Recently, I have read a journal article about teaching and learning, in which the authors introduce three approaches to teaching: a) teaching for understanding, b) conventional teaching, and c) core knowledge teaching. Among these three, teachers' instructions can respond to student learning significantly in the first approach.
Teaching for understanding means instruction designed to stimulate the following five students' interrelated mental activities:
Teaching for understanding requires teachers to confront uncertainties of teaching. Facing with questions about what students do, what they do not understand, and what activities can improve particular students' understanding in particular time, teachers must go beyond scripted routines in schooling. Teachers can no longer avoid those questions. Instead, they need to recognise and respond to the questions through another means. So, it is likely for teachers to reach out to other teachers in response to the uncertainties/ questions they are facing.
In the workplace, colleagues may provide moral support and practical suggestions to each other. Teachers may also share among themselves, plan together, and visit each other's classes. Through these activities, a professional community among the colleagues can then be formed. This supportive social community may emerge from effort to teach for understanding. Other material resources such as time for collaboration, human resources, and some level of knowledge about fostering students' understanding are also needed in the community. These materials may come from teachers' professional development. The uncertainties of instruction will provide the content of social relationships among educators, and the relationships can further contribute to teaching for understanding.
Feedback from student learning to teaching practices is also essential in teaching for understanding because it can help teachers to adjust activities in response to their students' progress in learning. In view of this, there are two processes in teaching for understanding: a) the dynamic relation between teaching for understanding and social relations in the school, and b) a feedback loop between teaching and learning.
Reference
Gamoran, A., Secada, W.G., & Marrett, C. (2000). The organizational context of teaching and learning: Changing theoretical perspectives. In M.T. Hallinan (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of education (pp.37-63). NY: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers.