Alexander Gardner

COMM-479-01

12/12/2020

Gil Cooper

Reading Response #2

The three instructional stances go as followed: The Subject-Centered, The Process-

Centered, and The Learner-Centered Stances. The subject-centered approach has a primary goal

is that education is a main transmitter of cultural knowledge, as there is a growing concern that

cultural knowledge, centuries of knowledge, is being lost in a span of decades. As stated in our

textbook “In our own field, we often justify the study of communication in terms of its

contribution to a liberal education, which means keeping alive the great works about

communication, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the great examples of communication, such as

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.” (Allen, Willmington, Sprague) Subject-centered helps

keep important pieces of literature circulated within schools education programs, as well as in

the heads of many students, even with the risks that the stance brings, like being to subject-

oriented that it overlooks the students, often overloading them with too much information to

handle at once. The process-centered highlights the importance of establishing diagnosing,

structuring, and evaluating learning for students and for teachers as well. If a teacher takes this

approach, they often will not blame the student if learning is not happening, they instead look for

another way to change the lesson. The risk of doing this stance is that the connection with the

stimuli and the responses that follow may not have the best way of understanding the human

learning complexity. The learning-centered approach is focused on the defined characteristics of

learners, or rather, the characteristics of students. As defined by the textbook “Almost by

definition, these instructional approaches do not lend themselves to prescriptive models and

diagrams. They may be characterized as optimistic, phenomenological, and holistic.” (Allen,

Willmington, Sprague) The stance is most appealing to teachers just beginning in the teaching

world with their idealistic, positive approaches that help recognize the uniqueness within the

personalities of teachers and students. Despite the knowledge that critics are not against

understanding how students see the world and how they learn, there are still attacks on it about

the lack of accountability from results viewing education as a process so personal that its

outcomes cannot be measured.

The seven questions asked through a teachers career: What is the nature of humankind? I

believe that humankind has the power of free will, however, that free will can be altered at a

young, and thus may have a good or bad response to the notion of free will. Most of the

alterations can occur due to environmental factors, such as the location in which someone lives,

or hereditary factors, such as a disorder that is passed down within a family tree. When thinking

on that notion with good vs. evil, in my opinion people are basically good, but every person has

that power within them to be evil, it just determines what brings out the evil within them. How

do people learn? When thinking about learning, the first thing that comes to my mind is that not

everyone learns the same way. Many people have different ways of learning and it is our

responsibility as a teacher to understand how they learn. It is vital to know how someone learns

because if they do not understand what it is you are teaching, then you will gain no ground with

them and they will learn nothing from you as an educator. Why do schools exist? Schools exist

around the idea that we need to prepare our students for the real world, not just in a job society

but also in a general society. They also help maintain a sense of cultural knowledge by having

mandatory history courses that dive into different backgrounds, as well as American history. It
can be a stepping stone for some students into getting a sense of morals and understanding

responsibilities. For others it can be a pathway into a better future from their present day lives.

School matters for students like those and for teachers as well because they get the chance to

impact a students lives for the better, and hopefully not the worst. Who sets the goals of

instruction? While a teacher should set goals for what lesson should be taught and how it be

taught, it will ultimately be up to the school curriculum and how the school operates that

curriculum. I believe that when the curriculum is created, it should be created around the notions

of the students and the teachers. Board of Education members should be composed of parents,

taxpayers, school administrators, and teachers so that when creating the curriculum, it's keeping

everyone's interests in mind and complingin them together to help teach students. What purpose

is served by evaluating students? I think as a teacher giving out tests and letter grades is an

effective way of evaluating students and giving students the feedback they need, but at the same

time it lacks motivation for some students to try and keep a good grade in class since they are

only receiving a letter and not nothing more. It could provide answers for parents that are

wondering how their student is doing in class and if a future employer wished to know what their

future worker excelled in doing while in school. By what standards should the success of

instruction be evaluated? If students learn a great deal of knowledge while being taught by a

teacher, then there would need to be an observation on how the teacher teaches before anyone

can be called a good teacher. If a student were to rate the course highly during the course and

some time after the course, then that means the teacher left an impression on the student that the

student will most likely never forget. If a professional rated the instructor highly, then it can be

that the professional has worked with the instructor in the past and really knows what they can be

like in a classroom and understand them on how their methodology works. How does
communication instruction relate to the overall function of education? Communication

instruction is important in the overall function of education because it helps students learn the

differences in how to talk to someone. Like for example, you can talk all causally around your

friends at the bar, but the next day you are very formal with your communication because of a

job interview you are about to walk into. Communication instruction helps build students

confidence in themselves when speaking in a classroom of 20 when they don’t often speak

publicly and will grow their competence with themselves to speak what they believe is

important. Not only that, but it helps acquire useful skills that, later down the line, will benefit

them, like fully understanding the audience of a speech or when writing an essay the student

knows what sounds contradicting and what doesn’t.