Harvesting Stories of Invention: Innovative Theories Can Generate Sound Practices, But so too Can Innovative Practices Reflect & Generate New Theories.
There are Troves of Generative Story Locked up in "Known" but Unplumbed Practices. In the field of Neuroscience theory is considered a somewhat pompous term. This seeming humility comes from the fact that they essentially are biologists, and biology is so complex that it humbles any who attempt to understand it. The term they use for theory is Story. The parallels to education and human learning suggest that we might do the same. Predictably, each nested story told likely will serve to excite other stories or latent theory structures and fresh applications and innovations. The Figure below offers an example of what should of/could of have been a continuing story on the ReQuest Procedure that has been cut to a very short-story by a culture of decontextualized and superficial coverage of potentially generative ideas that are nested in some otherwise familiar practices. (Other examples are welcomed. Send to: avmanzo@aol.com.)
The Story of the ReQuest Teaching Method & the Layered Theories Within It.
The ReQuest Procedure (Manzo, 1969) has been somewhat widely adopted but little understood and implemented following its publication nearly 40 years ago. Several matters of a theoretical nature that were/are nested within it. It was, and remains for many a Vel without Cro. The Journal of Reading, now the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, published a four page article on ReQuest Procedure with little reference to several other theoretical constructs and connections within the research. It would not allow mention of several instructional design features that virtually pioneered aspects of the then emerging field of cognitive psychology, nor of the role of social and imitation learning theory and Mental Modeling (Manzo & Manzo, 2004), today called "Cognitive Apprenticeship Teaching." The shallowness of knowledge of ReQuest makes two independent but related points: recently several books have been written dedicated to improving "reading comprehension" but without a single reference to this proven and scientifically replicated and clinically supported teaching methodology. The absence of its theoretical and philosophical story may in part explain its relatively weak showing where comprehension and inquiry training have been targeted. ReQuest’s primary function answered the very carefully researched but inconclusive answer to the question of where to put questions, before, during or following reading. It did so by raising a different question: can we teach student’s to raise their own guiding question, or purpose for reading? It answered this challenge by creating a reciprocal interaction that made students co-creators of a tentative guiding question. Few realize that ReQuest both described and provided a proof-of-principle of a process for improving reading comprehension at a time when it was widely held that comprehension could not be improved because it had a very high correlation with another factor believed to be immutable, IQ. The ReQuest Procedure also was constructed to create a seamless diagnostic-teaching method that near automatically was adaptive to each student’s comprehension needs in a socially and ego protected way. In many ways these actions and predictable results were the first convincing evidence for the emerging branches of study now known as cognitive and social psychology.
Most disappointingly, the ReQuest method and the related research gave the first clear evidence through example of the value and distinction between strategy and skill instruction by stressing student inquiry training and involvement in determining whether they had evolved an appropriate question to guide reading or not, as opposed to giving them a stated purpose as in the Directed Reading Activity. Much of the justification for the design of the method’s rotational questioning and answering between students and teachers was based in great measure on theoretical propositions that subsequently were highlighted by the discovery or more correctly re-discovery of the writings of theorists such as Vygotsky & Bakhtin. The study suggested that the rotation function and modeling dimension of ReQuest caused teachers to be as influenced in how they conceived instructional conversation and taught as much as they influenced the way students’ questioned and responded. We came to call this a Heuristic Effect. From this discovery we concluded that teaching methodologies could be designed to intentionally cause teachers to discover insights into better ways to teach (c.f., Manzo & Manzo, 1990, Content Area Literacy: A Heuristic Approach).
