When faced with students who have learning skills, styles, and backgrounds very different from their own, teachers can promote academic rigor by engaging in reality pedagogy. This approach proposes seven strategies, or Cs: Cogenerative dialogues (in which teachers solicit feedback from a dissimilar group of students); coteaching (in which students…

Discusses connections between Madeline Hunter's elements of effective teaching and current brain research. Hunter's emphasis on setting the stage for learning fits precisely with research on the brain's attentional mechanisms. Other Hunter elements, including level of concern (challenge), task analysis, procedural memory, and prior learning, are…

This critique of E.D. Hirsch's book, "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," argues that because Hirsch confuses memorized facts with learned facts, he ignores the importance of constructing meaning and fails to realize that students will not remember what they do not understand. (TE)

This article is E.D. Hirsh's response to a foregoing critique of his book "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." He argues that the distorted image depicted by Estes, Gutman, and Harrison obscures the promise of the cultural literacy initiative to improve learning in our schools. (TE)

A group of concerned educators evaluates the well-publicized arguments for teaching students to be culturally literate. They argue that content and process instruction are inseparable and that teacher preparation and student assessment should both reflect a more thoughtful fusion of content and process. (TE)