Impact concerns can be described as the most desirable characteristics

for a teacher to possess because they demonstrate teachers’ understanding

that they are forever “students of teaching.” Francis Fuller conducted an

investigation on teacher’s concerns about teaching and proposed that they

can be characterized into three different phases: self, task, and impact.

“Concerns related to self deal primarily with feeling of adequacy and

competence, and focus on questions such as “How am I doing? Will my

students like me”. Fuller refers to this phase as the “survival” stage of

development. Task concerns prompt questions that will inform and determine

curriculum and lesson plans. Impact concerns represent the shift of focus

from teacher concerns, apprehensions, and introspection to a focus

specifically on student learning and development. This phase would consists

of strategies to inspire and motivate, speak to the individual, recognize

individual differences in students, and what would be the most effective

course of action to help students achieve and accomplish academic success.

The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium is a group

of state educational agencies and national educational organizations whose

existence (outside of teacher licensing, and approving program) is

predicated on the single premise that a “teacher must be able to integrate

content knowledge with the strengths and needs of students to assure that

tall students learn and perform at high levels.” The INTASC Principles are

specifically designed to promote the necessary understandings, abilities, and

knowledge aspiring teachers must have or acquire to effective educators to

the new and future generations of young learners.

Wiggins’ philosophy stems from the idea that “people make decisions and

act based on their conceptual understanding of their life experiences. She

breaks down these understandings in what she describes as constructivists

visions of the mind that will increase and improve the efficacy of both

learning and teaching. Schemas are mental structures or constructs that

inform our understandings from our own life experiences. A schema acts as a

network that connects one’s memories, relationships, and life experiences: it

“consists of everything we know and understand about it—or the concepts

we hold about it”. Schemas reveal the process in which individuals arrive at

particular presumptions and why they conceive things they way the do.

Schemas are abstract, complicated, and personal. Metaphors on the hand

are quite specific. Wiggins proposes that we use metaphors to understand

concrete, more complex concepts in natural kinds of experiences that are

products of our perceptions of and relations to our bodies; our interactions

with our physical environment; and our interactions with people within our

culture. Metaphorical concepts enable us to structure one experience in

terms of another. Multidimensional gestalts are structured wholes that we

come to know through exploring the various dimensions that stop or emerge

naturally from our own personal experiences. Wiggins clarifies these

concepts by stating that “learning is more likely to take place when learners

have a context for understanding new ideas, Because we learn ideas best
when we can set them into a context with which we are already familiar and

which we already understand…The closer the relationship between new

information and something we already know, the easier it is for us to

understand”.

Ayers clearly adopts the pedagogical philosophy of John Dewey who

believes that educational experiences should be “democratic in structure—

including teaching-learning relationships that are communal and self-

governing in their organization; and built on ‘continuity and interaction’ or

active engagement”. He believes that teaching that is exploratory in its

nature of learning or interest-based within a subject of matter is most

effective in creating knowledge and providing opportunities for future

growth. Schwab believed that investigation or inquiry into any given

education situation or field could be understood in what he referred to as

“four commonplaces”: learners, teachers, subject matter, and milieu. Based

on the comic, I think Ayers would be most interested in the learners. In

reality, I think Bill Ayers (who was co-founder of the terrorist organization the

Weather Underground, which had bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a

Judge’s home and is responsibility for the death of Americans) was much

more concerned and interested in using democracy against itself to

overthrow capitalism and replace it with his beautiful delusional communist

utopia. I guarantee if a teacher at Crane committed the same crimes as

Ayers in protest of Obama starting wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, his or
her philosophies would not be taught to aspiring teachers to bequeath to

their “ship”of students. Frankly, it makes me sick. It’s absolutely repulsive;

it’s immoral.

To provide some context, Wiggins says “that learning is a

socioculturally embedded process of the individual through which learners

construct their own understanding of experience is generally characterized

as a social constructivist vision of learning.” This is to say that all human

learning takes place in a social context in which we construct our

understandings of our life experiences through interaction with others.

Considering I was sick and missed all but one of the student’s lessons, it is

unfair for me to make a general characterization about how all my

colleagues provided scaffolding and demonstrated their understanding of the

importance of remaining in the zone of proximal development. So all I can do

is definite the terms and describe the two examples I have attested to: my

own, and one other student. The student’s lesson was to teach us how to

perform a trick on a finger skateboard. Though he had developed a thorough

lesson plan, the measure of proficiency between him and the rest of us was

too great. This of course is taking into consideration that our lesson was to

be taught, learned, and performed by the group in a ten minute time frame.

But because he was so far outside the zone of proximal development, any

kind of scaffolding proved to be futile. It was simply oo arduous of a task. It

would be analogous to offering the best possible scaffolding to a student

playing through a Chopin etude who has never played piano before. I think I

did a good job choosing a task in choosing a lesson that would be engaging

and could be taught to any individual in a ten minute time frame because I

was in the zone of proximal development with my student. I think I was over

zealous in how I scaffolded the lesson and was a little too controlling and

should’ve asked better questions to help guide the student through the

lesson that would’ve enhanced his understanding in a quicker way. Instead, I

kind of rushed through because I was worried about the time based on the

last lesson and didn’t prepare the way I should have. It was certainly a good

learning experience for me. However, my student could perform the trick

perfectly on his own without any input from me, so that was one positive I

could take away from it. For definitions sake. The zone of proximal

development is the measure of proficiency between student and teacher

where the teacher’s help or guidance is still beneficial and useful to the

progression or growth of the student, where as scaffolding describes the

actions the teacher takes to help the student get through a particular task.

And to emphasize where I went wrong, Bruner tells us that effective teaching

includes that providing scaffolding where it is needed and stepping back

when its not.

Allsup and Baxter’s focus is on a type of Socratic style dialogue that

creates a setting for investigative and imaginative inquiry on music. They

say “When teachers ask thought-provoking questions about music, students

can build language and thinking skills to help them talk about the music they

encounter throughout their lives”. They want teachers to ask questions that

lead students to greater depths of understanding. It is reminiscent of

Wiggins’ concept of scaffolding. There are three types of questioning: open,

guided, and closed. The purpose of an open question is to gather musical

information. The answers provided by students apprise us of what they

know, what they recognize, and what they here. Guided questions serve to

aid students in discovering and uncovering new information. Closed

questions produce single answers. They, unlike guided and open questions,

are black and white. Questions like these will fill in missing pieces and give

students and more complete grasp of the musical work or whatever else they

might be examining. Sometimes it is important to provide students with the

vocabulary they might not have in their arsenal so they can articulate what

they are thinking and further the dialogue. Allsup and Baxter say “learning

by discovery can create flashes of insight and illumination….dialogue

requires us to genuinely listen to our students…By equipping students with

no only the vocabulary to defend their preferences, but also the thinking and

listening skills to make aural distinctions between an array of musical styles

and genres, we are providing a service that can benefit students long after

they leave our classrooms.” And I think that is the goal of every teacher: to

equip students with everything we can possibly provide them so they can be

(musically) autonomous.