Comments+Week+of+March+21

I found some more articles by Daniel Wickingham, the cognitive psychologist who writes for the AFT magazine. Please go to the research page and you can click on an article I attached. I think I heard our concern was that we do this exciting, engaging lesson but the students don't walk away with deep learning. We had talked about addressing this by focusing on summaries or somehow highlighting the key pieces of knowledge. While his article doesn't address the summaries, it does address deep learning. His website has many more articles and some YouTube videos. Not sure how to use this, but it is interesting. I would love to read your thoughts...just go to edit and add them to this week's page. Way to go, PJ. That covers about all we discussed. []

I totally enjoyed the article. As far as the article is concerned, it is right on. The BIG question that comes to my mind is "What about our young students?" Most of the students don't even want to make an effort to learn so when you have them engaged in any sort of learning activity, keeping them focused is a major problem. Their thinking probably isn't even on the subject at all. Most teachers feel if they are quiet and "working", they are learning--NOT. The article's examples were all upper level lessons. Older students should be maturing and realizing how important it is to learn.

So the discussion for me would be--what type of learning activities will bring about thinking about the lesson at hand? How do we get them totally engaged and wanting to learn? We are big into teaching "strategies" to help them comprehend at a higher level. Obviously these are not fact and memorization type learning lessons and probably boring as heck. :) Here's one thing I do know. When you teach a topic, you really have to think about the subject at hand. One activity I did right before FCAT writing was to have a student come to the front of the class and teach something about writing, ie--grabbers, similes, conclusions. The other students might not have learned anything, but the student teacher did. It forced them to think about that skill or topic.

K. Taylor Whitehurst

I also enjoyed this article. Reading this made me think about some of our purposes with lesson study. Wickingham discusses how important it is to anticpate students' thoughts and this is something that we try to accomplish when teaching a lesson. I think we know that anticpating students' repsonses can only help us to help our students have a deeper understanding of the topic. Prior knowledge does seem to affect deeper knowledge. In the past, we have always tried to have a "hook" to fully engage the students. But, does that "hook" lead our students to only understand in a "shallow" way? I think it's important as teachers to help our children understand the relationships among it's parts. "What you think about is what you remember". I think the key in teaching our students in to try to truly shape what they are thinking about during a les son. " **Design lessons so that students can't avoid thinking about the lesson's goal. ** On a more positive note, the "memory is as thinking does" principle can yield steps teachers can take to help students develop deep, interconnected knowledge: //Lessons should be directed so that students are very likely to think (or can't help but think) about the goal of the lesson. //."- I really thought this was important too. Sorry for the random thoughts here....

Stephanie Hajdin