I teach a college-level course to innercity juniors and seniors.
The two greatest challenges are to teach them how to really write; I don’t mean to carry out some forumla for sentence structure or paragraph formation. I mean to have a strong voice and the ability to structure a compelling argument or analysis and to compose clear and articulate sentences. Modeling deep reading and analysis and structure and sentence construction — all very direct approaches — are essential, of course, but I’ve got to balance that with just throwing them into the water, so to speak, and having them splash around a bit and try to figure out how to swim.

The same is true for interpreting literature — esepcially poetry.
There is a lot of knowledge they need to know and I agree that students are unlikely to “discover” most of it on their own. But sometimes it is very effective to simply toss a poem at them and see what they come up with, together perhaps, and for them to recognize their power as thinkers.

I appreciate the article-link and will give it a more careful reading when I have time. I understand the logic of these arguments — in the article and those you have made — and probably agree with most of them most of the time. But I’m wary of absolutes. I don’t know that I support any of the “claims” made with “respect to the efficacy of guided discovery.” But I have seen sleeping students awakened and even inspired by really good teachers using that and other indirect methods of instruction.

Teaching is an art and a science.

Here’s a good article, Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not
Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist,Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching, from Educational Pyschologist summarizing the research.

—–Guided discovery is merely inefficient, confers no benefits over explicit instruction, and can impede the leqarning of kids weak in cognitive capacity and background knowledge.

Confers no benefit?

That’s a rather far-reaching claim. I often admonish my students — in a sometimes very explicit manner — to be extremely careful about claiming absolutes since even a single contrary example is siffucient to disprove such claims.

How large is the research sample on which your claim is made?

I don’t recall anyone doing such a study in my classroom….

Early in my career, I wanted to find out which method of the current 13 at the time was the best. I worked with groups of students using each method faithfully. Guess what? They all learned and progressed. Of course, in teaching them, I adjusted for the individuals just as I always had, responded to individual needs, and varied enough to meet the individual need, and even re-taught where necessary. That action research taught me a valuable lesson. There is no one perfect tool, no one perfect method or philosophy, and children do not come in one massive block. One size, no matter what it is, does not fit all.

Of course, we all need phonics and the method of getting that will vary. We also need comprehension strategies, metacognition, background knowledge, preteaching of concepts,higher order thinking skills, study skills, and let us not forget independent reading for the sheer joy of reading and thinking. If we can instill a love of learning and reading, as well as giving students the tools to read, we will have provided a lifelong gift.

Just as we think differently, we learn to read differently, and as knowledgeable teachers, let us work with that knowledge and teach our students.

4th-Grade Slump: Too Much Pressure on Kids?
In the pressure-cooker world of the nation’s elementary schools, it’s hard to be 9 years old.
By Peg Tyre and Karen Springen
Newsweek

Feb. 19, 2007 issue – Terri Bollinger, principal at the Ridge Central elementary school, has noticed a troubling trend. Her third graders are doing incredibly well. Most of them meet or exceed Illinois state reading standards. But her fifth graders aren’t showing the same kind of improvement—and in 2005, their reading scores even dropped a little. Bollinger thinks she knows why. For complicated reasons, some kids lose their mojo when they get to fourth grade.
—

The problem with ignoring phonics or just giving lip service to it is that the kids who read via whole language will often start to have problems with spelling later. Phonics is still needed down the road even if you have a gifted reader.

All of those little rules (and exceptions) that you had seared in your brain are not there for this crop of kids. This is probably part of the reasons behind what they call the “fourth grade slump.”

Encoding and decoding are two different things. Your child may be the type that “plucks” words out of the air early on, but later that visual recall may not be so helpful when they get into compound words.