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...
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