No subject

"I think the difficulty of developing a common vocabulary on the nla is
partly 
due to the multiple meanings many words have."

I think the difficulty is much more serious that this.  Many years ago, an
educational guru out of California named Madeline Hunter addressed the fact
that the field of education, at all levels,  suffers from a failure to
develop a common set of terms that means the same from classroom to
classroom, unlike other professions such as law and medicine who each have
a common "language" that is aggressively taught and utilized.  Adult
education, as a subset of education, suffers also from the lack of a
professional vocabulary.  I think it isn't that we don't have jargon, or
terms with specific meaning; we have way too much of it, often
contradictory.

Dr. Hunter developed a "common vocabulary" that was widely taught around
the country (it reached SC), largely to establish a list of teaching skills
used in many forms of K-12 teacher evaluation systems.  As a school
administrator, I readily experienced the advantages of the common
vocabulary since I was doing a lot of teacher evaluations. Some of Hunter's
terms, by way of example, included techniques for "anticipatory set", the
need to "monitor and adjust", the importance of "direct instruction", and a
host of techniques to "check for understanding".  

Hunter's work applies, in my opinion, to any classroom, adult or otherwise,
and I often find myself drawing on her ideas to develop training and staff
development programs. In short, her work provided a foundation toward
defining what effective teaching looks like.  It surprises me that the
movers and shakers who make accountability policy evidently have yet to
arrive at the realization that it is impossible to determine program
quality without standards, and standards must be based on dialog using a
vocabulary we can all agree on. 

A Google search using the name "Madeline Hunter" yielded a number of hits. 
The following website includes a good summary and list of her terms:  
    
http://www.humboldt.edu/~tha1/hunter-eei.html

Deborah W. Yoho
Co-moderator, NIFL-Health Listserv
President, SC Adult Literacy Educators
Executive Director, Greater Columbia Literacy Council
2728 Devine Street,  Columbia, SC  29205
803-765-2555   Fax  803-779-8417   dwyoho at earthlink.net



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