What's Wrong With Madeline Hunter? (1985)
The backlash against Madeline Hunter reached the pages of Educational Leadership in the form of"What's Wrong with Madeline Hunter?" a stinging rebuke penned by . . . Madeline Hunter. Of course this was no takedown, but a defense of her methods through a diligent debunking of what Hunter saw as myths about it.
Read the article: "What's Wrong With Madeline Hunter?" (PDF)
It's a measure of the impact of Hunter that she writes of herself in the third person: "Madeline Hunter" was both her name and a teaching method and philosophy whose ubiquity in the world of education inevitably drew a good deal of criticism. Perhaps the most fundamental criticism—or myth, according to Hunter—is that "the model is rigid and stifles creativity."
In fact, she insists the model is merely a solid foundation on which teachers can be creative and improvisational: "The Taj
