Supplantive-Generative Scale........ Huh?

S-G Scale

 

When thinking about the Action Research Project I have going, and when and how I am going to instruct my students, it is hard not to become completely overwhelmed with the idealistic vision of creating deeply immerged students who will become fully drawn in to the curriculum based on the excitement of using new tools to explore the material from different angles.  I often get this intense excitement about the prospects of guiding my students and changing their lives, but excitement alone will not bring them to where I would like them to be.  Looking at the two different types of instruction presented by Cronje and taking an investigated look at what outcome I am expecting from my students, I will better come to the end result of successful and meaningful educational decisions.

The desired outcome from my ARP is an increased success rate in completion and organization of independent at-home assignments from 9^th grade students.  So there will be times when I will need to design my instruction with both supplanted instructional content and student-generated content in mind.  For example when it comes to teaching my students the particular steps for using each of the chosen LMS tools and web 2.0 tools that they will use to organize themselves, access and submit work, and to later create presentations with, I will need to supplant instruction looking for a very particular outcome and assessing acquisition of information and understanding of particular factual information or steps.  Cronje cites in his paper “objectivists tend to concentrate on direct instruction while constructivists focus on learning (Brooks, 1990). “ but then further explains that an integration of the two (objectivism and constructivism) may be better understood by considering that ”learning depends on intensive use of elements from both sides of the continuum, and not from the extent to which one has been successful in claiming occupation of some gray and neutral middle ground” (Cronje, 2006).  

This will apply to my instruction and my ARP in that there will be times to use more direct instruction styles and to look for more narrow and specific outcomes, and there will be times when I will look for more  broad, perhaps creative deeper level outcomes and a different more constructive instruction strategy will be employed.  I will need to analyze the particular desired outcomes and implement instruction strategies accordingly.  


And they say "teaching is easy, we only work 9 months a year"! Ha!

Brooks, J. G. (1990, Feb.). Teachers and students: Constructivists forging new

connections. Educational Leadership, 68-71.

Cronje, J.C. (2006,August). Paradigms regained: Toward integrating objectivism

and constructivism in instructional design and the learning sciences. ETR&D,54(4),387-416.