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HUNTER, MADELINE

PROFESSOR

Research into Practice

In 1985 Ron Brandt, executive director of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, said that Madeline Hunter "has had more influence on U.S. teachers in the last ten years than any other person." Hunter's popularity was based on her instructional-theory-into-practice (ITIP) model for effective teaching, which was designed to "teach more faster" in all disciplines and to all grade levels. Her training first as a practicing psychologist and later as a school psychologist served as the foundation for her ITIP model. This model translated her research in behavioral and social psychology into eight sequential steps for every teacher to follow in any given lesson.

ITIP Model

To follow the Hunter ITIP model, the teacher initiates an anticipatory set, determines objectives, gives input, models the task, checks for understanding, guides practice, assigns independent practice, then offers closure. According to Hunter, the ITIP model enables teachers to make appropriate decisions in three major aspects of teaching: content, learner style and behavior, and teacher behavior. Key learning principles on which Hunter based her model are motivation, retention, reinforcement, and transfer. Hunter published several programmed books, most notably Teach More—Faster (1986), that promised teachers who followed her model that "psychological theory will be more meaningful to you."

Widespread Popularity

Hunter, a researcher who treated the classroom like a clinical field test, was widely popular in the reform-minded early 1980s. Her "learn more faster" promise seemed like the ideal cure for the teachers and students who had been told that they had failed miserably on measure after measure. Hunter won the trust and admiration of many administrators nation-ally who viewed her model as a means by which teachers could be evaluated. Department chairs and principals could simply monitor lessons and assess whether all eight parts of the model were in evidence. Teachers would be diagnosticians of their students' learning needs and administrators would be diagnosticians of their employees—the teachers. The notion was orderly, manageable, and easily measured. Teachers who inculcated Hunter's model into their every lesson became, in some school districts, "master teachers." By the end of the 1980s dozens of states had instituted assessment procedures, both for student teachers and experienced teachers, based on Hunter's model.