Jenifer Fox in Independent School magazine

There are certain things that educators know, and that is why parents and society entrust them to educate children. One of those things is how children best learn.With rapid advances in technology, there have been rapid and paradigm-shifting streams of new information about how children learn and this creates a big challenge for classroom teachers and schools as they strive to know best how children learn. The rub: how to keep up with the most recent and most helpful information. One of the universal classroom tensions that this situation has created is this, as Jenifer Fox illustrates it:

"Tutoring vs. a Developmental Approach to Learning
If, as educators, we understand how children learn, we know that conceptual structures are formed in sequences and these sequences must be achieved through scaffolding of simple understandings to more complex ones. A variety of factors affect these essential linkages and, if one link is weak, each newly added concept becomes confusing to a child...Many teachers and parents believe that one-on-one tutoring works because kids perform better when the focus is only on one child. Or they believe that a child doesn't understand because the child takes longer to learn and, if the tutor can simply take more time with the student, he or she will grasp the concepts. Both assumptions may be true, but the problem is that, most often, tutoring is practiced as if they are always true. When there is a developmental weakness in a child's conceptual understanding, tutoring will not work unless the tutor understands both where the weakness in the scaffolding occurs, and how to ameliorate understanding. Unless tutoring takes a developmental approach, students will not understand the problems simply because the tutor is working one-on-one or taking more time. "

Learning - whose problem is it? This is one of the most crucial debates infusing education circles across the country right now in both the public and private school arenas: Are teachers responsible for teaching or for student learning, or both?

I am not suggesting that Jenifer Fox and The Strengths Movement is the answer, but without a doubt, Fox is weighing in on the paradigm shift and is one of the leading voices in the conversation.

What do you think?

Read full article:
Questioning The Tutoring Paradigm by Jenifer Fox, Independent School Summer 2008