Madeline Hunter Had the Right Idea

Debbie Willingham
Mar 01, 2010

I was having a conversation with a group of teachers during a recent workshop on Connecting Exemplary Practices in Acquisition Lessons when Madeline Hunter's name came up. Those of us who started teaching in the seventies immediately related to the speaker's comment about Hunter's Direct Instruction model. But then the complaints started. "Why are you going back to all that old stuff?" "Isn't LEARNING-FOCUSED just changing the names of what she did?" "I used to like her lesson plan; whatever happened to planning that way?" "If LEARNING-FOCUSED is similar, why not just do it the old way?"

For those who wonder how much it has evolved from Hunter's model, a comparison of Hunter and LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies follows:

Hunter's Objectives were defined as what the student should know, understand and do as a result of the teaching. They were based primarily on the text or on local decisions about curriculum. In LEARNING-FOCUSED language, Lesson Essential Questions are based on curriculum standards, clearly conveying to students what they should know, understand, and be able to do by the end of the lesson. Research now tells us that conveying the intent in the form of a question makes it more obvious to students that the expectation to answer it is their responsibility.

Madeline Hunter's Standards were the expectations that students would be held accountable for, in other words the standard to which they would be held (note: the term is not the same as our current use of standards i.e. state standards). Using Hunter's definition of standards, in LEARNING-FOCUSED lessons there is the expectation of a high and appropriate degree of rigor (there is a vertical progression of rigor on the given topic through the grades), and all students should be able to answer the lesson essential question.

The Anticipatory Set was Hunter's term for the "hook" to grab the students' attention and put students in a receptive frame of mind at the beginning of the lesson. In a LEARNING-FOCUSED Acquisition Lesson this is the Activating Strategy, the beginning activity to pull in students' prior knowledge, to introduce them to and get them interested in a new topic, and/or introduce key vocabulary to be used in the lesson.

Teaching for Madeline Hunter included three main components. Input included the teacher providing the information or content needed to the whole class. Checking for Understanding meant determining whether students had "gotten it" before proceeding and included the use of questioning strategies beyond mere recall (include higher levels of Bloom's). Modeling was the term used for what had just been taught to show students examples; students were taken to the application level to come up with their own answers and examples.

Teaching Strategies using the LEARNING-FOCUSED model include the use of whole group instruction with graphic organizers in which you provide and show students how to organize and understand the information/content. Collaborative pairs of students stop along the way during a lesson to answer questions and discuss their learning so far (distributed summarizing and practice). We now know from research that students need to talk about what they are learning rather than just hear. In addition, Assessment Prompts are those points during the lesson in which students will be held accountable for a portion of the lesson just taught by answering a question, explaining a process, etc. to ensure their understanding before proceeding. In some lessons, moving from the acquisition of new knowledge to its immediate application through an extending thinking activity or assignment is also appropriate; or in some cases extending thinking may comprise its own separate lesson.

Hunter's Guided Practice was the opportunity for each student to demonstrate understanding while under direct supervision. In a LEARNING-FOCUSED lesson, practice and assignments provide the opportunity for each student to practice a skill or process or to use content to demonstrate understanding while under direct supervision, or as homework only if and when students know how and what to do independently.

Hunter's lesson ended with Closure, the actions or statements designed to bring the lesson to an appropriate conclusion and to help students bring things together in their own minds. The LEARNING-FOCUSED Summarizing Strategy involves having the students summarize and pull together important facts through a short activity or strategy, written or oral, answering the essential question in some way. Research now tells us that the students themselves need to do the summarizing in order to better internalize new learning.

Finally, Hunter's Independent Practice was for reinforcement, in different contexts, on a repeating schedule through the course/year. This would correlate to LEARNING-FOCUSED Structured Monthly/Unit Review - going back to content taught earlier at the end of each month or unit to continually review, add to, and put together throughout the course/year. Unit Culminating Activities also provide students with independent practice.

In essence, the components of the LEARNING-FOCUSED lesson plan and Hunter's lesson plan are very similar. However, the research that has been done in the past thirty plus years has revised, finessed, improved, and elaborated on Hunter's direct instruction model. We now know definitively which strategies help students learn best. LEARNING-FOCUSED puts all of that together in a compilation of the best, research-based strategies that all teachers, in every subject and every grade, should be using.

Click here to view more information on the LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies Model.