Big Picture 407

Re-Post from C&I 407, Summer 2011:


I think the most important reminder I got from this class was to always to remember to think about the students, what they know, and how they think. I try to model tasks for students but I know I need to go back and remodel more often for them as a reminder. I think though that if I want to reflect back on the course I should also go back through my old posts and try to pull out the main points and common threads that I plan to implement in the future.

Declarative knowledge is important and becomes the database from which students can draw facts that they need to solve problems. While declarative knowledge—like that described by E.D. Hirsch in “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know” (1987)—is important, it is also necessary to keep students moving towards conditional knowledge which according to Bruning, et al, “is needed to help students make effective use of their declarative and procedural knowledge.” (p.37)

With my URQs—a way I try to move students in that direction—I plan to change how those are introduce at the beginning of the year. Instead of me telling them why I plan to use the questions I will put them in groups and have them look at a standard set of questions in the text, asking them to list things they think are good about the questions and to see if they can identify any problems that might be inherent in the questions. This will hopefully get some of them to engage in divergent thinking as described in Bruning et al. (2004) p. 166. I will then ask them to read a section as a group and develop a set of answers to those questions. I will then have them repeat the process with the URQs and see if they can see why I think they are a more useful set of questions. I can also use their answers as a form of, “inexpert modeling,” to improve their self-efficacy.  I can then provide other examples to help demonstrate, “expert modeling” (Bruning et al., 2004, p. 119).

In my history classes my students’ least favorite reading question at the beginning of the year is the third one that asks them to make a connection to something else. But, what good is it if you know a set of historical facts if you are not required to connect the dots and to see how those facts can and should be applied to new or similar situations. I use my URQs to try to get students to engage historical readings in a way they normally do not. Often they need to answer question from the end of a section or from a study guide and instead of reading, then answering questions, they read the questions and hunt for the answers. The problem with that method is that they often take things out of context and it can be hard to correct the misconceptions that they develop. By the end of the year I can only hope they can at least appreciate the importance of my connection question.

In trying to remember how my students think I remember in Bruning et al. (2004) when they mentioned several times about students who feel that they are, “no good at math.” I think that applies to students in any other subject as well. They have “learned—perhaps become acclimated is better—from being told (by teachers, parents or peers) that they are not good at a subject. I think that this negative reinforcement has turned them into performance oriented, essentially taking an entity theory model stance that they are not good at something and so they avoid it or don’t try.  In a previous post I noted that Bruner et al. stated on page 143 that, “[f]rom a practical viewpoint, all theorists agree that goal orientations are changeable, given careful consideration on the part of the teacher and an awareness by students of the consequences of adhering to different types of goals.” They go on to give the suggestion, of [e]phasizing daily academic improvement while simultaneously deemphasizing the importance of ability are central to establishing a learning oriented environment, and that this must be, “emphasized from the onset.”

Finally, I want to make sure that if I want students to make relevant connections then my assignments should be relevant as well.  With my Renaissance and Cold War projects I want to make sure I address some issues from the “Factors to Consider” (Popham, 2008, pp 178-9) to make sure my students recognize the larger importance of those assignments in terms of:

1. Generalizability—I would hope that the ability to research and summarize information in a coherent manner could be used in a variety of tasks. The presentation part is as well as Power Point and video production skills are useful in a variety of areas.

2. Authenticity—I think that for many jobs, and for future schooling, the ability to put together a researched report and to be able to present information from that report are important skills. Power Point has been important but with the rise of YouTube and instructional video and asynchronous communication, video production is perhaps becoming as important. Just look at this class!

3. Fairness—Perhaps there is a problem here. I usually book many days in the library for research and in the computer labs for students to work on these projects. The problem is that they still need to work from home and not all of our students have internet access at home.

As for me I need to make sure that I remember the teachability aspects of the project and that reinforce skills from other classes that are now applied to history content. The researching and writing are reinforcing skills taught in English classes and are part of the new Common Core English standards applied to social studies. The oral communication reinforces our English II classes and my dual credit communication course. The video production skills are also used in our media classes.

I’m perhaps going to take the easy way out and say that I think both are needed to measure learning. True-False, multiple-choice, and short answer are needed to check for declarative and some procedural knowledge, but obviously when I think of “academic skills” I would certainly think that performance assessment (and portfolios) provide a much deeper and richer understanding of a student’s skills and abilities than the “snapshot” that is given in other forms of testing.

David Ausubel says the most important thing to know in teaching is what the student already knows, so perhaps Socrates had it right, question and answer. Students don’t like it—they just want to the answer to the question—and teachers get tired of it or just give the answer so that they can cover everything. I will try to take the time to have the students think, then guide them to the answer so that they can see the answer and how it is connected or related to other events and to their lives today. To quote from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, “the old ways are the best ways. Question and answer, glean what afflicts.”