Madeline Cheek Hunter

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Madeline Cheek Hunter (1916-1994) was an influential American educator who developed a model for teaching and learning that was widely adopted by schools during the last quarter of the 20th century.

Madeline was one of two daughters born to Alexander Cheek, grandson of a Cherokee Indian. He had been orphaned at eight years old and had to drop out of school to work. Eventually he became a barber and, as a result of hard effort and intelligence, owned shops all over the United States and Canada. Madeline's mother, Anna Keis, was the daughter of a Bohemian nobleman and a peasant woman.

Madeline's family originally lived in Canada where she was born. Her father was an avid hunter who liked Canada because "the duck hunting was better there." As Madeline was a "sickly" child, the family ultimately moved to California to avoid the terrible Canadian winters in Saskatchewan. Although they returned to Canada from May to October for many years, most of her schooling was in California, where she entered the University of California at Los Angeles in 1932 at the age of 16 with a combination pre-medicine and psychology major. During World War II she married an engineer, Robert Hunter, who worked at Lockheed Aviation.

Madeline Hunter developed the Instructional Theory into Practice teaching model. It is a direct instruction program that was implemented in thousands of schools throughout the United States. Hunter identified seven components for teaching: (1) knowledge of human growth and development; (2) content; (3) classroom management; (4) materials; (5) planning; (6) human relations; (7) instructional skills.

She believed that teachers were foremost teaching decision makers, that each teacher makes thousands of decisions each day. All of the decisions a teacher makes can be put into one of three categories; (1) what you are going to teach - content category; (2) what the students are going to learn and let you know that they've learned it - learning behavior category; (3) what you as the teacher will do facilitate and escalate that learning - teaching behavior category.