Tfcu Framework

In an extensive study on Brain and Education, Renite Numnela Caine and Geoffrey Caine, educators in California, mention that if we become more familiar with brain’s capacity to seek and perceive patterns, create meanings, integrate sensory experience and make connections, we become more adept at solving practical problems, such as setting appropriate methodologies, effectively assessing learning, designing schools and administering education. Brain research establishes and confirms that multiple complex and concrete experiences are essential for meaningful learning and teaching. Brain’s infinite capacity to make connections can be used optimally by making content inseparable from context. Every complex event embeds information in the brain

The framework is based on the conception of understanding as a performance. These performances “go beyond the information given” and extend and synthesize or otherwise use what one knows in creative and novel ways by explaining, interpreting, analyzing, relating, comparing and making analogies. This focuses the attention on what students do rather than what teachers do. It helps teachers analyze how far students have understood by making students undertake a varied range of activities as part of their school work that is different from typical assignments. It demonstrates their mastery of understanding goals. There are three progressive categories of performances that are

Assessments help students and teachers know what students understood and how to proceed with subsequent teaching and learning. Assessment both enhances and evaluates learning. The learners constantly get feedback from their teachers at regular intervals which help them know where they stand and where they need to go. Assessment is done at different stages and in different ways.

Though each element of the TfU framework can be used for analyzing particular aspects of educational practice, the power of this framework derives from the coherent integration of all four elements(Martha stone wiske). The TfU framework supports teachers as continuing learners. The framework is found to be exceedingly successful in English teaching practice. The framework provides a set of guidelines to help English teachers plan, teach and assess units of work more effectively. The framework respects the integrity of the subject, allows English teachers to explore significant issues in depth, often by making connections beyond the traditional boundaries of the subject. But most importantly, English teachers who use the TfU framework will help students to develop the dispositions to become powerfully literate members of contemporary society. (Martha stone