Whitney Houston's Song Analysis

It has been noted that young people are the most valuable resource for the nation’s social and economic prosperity and overall success (Rowe, 2006). A hit song by Whitney Houston supported this anthem cry, “I believe the children are our future" (1985). The experts agree, that the key to such prosperity at both the individual and national level is quality schooling. Teachers, in turn, are the most valuable resource available to schools, and are therefore central to school improvement efforts directed at student’s learning outcomes and achievement progress (ACER, 2005). Teachers need to be equipped with evidence-based teaching skills that are effective in meeting the developmental and learning needs of the students for whom they have responsibility.

This approach has its origins in the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Ausubel’s assertion that “the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.” The ZPD establishes what the learner already knows, and can do with minimal assistance by a teacher or peer- following which the individual is expected to undertake learning tasks independently. Unfortunately, this is not without its drawbacks. We confuse the need for the child to construct her own knowledge with a form of pedagogy which sees it as the child’s responsibility to achieve that. We focus on the action of the student in the construction of knowledge rather than the action of the teacher in engaging with the child’s current misconceptions and structuring experiences to challenge those misconceptions…. The constructivist theory of knowing has been used to justify a non-interventionist theory of pedagogy. Even more unfortunate is that 67% of the teacher trainees in a recent study indicated that constructivism was the only teaching approach to which they had been exposed in their teaching method

Cowen in his research, A Balanced Approach to Beginning Reading Instruction, stated, “The synthesis of the research on balanced literacy instruction for beginning readers can serve as a catalyst to provide greater dialogue and opportunity for putting an end to the senseless reading wars that have distracted and even disrupted our youngest children from learning to read successfully” (2003). Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, advocated that phonics instruction should be taught explicitly and early, ending by second-grade for most children; and provided insight into the need for teachers to pay more attention to students’ comprehension as part of an integrated approach to the teaching of reading, including more time for students to read meaningful texts and quality children’s literature