![Hild Taba](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Hild_Taba.jpg)
Hilda Taba (7 December 1902 in
Kooraste,
Estonia
Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...
– 6 July 1967 in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
) was an architect, a curriculum theorist, a curriculum reformer, and a teacher educator. Taba was born in the small village of
Kooraste,
Estonia
Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, a ...
. Her mother's name was Liisa Leht, and her father was a schoolmaster whose name was Robert Taba. Hilda Taba began her education at the
Kanepi Parish
Kanepi Parish ( et, Kanepi vald) is a rural municipality of Estonia, in Põlva County. It has a population of 4,662 (as of 1 January 2020) and an area of . The administrative centre is Kanepi.
It was created in 2017 with the merger of Valgjär ...
School. She then attended the
Võru
Võru (; vro, Võro; german: Werro) is a town and a municipality in south-eastern Estonia. It is the capital of Võru County and the centre of Võru Parish.
History
Võru was founded on 21 August 1784, according to the wish of the Empress Cather ...
’s Girls’ Grammar School and earned her undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy at the
University of Tartu
The University of Tartu (UT; et, Tartu Ülikool; la, Universitas Tartuensis) is a university in the city of Tartu in Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. It is the only classical university in the country, and also its biggest ...
. When Taba was given the opportunity to attend
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United St ...
in Pennsylvania, she earned her master's degree. Following the completion of her degree at Bryn Mawr College, she attended Teachers College at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
. She applied for a job at the University of Tartu but was turned down because she was female, so she became curriculum director at the
Dalton School
The Dalton School, originally the Children's University School, is a private, coeducational college preparatory school in New York City and a member of both the Ivy Preparatory School League and the New York Interschool. The school is located in ...
in New York City. In 1951, Taba accepted an invitation to become a professor at San Francisco State College, now known a
San Francisco State University
Author
Taba was a student of
John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
; she wrote her first dissertation after studying with him and wrote a total of seven books. Her dissertation entitled ''Dynamics of Education: A Methodology of Progressive Educational Thought'' (1932) focused on educating for democracy. She discussed how children should learn how to relate to one another through democratic relationships. Two other key ideas in her dissertation included how learning should involve dynamic, interrelated, and interdependent processes and how educators are accountable for the delivery and the evaluation of the curriculum. She also believed educational curriculum should focus on teaching students to think rather than simply to regurgitate facts. After working with John Dewey,
Benjamin Bloom
Benjamin Samuel Bloom (February 21, 1913 – September 13, 1999) was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning. He is particularly noted ...
,
Ralph W. Tyler, Deborah Elkins, and
Robert Havighurst, she wrote a book entitled ''Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice'' (1962). Taba wrote:
One scarcely needs to emphasize the importance of critical thinking as a desirable ingredient in human beings in a democratic society. No matter what views people hold of the chief function of education, they at least agree that people need to learn to think. In a society in which changes come fast, individuals cannot depend on routinized behavior or tradition in making decisions, whether on practical everyday or professional matters, moral values, or political issues. In such a society, there is a natural concern that individuals be capable of intelligent and independent thought.
Taba explains a process for what educators should teach and how they can accomplish desired student outcomes. In order for teachers to teach effectively, they need to understand the three levels of knowledge. Taba lists them as facts, basic ideas and principles, and concepts. Too much factual information is often presented very quickly, so students do not make connections between the new information and the information stored in their brains. Hilda Taba explains how when facts are simply memorized and not connected to previously known information, students forget the memorized facts within approximately two years. Taba says basic ideas and principles should be selected based on what information children are able to learn at their ages and based on what information has scientific validity. The final level of knowledge, concepts, involves students using knowledge from all content areas to predict outcomes or effects.
Approach
Because Taba died in her sixties while she was still an inspiring educator, her students continued her work. Many of her students, who were members of the Institute for Staff Development in Miami, used Taba's ideas to create four thinking strategies known as the Taba approach. The four strategies are concept development, interpretation of data, application of generalizations, and interpretations of feelings, attitudes and values. Using all four strategies, the Taba approach's goal is to facilitate students in thinking more efficiently. Based on Taba's methods, “to think” means “helping them
tudentsto formulate data into conceptual patterns, to verbalize relationships between discrete segments of data, to make inferences from data, to make generalizations on the basis of data and to test these generalizations, and to become sensitive to such corollary relationships as cause and effect and similarities and differences.”
Taba's strategies for encouraging students to think focus on the teacher as the mediator rather than the teacher as the lecturer. When utilizing the Taba approach, the teacher leads the discussion but encourages the students to share their opinions and to relate their own ideas to their peers’ ideas. The teacher must not judge the students by their answers and can neither agree nor disagree with their responses. Phrases such as “That’s not quite what I had in mind,” are not acceptable when using the Taba approach. Even positive phrases such as “Correct,” or “Now you’re thinking,” are too judgmental for teachers to say. Along with verbal feedback, the teacher should avoid giving nonverbal cues such as smiling during certain students’ responses and scratching his or her head during other students’ responses. The teacher's role in the discussion is to encourage the students to expand on their classmates’ ideas or to ask students to clarify their own ideas.
Legacy
Through Hilda Taba's teachings and through her books, Taba greatly contributed to American education.
[Crocco, Margaret Smith, Davis, O.L. (2003). Building a Legacy: Women in Social Education, 1784-1984. In NCSS Bulletin, (pp. 57-58). Washington, D.C. Retrieved October 27, 2008 from ERIC database.] In a 1970 survey of over two hundred educators who had participated in training concerning the Taba approach, nearly all of the educators said the strategies were valuable to their classrooms. Some of the teachers even reported that Taba's approach to teaching was “the most valuable teaching technique they had ever acquired.”
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Taba, Hilda
1902 births
1967 deaths
People from Kanepi Parish
People from the Governorate of Livonia
Estonian architects
American women architects
20th-century American architects
20th-century American women artists
Estonian women architects
University of Tartu alumni
Teachers College, Columbia University alumni