than a consultation on
conversational technique. This is appropriate, because
Grace will not be able to assist the children until she can
recognize in the story multiple opportunities to link
schemata, concepts, and text details; only after that
point can knowledge of questioning technique be
joined effectively to subject matter knowledge.
Stephanie persisted. Through an instructional con-
versation between herself and Grace (a series of ques-
tions and comments about character interpretation)~
she assisted Grace to reach the appreciation of the troll
and goats' commonalties; that both are hungry as well as
territorial; that, in fact, the troll's behavior may be com-
plexly motivated.
Stephanie's immediate goal [she reported later] was to
assist Grace toward the idea that there is more to these
texts than what is literally presented. She focused on the
case at hand and discussed the parallels between the
character and circumstances of the troll and of people
---especially those in the world of the students. She
wanted to assist Grace to consider more than a single
preselected theme. A single theme places a severe limit
on how conversationally responsive a teacher can be to
the ideas and interpretations that a topic or text elicits
from children. If the teacher insists on being guided
solely by preselected goals, a lesson will inevitably take
on more of the quality of a recitation than a responsive
conversation. Directing them to an interpretation pro-
vided by the teacher can have merit, but the ultimate
goal is to teach students to construct an understanding
without assistance:
It's important to distinguish between help that
somehow gets a child to produce the right answer
and help from which the child might learn how to
answer similar questions in the future [without
the assistance of a more capable other] .... II~ for
example, when a child cannot read the word bus
on a word card, the teacher prompts the answer
with the question, "What do you ride to school
on?" The child may answer correctly... [and] say
"bus." But that is not a prompt the child could give
to herself the next time, because the prompt
depends on the very knowledge of the word that it
is supposed to cue. (Cazden, 1981, p.5.)
Grace and Stephanie's first consultation session ended
with an agreement to tape the next day's lesson and to
meet again. In concluding, Stephanie reminded Grace
to reflect on many possible story themes and interpreta-
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
47
tions so she would be better able to respond to child
contributions. By the end of the session, Grace had
become enthusiastic about having alternative themes in
mind. This joint understanding, created by building and
refining joint concepts, moved both toward mutual
trust. Such movement is the hallmark of collaboration
that arises in assisted performance and reveals that the
conversations of Grace and Stephanie were themselves
instructional conversations within Grace's zone of prox-
imal development.
But even with alternative themes at the ready, chil-
dren's comments cannot always be quickly understood
and related to the text. The integration of student ideas
and experience with the text is a fundamental cognitive
goal of teaching comprehension; the importance of this
goal is matched by its difficulty of achievement!
These difficulties were well illustrated in the second
consultation session, which occurred the following day.
When they began to examine the new videotape made
for the second day of consultation, it was clear that
Grace's questions were not being guided by a theme--
neither her own, nor ones gleaned from the many inter-
esting interpretations offered by the students. For exam-
ple, a child connected trolls to dinosaurs, but Grace lets
another child change the subject to trolls and dragons
without making use of the dinosaur connection. And
then a child offered a correction, that there are no
dragons in the story, and introduces the idea of the troll
"stepping in tar." Later, this same child implies she has
seen tar pits with remains of dinosaurs, another idea not
pursued. Grace was unable to select any of these pos-
sibilities for focus, and the conversation drifts and
bounces from one idea to another.
Grace has not yet shifted from the role of analyzer-of-
themes to the role of assistor-of-children-who-analyze-
themes. The problems in this sequence are recognized
as clearly by Grace as by her mentor:
GRACE:
Oh my God. What am I going to do with all this
information?... I did not expect to get myself in this
direction. I'm really amazed with what these kids give
me. I didn't expect that much .... I think that's my one
problem .... I'm not experienced enough to make the
most out of the situation while I'm in it right then. [I get
a lot out of just watching my tapes along with you ] but I
really need your feedback. Because there's tons I would
have missed, really, without you .... I feel more com-
fortable.., with the stories .... and I think I'm giving
those kids more, because each time I read the story I see
a little bit more. Maybe I'm reading it slower and slower
as I go down the line with these kids or maybe I'm taking
more time to bringing, figuring things out. But I can see
that I go right over a whole lot of stuff
This second consultation session was a pivotal one. It
is one in which Grace achieved greater mutual under-
standing with her consultant. She moved toward a new
set of standards by which to judge her own teaching.
She discovered how important it is to be attentive to
text and student utterances, and to observe, accurately
and
conscientiously, not only the text but her own
behavior.
In the following month, Grace virtually solved the
"multiple theme and structure" problem, with little or
no further assistance from Stephanie. As Grace moved
Grace has learned that
announcing to children the
meaning of a word, concept, idea,
or theme does not mean
they have learned it.
further through the zone of proximal development,
however, a new aspect of teaching skill came to the fore:
that of eliciting ideas from students and engaging in
responsive conversational turns that assist child perfor-
mance.
Advancing through the Zone
of Proximal
Development
As this next session begins, Grace and Stephanie are
watching a tape of Grace and her students reading a
story about characters who can't stop eating cookies.
GRACE:...
in the beginning of the story there is not a
whole lot until they come across this thing called "will
power." That's where the big deal is because the kids
don't know what will power is. We spent a lot of time
talking about it. I had anticipated it, but I didn't want to
bring it up in the beginning of the story.
Building on what she had learned in the earlier ses-
sions with Stephanie, it seems clear that Grace had
studied the story and correctly identified the concept of
"will power" as a crucial theme. Grace reported that she
had
learned much about eliciting from kids and that she
had applied her new understanding to the taped lesson
they were now reviewing.
According to Grace, it was a visit to Janet's class
(another teacher in the school) that helped her antici-
pate the importance of"will power" in the story. Janet, a
48 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
third-grade teacher, was widely acknowledged as a mas-
ter of eliciting students' own experiences and concepts
they could bring to bear in comprehending new text. In
Janet's lesson on civic government, she began by having
the students read a portion of the textbook. (She did not
begin by announcing and explaining the new concepts,
as one might well do with older students.) Then she
elicited, in conversation, the children's understanding
of the text and their relevant personal experiences.
After this visit, "elicitation" became a key idea in
Grace and Stephanie's project: "eliciting" from students
rather than "telling" them. This new concept and the
visit to Janet's classroom taught Grace that there are
alternatives to bringing up such concepts as "will
power" too early because the teacher ends up "telling"
the students about the concept, which may not help
them comprehend at all. Stephanie urges Grace to
emphasize "elicitation" even more than Janet did,
because Grace's students are even younger and because
they are reading fiction, where the crucial issues and
emotions are likely to be found in the students' experi-
ences. (While there are many ways of assisting students
to acquire concepts, such as demonstrations, arranging
joint experiences such as field trips, and assigning auxili-
ary text material, Stephanie concentrates on the issue of
elicitation because she sees it as a route for Grace to
adopt more responsive instructional dialogue.)
GRACE: When we went to visit Janet, I saw that she
could have mentioned "housing project" at the begin-
ning but instead she waited until the children read it and
then she chose to talk about it at that time .... [Before
the visit] I would have been inclined to [start today's
lesson by asking], "Who knows what will power is?"
right at the beginning. And I would have thought, "Oh,
yes, I'm laying the groundwork [for the theme]," but
really it would be too far fetched, I think, at the very
beginning of the story .... (smiles) "Have you ever
heard of will power?" [Instead, today I was] planting
these little (seeds): "Who decides how many cookies
you eat?
DoesMom
say, "You can eat only 3?' or
doyou
tell yourself,
'I better not eat more than 3 because I
didn't eat my dinner yet.'"
STEPHANIE: Were you trying to elicit...
GRACE:... from them. You know, just laying it out and
then have them tell me what they would do. And most of
them said that
Mom
would say [how many cookies to
eat[.
Implied in Grace's comments is the assumption that
this line of discussion will eventually lead to the ques-
tion of "telling yourself" to eat only three cookies,
which is just a short step from an understanding of"will
power." This represents a major shift in Grace's thinking.
Previously, Grace expressed some doubts about the
value of eliciting from the children rather than "telling"
them. Her impulse to "tell them things" arose from an
accurate recognition that they often did not know cer-
tain facts or definitions that would be crucial for under-
standing a story. Her doubts in the earlier session were
expressed in terms of the problem of reconciling elicita-
tion (from students) and working with a preselected
lesson objective.
In this session, she is beginning to appreciate that
elicitation of child utterances actually assists the devel-
SUMMER 1989
opment of comprehension and that the goal is to assist
students to engage in such cognitive activity rather than
"feed" them the lines. As a result of observing Janet,
Grace seems to see the value of patiently building com-
prehension on a foundation composed of the text itsell~
students' initial responses to discussion, and their own
experiences. Grace appreciates that the new under-
standings will emerge from collaborative text analysis,
through the instructional conversation. Grace's under-
standing is developing rapidly, and it looks as though the
need for Stephanie's assistance is diminishing.
Grace has learned an important distinction. She has
learned that announcing to children the meaning of a
word, concept, idea, or theme does not mean they have
learned it or can then use it to comprehend what they
read. A startling parallel between Grace's learning and
the children's learning also reveals itself: Grace has
grasped the concept of conversational elicitation, but
she cannot yet control it as a tool of teaching, just as the
children can discuss the concept of "will power" but
cannot yet use it as a tool to analyze new text:
GRACE: Okay, Do frog and toad have a problem?
CHORUS: Yeah.
GRACE: What's their problem?
SUMMIE: They can't stop eating cookies ....
GRACE: They can't stop eating cookies. And what is one
of the solutions they gave for their problem?
ISSAC: Will power.
GRACE: Will power. Will power is one solution. Have
you any idea what will power is?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: Superman.
GRACE: Okay. What do you mean Superman? What kind
of power?
ISSAC: Exercise!
GRACE: Exercise would be will power? Okay. If you
have... Okay, let me use it in a sentence. If you have will
power and know that exercise helps you to lose weight,
you have will power if you exercise every day. If Mom
says you can have one scoop of ice cream when you
come home and you really want three, if you eat only
one, you have will power. Does that give you an idea of
what will power is?
At this point, Grace stopped the videotape (and said,
sharply):
GRACE: No! ... it was like blank stares [on faces of
children]. It just went [over their heads]. I thought I had
brought it down to the point that they could under-
stand, but they still couldn't get it... I was hoping that
since I had given them several examples, they should be
able to tell me because then I would think that they
know.
STEPHANIE: It seems that you really didn't get enough
of their experiences. [You were] heavy on teacher-talk
all the way to the end. At the end of the teacher-talk,
you've got dead-pan silence, which says that it's got to
come from them. So, you've got to turn it around into
elicitation ....
GRACE: I thought: "These kids don't know anything
about it [will power]. If these kids don't know anything
about it, you've got to teach them about it."
STEPHANIE: Well, that's true in the case of what Janet
did with the city government lesson we observed. But
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
49
how did she do that? What did she say? She elicited
everything from them .... They may not be able to
label [their experiences]. But you (should) expect them
to talk about experience that they have had, so that the
experience is out on the table.
GRACE:... but what I feel is that if the kids don't have
any experience with [the topic or concept], then you
have to supply it.
STEPHANIE: Or somehow find out what experience is
[for them]. [In some cases, you may have to provide
content background, like Janet did with texts]. But in
the case of the stories at [your grade level], it's human
experience. So you fish and fish and fish until you come
up with whatever experience it is that they have that is
going to relate to what's going to happen in the story.
Grace is still using too much "teacher-talk." Grace's
growing sophistication is revealed in her developing
skills of self-observation and analysis; she can now "see"
more clearly what she is doing, and what needs repair.
But she cannot yet observe and repair "in flight." Until
she saw the tape, Grace did not know that this lesson
failed to match her advancing standards--standards that
were internalized from earlier interactions with Step°
hanie and Janet. A growing ability to self-analyze does
not produce an instant change in the ability to conduct
lessons, just as knowing a "definition" does not lead to
changed behavior. As the exchange above reveals, know-
ing the meaning and accepting the value of elicitation
does not translate into its effective application.
Actually, Grace is at an advanced point in her zone of
proximal development. She has mastered much, but
there are still elements that must be assisted. This is an
extremely frustrating point for the learning of any com-
petence: the acceptance of higher standards, the dis-
crimination required to identify good performance, the
awareness that one's skill is not yet there, and the felt
need for help from a more competent other. Grace's
discomfort is entirely human.
STEPHANIE: How about this. [I think you've got to go;
the kids are coming back]. How about if you film your
Blue Group lesson tomorrow....
GRACE: No. I don't want to film anymore .... I won't.
Maybe I'll [audio] tape it. I don't want to film it.
STEPHANIE: Because of the .... is it easier to
audiotape?
GRACE: No. I just don't want to go through this tomor-
row.
STEPtlANIE: ]recounts her own complex schedule of
the week; but offers to tape the lesson and make the
meeting] .... if you were really, really ....
GRACE:
No.
STEPHANIE: ... hot to do it ....
GRACE:
No.
STEPHANIE: .... I could [delay some work I have] . . .
GRACE: Yeah, maybe I should, Steph .... but I felt, you
know, I felt really good about my lesson this morning.
When I came to school today, I thought "Well, Grace
[today you finally start to do responsive teaching right]"
.... I felt, last night I felt, "Oh good, you've got it."
Because some days I walk in and go, "God, what am I
going to do?" I was feeling really good about this today.
[Stephanie is offering supportive comments] .... Actu-
ally, I should audio. Audio would be easier for me to do
because then I could listen to it at home. Because you
know, I don't .... I think I'll audio it. It would be easier
all around.
Despite her frustration and disappointment, Grace
agrees to audiotape her lesson and to meet again. She is
at the point in the zone of proximal development that is
most stressful but that heralds the coming of a new level
of competence.
Grace Breaks Through
The next session occurred about one week later.
Stephanie begins by asking Grace about her goals for the
lesson. Again, Grace has returned to the problem of too
much teacher-talk and her responsiveness to what the
students have to say.
GRACE: I'm focusing on not talking so much .... My
goals for today were to cut back on teacher-talk and to
think about my questions for them. I am focusing on the
same goals.
Each teacher utterance at the beginning of this lesson
was a question. Grace was talking less and doing a better
job of eliciting ideas from the students, rather than
"announcing" to them as in the prior lessons. As the tape
rolls, it is obvious that an important change has
occurred in Grace's conduct of the lessons. A highlight
of the entire series of consultations is about to occur.
GRACE: Okay, what did Cucullan say when he came
over to Fin McCool's home?
SUMMIE AND LOUISE: Is Fin McCool at home?
GRACE: Ammm.
KANANI: She said, "No, Fin McCool is not home."
ISSAC: He went out to look for a giant named
Cucullan.
GRACE: Ahum.
SUMMIE: His wife said Fin McCool is stronger, but he
said, "I'll show you who's strong."
GRACE: Okay. What could he do to show his strength?
KANANI: Lif' up the house.
GRACE: Allright. How is he going to do this?
ISSAC: Use his magic finger.
GRACE: Aha. Using that.., okay. What else could he do
to show his strength?
ISSAC: By sweating.
GRACE: You show your strength by sweating? How do
you show your strength by sweating?
TOSUFA: You go like this [child flexes her muscles].
GRACE: Okay. What do you call it when you do that?
LOUISE: Show his muscles.
GRACE: Yes. Show his muscles. But does that show how
strong you are?
ISSAC: Soft muscles.
GRACE: That you have soft or hard muscles? What
could he do to show his strength?
KANANI: Lift up a tree.
GRACE: Lift up a tree. Sure. what else?
SUMMIE: Lift up somebody's house.
GRACE: Allright. Turn to the next two pages .....
[students turn page]
SUMMIE: Wow. He lift up the house.
(TAPE STOPPED)
50 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
Principals treat teachers according
to their own "recitation script"--
assignments are given and
assessments are made.
away from "announcing" information to them. Grace
reports that Claire [another consultant of high repute]
came by the day before and complimented her on the
quality of her teaching, to which Grace replied, "I have
been working on this".... I said, "We went to see Janet
[the teacher who provided a model of elicitation], and
I've had a lot of help from Janet." I said we had been
working on this and I was glad that she noticed it. I
thought, "Oh great!" Stephanie is delighted with Grace's
progress, and gives her a long compliment that serves as
a summary of progress to date.*
STEPHANIE: I just can't help but applaud, because that
is such a good series of questions.
GRACE: Bite my tongue! Did you see that? I almost felt
like I was just really biting my tongue. "Don't say any-
thing else, Grace. Don't you dare say anything else."... I
was really concentrating on listening to them, I almost
practically bit my tongue. I was, hmmm, I mean, that's
about as... shut down as [a teacher] can be .... I really
wanted,to listen to what they had to say and, it was, it's
true. i j~hst. ! . didn't say anything and they kept feeding
me more and more. And I thought, this is kinda' neat that
they kept doing all this!
STEPHANIE: That was really apparent. That was real
good. Not a single wasted utterance on your part ....
GRACE: Finally!
The frustration and disappointment of the preceding
session is now gone, and in its place is Grace's deserved
satisfaction with what she sees on the tape. The
dialogues with the students are smooth and con-
versatibnal. There are no more abrupt changes of topic.
Aimless questions have been replaced by questions that
genuinely assist the children to assemble the thoughts
needed to comprehend the story.... There is no "tell-
ing" the students about the text; at various points in the
lesson, Grace begins declarative statements and then
changes them into questions. Does she remember Step-
hanie's instructions from a previous session?
Toward the end of the session, Grace expressed satis-
faction about the amount of information she had elicited
from the students through questions and her movement
WHAT'S NEXT
The case of Grace and Stephanie reveals many of the
key concepts of a new definition of teaching. When such
teaching occurs, classrooms and schools are trans-
formed. Stephanie herself wrote, after many years of
assisting teachers, about "the community of learners"
that schools can become "when teachers reduce the
distance between themselves and their students by con-
structing lessons from common understandings of each
others' experience and ideas" and make teaching a
"warm, interpersonal, and collaborative activity"
(Dalton, 1989) But our case study not only illustrates
what teaching must be for school children, it reveals
what teaching must be for all--whether it is preservice
and inservice teachers, administrators and supervisors,
or college professors.
Yet the recitation script persists in schools because it
is endemic to schools. Principals treat teachers accord-
ing to their own "recitation script"--assignments are
given and assessments are made. Superintendents assign
and assess principals. Boards assign and assess superin-
tendents. Professors of education assign and assess pre-
service teachers. No one is really teaching anyone, not
through the authentic teaching of the instructional con-
versation. Is it any wonder that teachers assign and
assess pupils?
In 1972, Sarason made a similar point as well as
anyone has before or since, and the situation has
changed not one whit:
.... I have spent thousands of hours in schools,
and one of the first things I sensed was that the
longer the person had been a teacher the less
excited, or alive, or stimulated he seemed to be
about his role .... being a teacher was on the
boring side. Generally speaking, these teachers
were not as helpful to children as they might have
been or as frequently as the teachers themselves
would have liked to have been .... Schools are not
created to foster the intellectual and professional
growth of teachers. The assumption that teachers
can create and maintain those conditions that
make school learning and school living stimulating
for children, without those same conditions exist-
ing for teachers, has no warrant in the history of
man. (But this assumption) gives rise to ways of
thinking, to a view of technology, to ways of
* Stephanie Dalton is now coordinator of an experimental preservice
teacher education program at the University of Hawaii. Grace Omura is
now a KEEP consultant and trainer for teachers in Hawaii's public schools.
SUMMER 1989 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
51
training, and to modes of
organization that make for one
grand error of misplaced
emphasis .... " (pp. 123o124)
In any school organization, one of
the duties of each member should be
to assist the performance of the per-
son in the next subordinate position:
The superintendent assists the prin-
cipal, the principal assists the
teacher, the teacher assists the pupil.
The central responsibility of the
teaching organization should be to
assist the performance of each mem-
ber. This assistance, with its accom-
panying cognitive and behavioral
development, is the justifying goal of
the school, and all other duties
should be in its service.
What this definition of teaching
implies, and the case of Stephanie
and Grace shows so clearly, is the
need for schools to be different kinds
of places. Schools must be organized
to provide time and resources to
assist teacher performance, so that
they may acquire skills and knowl-
edge needed to truly teach. What
Grace and Stephanie did is not possi-
ble in a system that fully scripts
teaching practice or fully scripts
teachers' roles. Teachers must have
sufficient autonomy, authority, and
warrant from the school system to
organize the kind of assisted perfor-
mances that Grace experienced.
Stephanie and Grace had the
authority and support to organize
their own contacts, to spend the
time necessary to do their work, to
enlist the assistance of Janet. They
had the resources from the school of
equipment, space, encouragement,
and--most important---of treating
their undertaking as something of
vital importance. This was a school
system organized to assist the perfor-
mance of all its members.
But we must not overlook another
aspect of Grace's experience: Teach-
ers must accept a degree of respon-
sibility for professional development
involving long and sometimes pain-
ful self-examination. They must
accept a higher criterion of what
constitutes teaching.
Will the school reform movement
of the 1980s, set in motion by A
Nation at Risk, provide for true
teaching in the classroom and pro-
fessional development programs? It
is too soon to judge, but we can pre-
dict that reform will depend on
changing the idea of school. The
idea of the reciting school that has
been passed down by our grand-
mothers, and lives in the memories
of each of our elementary school
days, is no fair vision to guide us. The
reciting school did not teach well a
century ago and will not teach well
tomorrow. How can we escape the
control of our common image of
what school is? There is only one
way. Teachers must do it. In class-
rooms here and there, in a whole
school here and there, even for an
hour here and there, we must each
work to change school culture so
that it more reliably assists the per-
formance of all, beginning with the
teachers. []
REFERENCES
Bennett, W.J. (1986). First lessons: A
Report on Elementary Education in
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Cazden, C.B. (1981). Performance
before Competence: Assistance to Child
Discourse in the Zone of Proximal
Development. The Quarterly Newslet-
ter of the Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition, 3(1), 5-8.
Dalton, S. (1989) Teachers as Assessors
and Assistors: Institutional Constraints
on Interpersonal Relationships. Paper
delivered at the meetings of the Amer-
ican Educational Research Association,
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Durkin, D. (1978-1979). What Class-
room Observations Reveal about Read-
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Goodlad, J. (1984). A Place Called
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Hoetker, J., & Ahlbrand, W. (1969) The
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52 AMERICAN EDUCATOR SUMMER 1989
