Learning to Read: Beyond Phonics and Whole Language

Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching presents a model of teacher thinking and action - one that explains teacher decisions about what and how to teach. Combining qualitative and quantitative data drawn from observations and interviews with urban teachers of writing, George Hillocks argues that teacher knowledge is not simply transferred from some source to the teacher. Rather, it is constructed on the basis of assumptions about epistemology, students, and subject matter. The fact of this construction helps to explain why teacher education has had so little effect on changing the classroom behaviour of teachers from one generation to the next. The book examines what actually happens in composition classrooms, presenting large chunks of representative transcripts for analysis.