Chapter 4: Designing Instruction to Improve Teaching and Learning

This chapter is talking about improving teaching and learning. Tracking is a phenomenon that broke up a large heterogeneous group up into smaller homo genius groups. In theory this sounds like a good idea because then the teacher can focus a lesson to target a group of students with relatively the same needs. This has negative side effects on students' self esteem and performance. There are three models for instruction in this chapter; authentic, differentiated instruction, and WHERE.
Authentic instruction makes students process the information in the higher order thinking areas. Differentiated instruction has been defined in another blog post but this book defines it as offering students different avenues to learn. The WHERE model tells students at the beginning where and what the purpose of the lesson is. So basically it works from a rationale statement. The next few sections in the chapter seem to be out of place. It mentions using technology and then reform for language minority students. The next topic is about who should teach reading... the answer to which is its the responsibility of every teacher a student has to teach the student how to read no matter what the content of the teacher is. This chapter offers some very good ideas about how to exactly put the theories into practice.