How People Learn: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7 Summary

The chapter starts off by affirming that the different disciplines/content areas require experts. These experts must have pedagogical content knowledge in order to be effective educators. This means that in addition to having content area knowledge, they should be familiar with how students relate to the curriculum - what units they might find challenging and how to deal with that.

An effective educator, Barb Johnson, teaches 6th grade, and is known as an “expert” educator. She uses strategies to get her students involved in every aspect of their learning. Johnson has the students create questions in groups, then as a class they prioritize these questions. Next, she aligns the students’ questions to the content standards for that grade level. One student states, “I just thought we were having fun. I didn’t realize that we were learning too!” Without her great content area and pedagogical knowledge, Johnson could not have guided the students through such a learning experience. This chapter hopes to illustrate the strengths that an expert teacher possesses. The focus will be on educators in the areas of History, Mathematics, and Science.

History History is often taught in the “dates-facts” method. This method subtracts the exciting opportunity to understand how history elicits analytical skill, and the fact that it is guided by particular rules of evidence. Different views of history held by different teachers will effect what is taught in each individual classroom. To become an outstanding history teacher one must help the students understand the issues that are related to interpreting history, and how this is relevant to their everyday lives.

Bob Bain, noted as an outstanding history (9th grade) teacher, emphasizes that the history given in the textbook is only one side of the story. To help the students understand the difficulty and the bias involved in determining historical significance, he actually has the students create a time capsule and explain why those items were important enough to be included. The next step was for the kids to compile a list of what constitutes historical significance. This list would be used throughout the entire semester. This allowed the students to realize how much conflict there was amongst historians while they had to decide what events to note.

Another example of an outstanding history teacher is Ms. Sterling who teaches high school history. She takes 5 days at the beginning of the semester to allow her students to answer the questions like: “What is history? How do we know the past?” Etc. Initially, she may have gotten responses that just stated dates and significant events. Towards the end of the semester, her students were able to use concepts and facts to explain why things happened the way they did. Me Sterling reached her goal of helping students understand history as an “evidentiary” form of knowledge, not just clusters of fixed names and dates.

Elizabeth Jenson teaches 11th grade history and has her students debate issues in a classroom forum. She also begins the school year by studying philosophical texts on the nature of man, which sets her students up for a better understanding of the historical events and arguments to come. “Teaching is a generic skill and a good teacher can teach any subject...” This statement has been contradicted by the previous studies that show expert teachers must have deep understanding of the structure of their disciplines, and the kinds of activities that will help students understand for themselves.

Mathematics The computational aspect of mathematics is one avenue that most people focus on, and ignore the rest. Problem-solving, characterizing and understanding structure, patterns, and other important aspects of mathematics exist as well. What teachers know and believe about mathematics is going to predict their instructional decisions and actions.

Multiplication with Meaning Magdelene Lampert, a 4th grade teacher, focuses on building a culture of “sense-making” in her classroom. When her students gave answers, the confirmation did not come from the book or the teacher. The confirmations would come from that individual’s explanation/rationale for coming up with that answer (using the applicable rules). Lampert has been known for developing independent, thoughtful, problem-solving students.

Understanding Negative Numbers The extension of numbers into integers is being taught to 3rd graders by Deborah Ball. She wants to incorporate the “ mathematics as a discipline,” idea, and have her students be “mathematical thinkers,” as she instructs them. Ms Ball uses several techniques, including models, to help develop the level of understanding she desires of her students. She uses a “builders model,” where there is a building with floors above and below ground. They used little paper people, and had them use an elevator to go between floors. She hoped that the students would grasp the understanding of writing addition and subtraction problems using integers. She hoped that the actual positions within the building model would help the students recognize that negative numbers were not always equal to zero. There were limitations to her technique as with any lesson, but she improvised with other activities that involved using a model of money to help explore negative numbers. Both Lampert and Ball incorporated their deep level of pedagogical content knowledge with their understanding of children as learners. Another educator that uses the same techniques that Lampert and Ball use is Annie Keith. Keith teaches a combination 1st and 2nd grade class. She strongly believes that children need to construct their understanding of mathematical ideas by building on what they already know. She uses math centers in her classroom that allow for students to participate in a variety of activities. The activities varied from solving word problems, to actually creating them. Keith makes the everyday procedural tasks into a problem solving task with her students. She observes her students problem solving methods and uses their strengths and weaknesses to guide them. She makes changes to her instruction, and applies the adjustments towards the mathematics content that she wants them to learn.

Model-based Reasoning Modeling can help students develop understandings about a wide range of important ideas that span across all content areas. In regards to mathematics, modeling is underrepresented throughout the curriculum. Children come into any premise with prior knowledge. In mathematics it is important to extend their understanding to new situations while encouraging them to try out their ideas and strategies.

Science The use of hierarchical strategies in helping novices recall knowledge and solve problems is a technique proven to assist students’ comprehension in the field of science. Experts tend to discuss principle and procedure as compared to the novice, who discusses specific equations that could be used to manipulate the variable given in a problem. Physics is the avenue used to illustrate these strategies. Undergraduate students were placed in a traditional introduction to physics course, while the others were placed in a course taught with one approach for problem solving that begins with a qualitative hierarchical analysis of problem. The students in the strategy-based course performed significantly better in their ability to categorize problems according to the actual principles that could be applied to actually solving them.

Conceptual Change The re-conceptualization of misconceptions must take place before students can learn new scientific concepts. There are a few ways that teachers can help students rid themselves of these misconceptions. “Bridging” allows for students to use their correct beliefs as an “anchor” to link to their misconceptions through an analogous situation. “Interactive lecture demonstrations” is another effective strategy to helping students overcome their erroneous misbelieves. To explain Newton’s Third Law (two interacting bodies exert equal and opposite forces on each other), a professor of a large introductory physics course uses a heavy moving cart going towards a lighter stationary cart, and asks for the students to predict the outcome. Students use prior knowledge (including misconceptions) to help them predict the outcome. The vast majority predicted incorrectly that the heavier/moving cart exerts a larger force on the lighter/stationary cart. Here, the demonstration allows the students to use their observations and experiences to understand the concept, allowing them to overcome their misconceptions.

Teaching as Coaching In a high school physics class the teacher allows the students to discuss their concepts in a classroom forum where students construct understanding by” making sense” of physics concepts, while the teacher plays a coaching role. Minstrell (the high school physics teacher) is introducing a unit on mechanics. He asks “What does the idea of force mean to you?” He allows for the students to have a classroom discussion answering the question, but guides them towards specific examples that he knows will elaborate the concept. This technique allows for the misconceptions to be addressed and clarified. In turn, this allows for Minstrell to develop a framework that helps to incorporate students’ thinking with his instructional strategies. Interactive Instruction in Large Classrooms It is merely impossible for an instructor in a large science classroom setting to address the needs of all students. “Class-talk” is a system in place to address this issue in a college forum. This system can be used in groups of four to answer specific questions. The answers are displayed as a histogram for the class. The professor evaluates progress as well as the effectiveness of instruction immediately. The technology is said to create an interactive learning environment in large college lecture halls.

Science for all Children This section of the chapter focuses on how to teach science to younger children, or students considered to be educationally “at risk.” The Cheche Konnen approach is used for this genre of students. Cheche Konnen, from Haitian Creole, means search for knowledge. This technique allows the students to create a “community of scientific practice,” where their curriculum emerges from their own questions and beliefs. The students are given the power to design studies, collect information, analyze the data, construct evidence and debate the conclusions. Knowledge and understanding are socially constructed through talk, activity and interaction around meaningful problems and tools (Vygotsky), and the teacher is the guide and support for these individuals during this process.

Scientific Thinking A study done by Roseberry et al. describes students’ frame of reference in September at the start of the school year as compared to June at the end of the semester, and they noticed a significant difference. By the end of the school year students were able to develop a sense for the function and form of experimentation. They initially depended on personal experience as evidence, but after being exposed to the scientific “sense-making community”, the students proposed experiments to test specific hypotheses in response to a question. Overall, the way to get students to comprehend science is to help students think about general principles rather than just understanding formulas and equations.

Conclusion All educators should strive to be outstanding teachers. Expert teachers tend to have a deep understanding of the subject matter, and how the curriculum is pieced together. Effective teachers are aware of the specific activities that will help students grasp the concepts in that content area. An outstanding educator provides their students with an optimal learning experience. This optimal learning experience is put together by the three principles for the design of learning environments discussed in the previous chapter. The classroom environment should be a “learner-centered , knowledge-centered, and community-centered” environment holistically.