Module 14 Discussion: What Has Changed?

The observation  that when “teachers structured assignments so students could clearly understand what was expected of them, students collaborated with their peers and teachers within a structure that stimulated discovery and mastery of complex skills” reminds me a lot of the scaffolding techniques illustrated in a previous model, and the Austin’s Butterfly video.

Something different I noticed about high quality language instruction in the 1995 example is that, in the traditional teaching model "students struggle to understand concepts in isolation, to learn parts without seeing wholes, to make connections where they see only disparity, and to accept as reality what their perceptions question." I actually disagree, and I think that an important part of the teacher’s job is to make connections across disciplines and draw conceptual themes for students to build on, because it is a high-level task that many students do not come upon independently.