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Toward a Theory of Instruction
This country’s most challenging writer on education presents here a distillation, for the general reader, of half a decade’s research and reflection. His theme is how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn―how they can be brought to the fullest realization of their capacities.
Jerome Bruner, Harper’s reports, has “stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey.” His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. In this new volume the subjects dealt with in The Process of Education are pursued further, probed more deeply, given concrete illustration and a broader context.
“One is struck by the absence of a theory of instruction as a guide to pedagogy,” Mr. Bruner observes; “in its place there is principally a body of maxims.” The eight essays in this volume, as varied in topic as they are unified in theme, are contributions toward the construction of such a theory. What is needed in that enterprise is, inter alia , “the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual,” and these are amply evidenced here.
At the conceptual core of the book is an illuminating examination of how mental growth proceeds, and of the ways in which teaching can profitably adapt itself to that progression and can also help it along. Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner’s “evolutionary instrumentalism,” his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a culture, the acquired characteristics that express and amplify man’s powers―especially the crucial symbolic tools of language, number, and logic. Revealing insights are given into the manner in which language functions as an instrument of thought.
The theories presented are anchored in practice, in the empirical research from which they derive and in the practical applications to which they can be put. The latter are exemplified incidentally throughout and extensively in detailed descriptions of two courses Mr. Bruner has helped to construct and to teach―an experimental mathematics course and a multifaceted course in social studies. In both, the students’ encounters with the material to be mastered are structured and sequenced in such a way as to work with, and to reinforce, the developmental process.
Written with all the style and élan that readers have come to expect of Mr. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction is charged with the provocative suggestions and inquiries of one of the great innovators in the field of education.
Jerome Bruner, Harper’s reports, has “stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey.” His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. In this new volume the subjects dealt with in The Process of Education are pursued further, probed more deeply, given concrete illustration and a broader context.
“One is struck by the absence of a theory of instruction as a guide to pedagogy,” Mr. Bruner observes; “in its place there is principally a body of maxims.” The eight essays in this volume, as varied in topic as they are unified in theme, are contributions toward the construction of such a theory. What is needed in that enterprise is, inter alia , “the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual,” and these are amply evidenced here.
At the conceptual core of the book is an illuminating examination of how mental growth proceeds, and of the ways in which teaching can profitably adapt itself to that progression and can also help it along. Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner’s “evolutionary instrumentalism,” his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a culture, the acquired characteristics that express and amplify man’s powers―especially the crucial symbolic tools of language, number, and logic. Revealing insights are given into the manner in which language functions as an instrument of thought.
The theories presented are anchored in practice, in the empirical research from which they derive and in the practical applications to which they can be put. The latter are exemplified incidentally throughout and extensively in detailed descriptions of two courses Mr. Bruner has helped to construct and to teach―an experimental mathematics course and a multifaceted course in social studies. In both, the students’ encounters with the material to be mastered are structured and sequenced in such a way as to work with, and to reinforce, the developmental process.
Written with all the style and élan that readers have come to expect of Mr. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction is charged with the provocative suggestions and inquiries of one of the great innovators in the field of education.
190 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 1966
About the author
Jerome Bruner
92 books71 followersJerome Seymour Bruner is an American psychologist predominately in the fields of developmental, educational, and legal psychology, and is one of the pioneers of the cognitive psychology movement in the United States. He is a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received his B.A. in 1937 from Duke University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941. During World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force Europe committee under Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 23, 2009
Not as difficult to tackle as Piaget's 'Psychology of the Child,' but I nevertheless found 'Toward a Theory of Instruction' daunting. Bruner indulges in theoretical convolution to make the point that we should not be afraid to introduce weighty concepts to children as long as we keep in mind that we have to frame those concepts in language and form accessible to them. Start with the enactive, then the iconic, before you hit them with the symbolic, he tells us, while he begins and ends his own work steadfastly symbolically.
My sister and I read this together after Margaret Donaldson's far more concrete yet equally sophisticated gem, 'Children's Minds,' and it was a hard transition. And now I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers,' which is, in the sense of proposing an idea of how to enable the untapped abilities of all our children, a parallel work. So much more fun to read.
That point Bruner's making, though, is a good one, dammit. Learning should be meaningful from the get-go. Many other points he makes are just as important, and despite the dense sentences, this book kept me busy copying down many 'ah-ha' quotes. Some examples:
'…[A:] two-year-old goes on exploring the limits of language even after the lights are out, parents removed, communication stopped, and sleep imminent. The child’s metalinguistic play is hard to interpret as anything other than pleasure in practicing and developing a new skill.'
'We get interested in what we get good at. In general, it is difficult to sustain interest in an activity unless one achieves some degree of competence.'
'Children, like adults, need reassurance that it is all right to entertain and express highly subjective ideas, to treat a task as a problem where you invent an answer rather than finding one out there in the book or on the blackboard.'
'Knowing is a process, not a product.'
My sister and I read this together after Margaret Donaldson's far more concrete yet equally sophisticated gem, 'Children's Minds,' and it was a hard transition. And now I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's 'Outliers,' which is, in the sense of proposing an idea of how to enable the untapped abilities of all our children, a parallel work. So much more fun to read.
That point Bruner's making, though, is a good one, dammit. Learning should be meaningful from the get-go. Many other points he makes are just as important, and despite the dense sentences, this book kept me busy copying down many 'ah-ha' quotes. Some examples:
'…[A:] two-year-old goes on exploring the limits of language even after the lights are out, parents removed, communication stopped, and sleep imminent. The child’s metalinguistic play is hard to interpret as anything other than pleasure in practicing and developing a new skill.'
'We get interested in what we get good at. In general, it is difficult to sustain interest in an activity unless one achieves some degree of competence.'
'Children, like adults, need reassurance that it is all right to entertain and express highly subjective ideas, to treat a task as a problem where you invent an answer rather than finding one out there in the book or on the blackboard.'
'Knowing is a process, not a product.'
August 25, 2018
While this book definitely includes language that can be seen as dated, the themes it discusses feel ahead of their time. Perhaps the main theme, which is never actually mentioned as such, is inquiry or student directed inquiry, a theme that is of high interest in contemporary pedagogical theories; especially in early childhood and surrounding ideas of play based learning and the Reggio Emilia approach.
'Knowing is a process, not a product' (p. 72).
'Knowing is a process, not a product' (p. 72).
April 3, 2011
It's important to read Bruner's ideas to understand constructivist theory; however, I found the text a bit dated, which made the reading a bit humorous at times.
September 7, 2015
(k:Bruner) 371.3 BRUNER (ILL)
Books mentioned:
A Christmas Garland/by Raymond Queneau
Exercises in Style/by Max Beerbohm
The Child's Conception of Number / Jean Piaget
My Pedagogic Creed /John Dewey (reflections of the author prior to the first Great War)
A Study of Children's Thinking /Margaret Donaldson(Editor)
The teacher's word book /Edward L. Thorndike (Jan 1, 1921)
A Study of Thinking (Social Science Classics Series)/Jerome Bruner
Zoltan Pal Dienes(Z. P. Dienes,born 1916,Hungarian mathematician, specialized in early child math learning)
I Will Tell You Algebra Stories You've Never Heard Before
The Six Stages In The Process Of Learning Mathematics /64 pages
Let's Play Math/Michael Holt and Zoltan Dienes/793.74 HOL/1973
Articles:
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
By George A. Miller
Psychological Review Vol. 101, No. 2, 343-352 (1956)
Peoples:
Jean Piaget: Cognitive development, epistemological.
Charles F. Hockett (American linguist )
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (English social anthropologist)
Roger William Brown (American social psychologist)
William James(American philosopher and psychologist)
Ivan Pavlov(Russian physiologist)
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky(Soviet Belarusian psychologist)
Chap1: The patterns of growth
enactive representation
iconic representation
symbolic representation
p221. ...that leads me to think that heart of the educational process consists of providing aids and dialogues for translating experience into more powerful systems of notation and ordering. And it is for this reason that I think a theory of development must be linked both to a theory of knowledge and to a theory of instruction, or be doomed to triviality.
Chap2: Education as social Invention
p22 It is in this sense that eduction is constant process of invention.
p27 Mental growth is not a gradual accretion, ....much more like a staircase with rather sharp riser, more a matter of spurts and rest....But these steps or stages or spurts are not very clearly linked to ages. The first stages are relatively manipulative, marked by highly unstable and single-track attention. Knowing is principally knowing how to do, and there is minimum reflection....(enactive representation)..... It is not that there are "stages" in any sense; they are rather emphases in development. You must get the perceptual field organized around you own person as centre before you can impose other, less egocentric axes upon it, for example. In the end, the mature organism seem to have gone through a process of elaborating three systems of skills that correspond to the three major tools systems to which he must links himself for full expression of his capacities - tools for the hand, for the distance receptors, and for the process of reflection.
Chap3: Notes on a theory of instruction
p43 Three aspects to the exploration of alternatives: activation, maintenance, direction.
p44 The structure of domain knowledge: mode of representation, economy, effective power.
p48...Children are told that "Mary is taller than Jane, and Betty is shorter than Jane" are often unable to say whether Mary is taller than Betty. One can perfectly well remark that answer is "there" in the logic of transitivity. But to say this is to miss the psychological point.
p48 But it is rare for a powerful structuring technique in any field to be uneconomical. That is what leads to the canon of parsimony and the faith shared by many scientists that nature is simple: Perhaps it is only when nature can be made reasonably simple that can be understood.
p50 Optimal sequence, ...cannot be specified independently of criterion in terms of which final learning is to be judged. A classification of such criteria will be at least the following: speeding of learning, ...transferability of what has been learned to new instance....economy of what has been learned in therm of cognitive strain imposed;......Achieving one of these goals does not necessary bring one closer to others; speeding of learning, for example, is sometimes antithetical to transfer or to economy.
Chap4: A course of study
p73 There is a dilemma in describing a course of study. One must begin by setting forth the intellectual substance of what is to be taught, else there can be no sense of that challenges and shapes the curiosity of the student. Yet the moment one succumbs to the temptation to "get across" the subject, at that moment the ingredient of pedagogy is on jeopardy. For it is only in a trivial sense that one gives a course to "get something across", merely to impart information. There are better means to that end than teaching. Unless the learner also masters himself, disciplines his taste, deepens his view of the world, the "something" that is got across is hardly worth the effort of the transmission.
The more elementary a course and younger its students, the more serious must be its pedagogical aim of forming the intellectual powers of those whom it serves.
P76 Language
There are certain pedagogic precaution to be respect if children are to be attracted by the subject. The subject must not, to begin with, be presented as a normative one-as an exercise in how things should be written or said. It must, moreover, be dissociated from such traditional grammar as the child has encountered. There is nothing so deadening as to have a child handle the form classes as traditional "parts of speech", "recognizing" one category of words as "nouns" and parroting, upon being asked what he means by a noun, that it is a a "person, place, or thing." It is not that he is either right or wrong, but rather he is as remote from the issue as somebody would be who attempted to account for grief over the assassination of a President by citing the Constitution on the division of powers. And finally, the discussion needs to remain close to nature of language in use, its likely origin, and functions it serves.
p101. If we were totally successful in planning and teaching the course, we would have achieved five ideals:
1. To give our pupils respect for and confidence in the power of their own mind.
Chap 5. Teaching a native language.
p102... how the use of language affects the use of mind.
... As between reading, listening, and speaking, one falls asleep most easily reading, next most easily listening, and only with the greatest difficulty while writing or speaking.....There is an important difference between deciphering(as in listening or reading) and enciphering (as in speaking or writing. In listening or reading our span of attention typically lags behind the furthermost point where our eye or ear has travelled. We hold words and phrased in mind until we can tie the utterance together. .... we aid our auditors and readers by reducing the amount of memorial baggage they carry to the end of a sentence. And so we write:
This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat.
and avoid
This is rat that the cat that the dog chased killed.
In speaking or writing the pattern is quite different: the arrow points forwards.The speaker or write rides ahead of rather than behind the edge of his utterance.... If the listener is trafficking back and forth between the present and immediate past, the speaker is principally shuttling between the present and future. The plight of the listener is to "fall behind"; of the speaker, to "get ahead of himself." Falling behind is a state in which the listener has insufficient processing time to decoding; get ahead of oneself is a failure to anticipate properly. Pressed for time, the listener falls further and further, the speaker get further and further.
p105 The power of words is the power of thought.
p107 What is true of external discourse may also be true of internal discourse with oneself. But consider now the relation of external and internal language. Can one be clear to oneself and turbid in saying it?
p112 .. So many students dislike two of the major tools of thought - mathematics and the conscious deployment of their native language in its written form, both of them devices for ordering thoughts about things and thoughts about thoughts.
Chap 6. The will to learn
p114 Almost all children possess what have come to be called "intrinsic" motives for learning. An intrinsic motive is one that does not depend upon reward that lies outside the activity it impels.
Curiosity is almost a prototype of intrinsic motive.... But it is clear that unbridled curiosity is little more than unlimited destructibility.
For curiosity is only one of intrinsic motives for learning. The drive to achieve competence is another.
p125 one last intrinsic motive ... should be called reciprocity.
Chap7 On coping and defending
p132..... A second feature of early acquisition of knowledge is that ideas are not isolated from their motivational or emotional context. Thus we find children as old as 11 who block naming any similarity between one object they happened to like and another the are frighted of -say, a cat and a dog - thought they are quite capable of grouping water and milk are things that you drink....
At the unverbalized level, then, the child approaches the task of school learning, with its highly rationalistic and formal pattern, with a legacy of unconscious logic in which action, affect, and conceptualization are webbed together. Feeling and action and though can substitute for each other, and there is an equation governed by what in grammar called synechdoche: feelings can stand for things, actions for things, things for feeling, parts for wholes. It is as evident as it is both fortunate and unfortunate that these early cognitive structures remain in being into adult life -evident in the sense that the structures appear in dream and in free association and, in a disciplined form, in the products of the artists; fortunate in the sense that without such structures there would be neither be poets and painters nor an audience for them; unfortunate in the sense that when this mode of functioning is compulsively a feature's of a person's life, he is not able to adjust to the requirements of any but a specially arranged environment.
p134 pre-emptive metaphors of defensive cognitive activity.
Chap8. A retrospect on making and judging
p154 The psychology of subject matter, how to simulate the thought in a school, how to personalize the knowledge, and how to evaluate what one is doing.
P163 In some considerable measure we have intellectualized and made bland and good-natured the teaching of the particulars of history,of society, of myth. I would urge that in fashioning the instruction designed to give children a view of the different faces and conditions of man..
p165 Evaluation is often viewed as a test of effectiveness or ineffectiveness- of materials, teaching methods or whatnot - but this is the least important aspect of it. The most important is to provide intelligence no how to improve these things.
p166 The idea of "teacherproof" or "studentproof" material is not only wrong but mischievous.
Books mentioned:
A Christmas Garland/by Raymond Queneau
Exercises in Style/by Max Beerbohm
The Child's Conception of Number / Jean Piaget
My Pedagogic Creed /John Dewey (reflections of the author prior to the first Great War)
A Study of Children's Thinking /Margaret Donaldson(Editor)
The teacher's word book /Edward L. Thorndike (Jan 1, 1921)
A Study of Thinking (Social Science Classics Series)/Jerome Bruner
Zoltan Pal Dienes(Z. P. Dienes,born 1916,Hungarian mathematician, specialized in early child math learning)
I Will Tell You Algebra Stories You've Never Heard Before
The Six Stages In The Process Of Learning Mathematics /64 pages
Let's Play Math/Michael Holt and Zoltan Dienes/793.74 HOL/1973
Articles:
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
By George A. Miller
Psychological Review Vol. 101, No. 2, 343-352 (1956)
Peoples:
Jean Piaget: Cognitive development, epistemological.
Charles F. Hockett (American linguist )
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (English social anthropologist)
Roger William Brown (American social psychologist)
William James(American philosopher and psychologist)
Ivan Pavlov(Russian physiologist)
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky(Soviet Belarusian psychologist)
Chap1: The patterns of growth
enactive representation
iconic representation
symbolic representation
p221. ...that leads me to think that heart of the educational process consists of providing aids and dialogues for translating experience into more powerful systems of notation and ordering. And it is for this reason that I think a theory of development must be linked both to a theory of knowledge and to a theory of instruction, or be doomed to triviality.
Chap2: Education as social Invention
p22 It is in this sense that eduction is constant process of invention.
p27 Mental growth is not a gradual accretion, ....much more like a staircase with rather sharp riser, more a matter of spurts and rest....But these steps or stages or spurts are not very clearly linked to ages. The first stages are relatively manipulative, marked by highly unstable and single-track attention. Knowing is principally knowing how to do, and there is minimum reflection....(enactive representation)..... It is not that there are "stages" in any sense; they are rather emphases in development. You must get the perceptual field organized around you own person as centre before you can impose other, less egocentric axes upon it, for example. In the end, the mature organism seem to have gone through a process of elaborating three systems of skills that correspond to the three major tools systems to which he must links himself for full expression of his capacities - tools for the hand, for the distance receptors, and for the process of reflection.
Chap3: Notes on a theory of instruction
p43 Three aspects to the exploration of alternatives: activation, maintenance, direction.
p44 The structure of domain knowledge: mode of representation, economy, effective power.
p48...Children are told that "Mary is taller than Jane, and Betty is shorter than Jane" are often unable to say whether Mary is taller than Betty. One can perfectly well remark that answer is "there" in the logic of transitivity. But to say this is to miss the psychological point.
p48 But it is rare for a powerful structuring technique in any field to be uneconomical. That is what leads to the canon of parsimony and the faith shared by many scientists that nature is simple: Perhaps it is only when nature can be made reasonably simple that can be understood.
p50 Optimal sequence, ...cannot be specified independently of criterion in terms of which final learning is to be judged. A classification of such criteria will be at least the following: speeding of learning, ...transferability of what has been learned to new instance....economy of what has been learned in therm of cognitive strain imposed;......Achieving one of these goals does not necessary bring one closer to others; speeding of learning, for example, is sometimes antithetical to transfer or to economy.
Chap4: A course of study
p73 There is a dilemma in describing a course of study. One must begin by setting forth the intellectual substance of what is to be taught, else there can be no sense of that challenges and shapes the curiosity of the student. Yet the moment one succumbs to the temptation to "get across" the subject, at that moment the ingredient of pedagogy is on jeopardy. For it is only in a trivial sense that one gives a course to "get something across", merely to impart information. There are better means to that end than teaching. Unless the learner also masters himself, disciplines his taste, deepens his view of the world, the "something" that is got across is hardly worth the effort of the transmission.
The more elementary a course and younger its students, the more serious must be its pedagogical aim of forming the intellectual powers of those whom it serves.
P76 Language
There are certain pedagogic precaution to be respect if children are to be attracted by the subject. The subject must not, to begin with, be presented as a normative one-as an exercise in how things should be written or said. It must, moreover, be dissociated from such traditional grammar as the child has encountered. There is nothing so deadening as to have a child handle the form classes as traditional "parts of speech", "recognizing" one category of words as "nouns" and parroting, upon being asked what he means by a noun, that it is a a "person, place, or thing." It is not that he is either right or wrong, but rather he is as remote from the issue as somebody would be who attempted to account for grief over the assassination of a President by citing the Constitution on the division of powers. And finally, the discussion needs to remain close to nature of language in use, its likely origin, and functions it serves.
p101. If we were totally successful in planning and teaching the course, we would have achieved five ideals:
1. To give our pupils respect for and confidence in the power of their own mind.
Chap 5. Teaching a native language.
p102... how the use of language affects the use of mind.
... As between reading, listening, and speaking, one falls asleep most easily reading, next most easily listening, and only with the greatest difficulty while writing or speaking.....There is an important difference between deciphering(as in listening or reading) and enciphering (as in speaking or writing. In listening or reading our span of attention typically lags behind the furthermost point where our eye or ear has travelled. We hold words and phrased in mind until we can tie the utterance together. .... we aid our auditors and readers by reducing the amount of memorial baggage they carry to the end of a sentence. And so we write:
This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat.
and avoid
This is rat that the cat that the dog chased killed.
In speaking or writing the pattern is quite different: the arrow points forwards.The speaker or write rides ahead of rather than behind the edge of his utterance.... If the listener is trafficking back and forth between the present and immediate past, the speaker is principally shuttling between the present and future. The plight of the listener is to "fall behind"; of the speaker, to "get ahead of himself." Falling behind is a state in which the listener has insufficient processing time to decoding; get ahead of oneself is a failure to anticipate properly. Pressed for time, the listener falls further and further, the speaker get further and further.
p105 The power of words is the power of thought.
p107 What is true of external discourse may also be true of internal discourse with oneself. But consider now the relation of external and internal language. Can one be clear to oneself and turbid in saying it?
p112 .. So many students dislike two of the major tools of thought - mathematics and the conscious deployment of their native language in its written form, both of them devices for ordering thoughts about things and thoughts about thoughts.
Chap 6. The will to learn
p114 Almost all children possess what have come to be called "intrinsic" motives for learning. An intrinsic motive is one that does not depend upon reward that lies outside the activity it impels.
Curiosity is almost a prototype of intrinsic motive.... But it is clear that unbridled curiosity is little more than unlimited destructibility.
For curiosity is only one of intrinsic motives for learning. The drive to achieve competence is another.
p125 one last intrinsic motive ... should be called reciprocity.
Chap7 On coping and defending
p132..... A second feature of early acquisition of knowledge is that ideas are not isolated from their motivational or emotional context. Thus we find children as old as 11 who block naming any similarity between one object they happened to like and another the are frighted of -say, a cat and a dog - thought they are quite capable of grouping water and milk are things that you drink....
At the unverbalized level, then, the child approaches the task of school learning, with its highly rationalistic and formal pattern, with a legacy of unconscious logic in which action, affect, and conceptualization are webbed together. Feeling and action and though can substitute for each other, and there is an equation governed by what in grammar called synechdoche: feelings can stand for things, actions for things, things for feeling, parts for wholes. It is as evident as it is both fortunate and unfortunate that these early cognitive structures remain in being into adult life -evident in the sense that the structures appear in dream and in free association and, in a disciplined form, in the products of the artists; fortunate in the sense that without such structures there would be neither be poets and painters nor an audience for them; unfortunate in the sense that when this mode of functioning is compulsively a feature's of a person's life, he is not able to adjust to the requirements of any but a specially arranged environment.
p134 pre-emptive metaphors of defensive cognitive activity.
Chap8. A retrospect on making and judging
p154 The psychology of subject matter, how to simulate the thought in a school, how to personalize the knowledge, and how to evaluate what one is doing.
P163 In some considerable measure we have intellectualized and made bland and good-natured the teaching of the particulars of history,of society, of myth. I would urge that in fashioning the instruction designed to give children a view of the different faces and conditions of man..
p165 Evaluation is often viewed as a test of effectiveness or ineffectiveness- of materials, teaching methods or whatnot - but this is the least important aspect of it. The most important is to provide intelligence no how to improve these things.
p166 The idea of "teacherproof" or "studentproof" material is not only wrong but mischievous.
April 21, 2023
I was once assigned a Bruner reading in a "Theories of Learning Class", but I remember little of what was discussed in that piece. His ideas took a backseat to Piaget and to Vygotsky in that class, which is unfortunate because I find him to be far more readable than those 2. In addition, Bruner's approach to studying learning is very closely tied to curricula and classrooms, which meant that when reading these essays I found myself frequently reflecting on the implications of his ideas for my own instructional methods.
The title essay is certainly the one that I would recommend to teachers in any stage of their career, since it actually outlines the process of how learning occurs, using an example of fourth graders being introduced to quadratic equations. Bruner suggests, as others have, that learning begins with enactive representations, followed by iconic representations, and finally by symbolic representations. The job of the math teacher then, is to assist students in developing these representations and presenting the concepts in a sequence such that the students can internalize the concepts and represent them in increasingly abstract form. While Bruner's discussion is narrow in that it focuses on a series of lessons for just a single topic in mathematics, it is a thorough examination of how learning occurs. The fact that the students grasped a topic that is usually not taught until high school is a testament to the soundness of pedagogical approach that Bruner argues for.
The other essays in here are still worth a read. For anyone who works with high needs students, "On Coping and Defending" presents the barriers that children face when learning. Bruner's argument, which I completely agree with, is that when a student is not learning, it is usually because there are psychological barriers that prevent a student from the process of coping while learning in the classroom. Instead, for a range of possible reasons, the student defends themselves from the psychic pain that they experience when engaging in school work, and these defense mechanisms take a variety of forms, depending on the student.
Bruner is unique among the pedagogical researchers I have read for a few reasons. First of all, he admits immediately the challenges of developing a theory of instruction, the central of which is that no one approach will work for all teachers and all students in all classrooms. Indeed, he is dismayed by attempts to develop "teacher proof" and "student proof" materials, and any such attempts will be misguided and will produce a sterile product. Curricula is something that is always changing, because it reflects the relationship between the teacher and the student, the teacher and the discipline, the student and the society, etc. Since none of these relationships are ever static, nor should our curricula ever be "finalized". So, Bruner believes that the goal of evaluating curriculum and pedagogical strategies should always ever gradual improvement, rather than optimization. He is humble in each of these essays admitting that he is only attempting to outline a foundation for what could one day be a true theory of instruction.
Secondly, Bruner is interested in helping teachers teach, and recognizes that any educational researcher should not operate in a bubble. There are texts on learning theory that are so littered with psychological jargon and academic baggage that renders them all but useless to the practicing teacher. if your goal is to improve that state of education, then you better recognize that the most important audience for your ideas is practicing teachers even more than Education PhDs.
Finally, Bruner's ideas are refreshing because they are both practical and carefully refined, unlike much of the trash that will be assigned to you in an education course. Too many books on education are loaded with meaningless jargon ("edubabble") and merely represent the authors attempt to get published, rather than a rigorous examination of one the many problems faced in schools today. Bruner is not here to stroke his ego by inventing a term that no one asked for, but rather to shine a light on how we can actually understand the process of learning in the classroom. By examining this carefully, Bruner provides sketches of a theory that actually explains how learning occurs and how we, as teachers, can improve our instructional methods
The title essay is certainly the one that I would recommend to teachers in any stage of their career, since it actually outlines the process of how learning occurs, using an example of fourth graders being introduced to quadratic equations. Bruner suggests, as others have, that learning begins with enactive representations, followed by iconic representations, and finally by symbolic representations. The job of the math teacher then, is to assist students in developing these representations and presenting the concepts in a sequence such that the students can internalize the concepts and represent them in increasingly abstract form. While Bruner's discussion is narrow in that it focuses on a series of lessons for just a single topic in mathematics, it is a thorough examination of how learning occurs. The fact that the students grasped a topic that is usually not taught until high school is a testament to the soundness of pedagogical approach that Bruner argues for.
The other essays in here are still worth a read. For anyone who works with high needs students, "On Coping and Defending" presents the barriers that children face when learning. Bruner's argument, which I completely agree with, is that when a student is not learning, it is usually because there are psychological barriers that prevent a student from the process of coping while learning in the classroom. Instead, for a range of possible reasons, the student defends themselves from the psychic pain that they experience when engaging in school work, and these defense mechanisms take a variety of forms, depending on the student.
Bruner is unique among the pedagogical researchers I have read for a few reasons. First of all, he admits immediately the challenges of developing a theory of instruction, the central of which is that no one approach will work for all teachers and all students in all classrooms. Indeed, he is dismayed by attempts to develop "teacher proof" and "student proof" materials, and any such attempts will be misguided and will produce a sterile product. Curricula is something that is always changing, because it reflects the relationship between the teacher and the student, the teacher and the discipline, the student and the society, etc. Since none of these relationships are ever static, nor should our curricula ever be "finalized". So, Bruner believes that the goal of evaluating curriculum and pedagogical strategies should always ever gradual improvement, rather than optimization. He is humble in each of these essays admitting that he is only attempting to outline a foundation for what could one day be a true theory of instruction.
Secondly, Bruner is interested in helping teachers teach, and recognizes that any educational researcher should not operate in a bubble. There are texts on learning theory that are so littered with psychological jargon and academic baggage that renders them all but useless to the practicing teacher. if your goal is to improve that state of education, then you better recognize that the most important audience for your ideas is practicing teachers even more than Education PhDs.
Finally, Bruner's ideas are refreshing because they are both practical and carefully refined, unlike much of the trash that will be assigned to you in an education course. Too many books on education are loaded with meaningless jargon ("edubabble") and merely represent the authors attempt to get published, rather than a rigorous examination of one the many problems faced in schools today. Bruner is not here to stroke his ego by inventing a term that no one asked for, but rather to shine a light on how we can actually understand the process of learning in the classroom. By examining this carefully, Bruner provides sketches of a theory that actually explains how learning occurs and how we, as teachers, can improve our instructional methods
May 9, 2024
A set of short essays exploring various aspects of how an understanding of child development can inform instruction. Bruner's style is not the easiest to read sometimes. He does not write with clarity and tends to an overly obscure level of abstraction, but he makes some very interesting points and when he gets into concrete examples and case studies, the writing becomes really interesting.
March 11, 2022
Apesar de ser um pouco datada, é uma obra de grande qualidade. As ideias de Bruner fazem-nos reflectir ainda hoje.
Senti que o livro me foi conquistando a cada capítulo, relembrando-me de como esta área é apaixonante e tão fulcral.
"O saber é um processo, não um produto." (p.96)
Senti que o livro me foi conquistando a cada capítulo, relembrando-me de como esta área é apaixonante e tão fulcral.
"O saber é um processo, não um produto." (p.96)
March 9, 2019
good theory of instruction
January 15, 2017
Almost certainly one of the most important books I'll ever read. The first ten pages alone carry an avalanche of useful fact, theory, and framework for thought to rival many entire non-fiction books.
I'm not a pedagogical expert so I'm not sure how the wisdom and theories contained within have held up academically over the years, but what is plainly obvious to a layperson is how little we've improved our approach to education in the half-decade it's been since. Certainly there are efforts like the Integrated/Core Mathematics curricula to mimic the ideas herein, but having experienced them firsthand even they are terribly misguided, having taken a multifaceted, complex framework involving motivation, rhetorical drive, empathic reasoning, and build-up of material amongst many other considerations and seemingly having boiled it all down to "kids learn better when they experiment with pictures before doing mathy things."
As a user interaction designer specializing in complex systems and applications, I found a lot to value, particularly in the first half. And as someone who has previously done education work, I wish I'd read this sooner.
I'd also highly recommend any would-be parent who is up to the challenge of reading and digesting this book to do so before taking the plunge. I know it has vastly reshaped some of my thoughts and strengthened others on the approaches I would take.
A requisite note: this book was written in 1966, and while Bruner seems to be an open-minded, progressive fellow the prose and some of the vocabulary very much reflect the social norms of the time, so wade with caution.
I'm not a pedagogical expert so I'm not sure how the wisdom and theories contained within have held up academically over the years, but what is plainly obvious to a layperson is how little we've improved our approach to education in the half-decade it's been since. Certainly there are efforts like the Integrated/Core Mathematics curricula to mimic the ideas herein, but having experienced them firsthand even they are terribly misguided, having taken a multifaceted, complex framework involving motivation, rhetorical drive, empathic reasoning, and build-up of material amongst many other considerations and seemingly having boiled it all down to "kids learn better when they experiment with pictures before doing mathy things."
As a user interaction designer specializing in complex systems and applications, I found a lot to value, particularly in the first half. And as someone who has previously done education work, I wish I'd read this sooner.
I'd also highly recommend any would-be parent who is up to the challenge of reading and digesting this book to do so before taking the plunge. I know it has vastly reshaped some of my thoughts and strengthened others on the approaches I would take.
A requisite note: this book was written in 1966, and while Bruner seems to be an open-minded, progressive fellow the prose and some of the vocabulary very much reflect the social norms of the time, so wade with caution.
September 2, 2012
Per una teoria dell'istruzione - Armando editore
Currently reading
May 5, 2013nice
November 1, 2016
i think, if i read this book i can finish my thesis
Want to read
November 10, 2018a
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