Hills, J.A. (2004). Better Teaching Article Review

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Moreover, Hill reports that he used to spend 16 hours a week lecturing, and now he uses that time to mentor students individually. Thus while Hills may still be putting in the same amount of hours, his students, who are only mentored for minutes at a time each day, are bound to be happy about the reduced investment of their own time. While Hills does state that those students who were not willing to work hard and show progress "phased themselves out" he does not provide any real evidence that the reason for his system's popularity was based on the pride of personal achievement as opposed to taking an 'easier road'.

Identification of At Least Two Problems or Strengths

Starting with the positive, the main strength of this article (and its content) is that it provides ideas for developing helpful evaluation and tracking tools for teachers to measure student progress. Moreover, each of these tools is based on time-honored, proven models devised by experts (although Deming's model is traditionally associated with manufacturing rather than teaching). The article also flows in a very "reader-friendly" manner, as Hills himself would describe it.

The weakness of the article rest primarily on the overly optimistic and evidence-deficient assessment of Hills' model. Obviously, the author is prone to be biased in favor of his own model. However, Hills' takes this to the extreme, noting absolutely no defects in his model, and essentially hailing it as the perfect remedy to poor writing instruction. While he provides a few statistics about how much the students liked the new system, these figures are essentially meaningless without hard evidence to back up their levels of improvement. The only 'evidence' Hills provides is in the form of a fictitious student with fictitious scores. There is also a considerable lack of support from the scholarly literature to support his conjectures, with the only two references provided being a book by Benjamin Bloom and a secondary source regarding Deming's management approach.

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Finally, Hills takes very little time to explain the fundamentals of the models he is deriving his own paradigm from (i.e. Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy and Deming's Total Quality Management).

Suggested Fixes for the Problems

To solve the problems addressed above, I would suggest that Hills provide real data and real transcripts from his experiences with the Helpdesk system and the assessment instruments, rather than merely a fictitious example. I would also suggest that he identify the flaws within his model, as no paradigm is as perfect as he is making his out to be. Finally, I would suggest that he do more research and provide a literature review containing scholarly, peer-reviewed sources that support his ideas. For example, how do we know that traditional teaching techniques are not effective in writing classes? Is there evidence to support this, or is he just not a very good teacher?

Discuss Potential Effects of Fixes, Problems, Improvements, or Strengths

The effects of the "fixes" would be that this article would carry much more weight among professional teachers and scholars. The effects of not making these improvements would be that no one will be able to take this model seriously, which is a shame, because their could be some very effective ideas contained within it.

Discuss the Potential Effects of the Article's Publication

The article is clearly geared at teachers or professors who are frustrated with their students' writing abilities and are seeing little progress no matter what they try. While this article may encourage some instructors to try out Hills' suggested methods, without the "fixes" described above, it will likely only convince very few teachers to make such a radical change in their instructional methods......

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