Chapter Three: Situating the Instructional literature Chapter Overview and Description

This chapter briefly provides some of the sources for most of the ideas presented in the book Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Integration. Throughout this book, the ideas we integrate are the ideas of others. Just as an artist does not 'own' the colour 'red', no one owns the skill of 'wait time' or the tactics and strategies that are part of 'cooperative learning.' Those options belong to all of us to explore. Our responsibility is to respect the efforts of those who worked so thoughtfully to construct them and to investigate them. We do not have the right to unthinkingly domesticate them and employ them in ways that do not make a difference for students.

We strongly encourage you to take the time to more specifically 'learn' and practice each of these processes. Go to the source whenever possible. For example, the authors spent months and years inquiring into the strategies in Joyce, Weil, and Showers book Models of Teaching. We each had 10 days of training (five days one year and five the next) on each of Concept Attainment, Inductive Thinking, and Group Investigation. In addition, we have researched these models, and employed them hundreds of times in our classrooms. The book Models of Teaching is crucial if you are to take the strategies of Concept Attainment and Inductive Thinking more deeply. In addition, for several summers we intensely worked at understanding Madeline Hunter's work at Seattle Pacific University. We have attended over 40 days of training in Cooperative Learning and we have written a book on Cooperative Learning. One of the authors did a masters degree related to the educational implications of humour, enthusiasm and the human brain and teaches a graduate research seminar on the implication of brain research on classroom practice. This has been a journey over time … learn one piece deeply, then integrate it with others. Construct. Weave. Integrate. Create.

This chapter is presented in seven sections. Each section will have a brief explanation of the instructional process (a review) followed by a description of the literature that contains more specific and detailed information. The chapter ends with a summary chart that reports what the research is saying. Last, we make a comment/challenge related to the current research around the effects of integrating instructional processes on student learning.

1. Experts have in-depth knowledge of their field of study as well as related fields of study. In which fields are you knowledgeable? How do you connect them?
2. As teachers, we are asked and expected to make a difference in student learning. As an educator, what instructional strategies, tactics, and skills etc., do you employ that you know (beyond intuition) make a difference in student learning?

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