The Bruner Teacher

With this statement, Jerome Bruner announced his vision for what teachers must do. His major contribution was a general framework for instruction based on cognitive psychology. Through the context of mathematics and social science programs, he illustrated how to meet these lofty ideals.

The timing was right for a new boost in education. The mantra "Educate Thinkers" swept through education environs and learner-centered teaching strategies mushroomed. Copying notes and lecturing, once normal activities in the classroom, made room for new teaching strategies in the teacher's daily schedule.

Some new teaching strategies and their effects

The once quiet classroom, now, is awaken to bustling activities of learners collecting, organizing, and manipulating data. Occasionally an outburst breaks the normal classroom sounds when a student is rewarded the illusive idea after a leap of intuition. - Thinking Inductively.

The faces of learners flash a Eureka smile when they attained concepts - the Basic Skill of Thinking.

Emotional and sometimes aggressive expressions flow during classroom discussions from the methods of Jurisprudential Inquiry - learning to think about social policy.

Students experienced the austerity of the scientific method through the Biological Science Inquiry Model - approaches that built on the researcher's tools.

Social practices, attitudes studies, and self improvement methods emerged in classroom discussions in order to understand others as well as self through Role-Playing and Learning from Feedback - studying social behavior and learning to modify behavior respectively. The list continues on and on to Training the Student to Learn.

This partial list of some of the popular strategies is familiar to the accomplished teacher. It holds some of the fruits of the Bruner mission statement. It is a vehicle through which a teacher engages students to experience the process of knowing. It is the way a teacher evolves from a tutor a dispensing knowledge to a tutoring/advising/counseling builder of people, a Bruner teacher.

Bruce Joyce / Marsha Weil, The Models of Teaching , Third Edition, Allyn and Bacon, Boston,