DESIGN PRINCIPLE 3: KNOWLEDGE

“Good learning designs recognize concepts as tools, situate those concepts in the context of their use reflecting authentic activity, conceptual tool, and culture, and analyze content for generalizable knowledge?”  What does that all mean for us as teachers?

In the article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” by Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) suggests that by “ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing useable, robust knowledge.”  This basically means that much of the learning and work done at schools in inauthentic and thus not fully productive of useful learning.  As teachers, we need to strive to provide authentic- or coherent, meaningful, and purposeful activities to our students.  So, how do we do this?  We need to situate kids in the context of the tools, activities and culture.  This is known as enculturation.  Students need to see that tools, both conceptual and physical, can be used differently by different groups.  We need to bring kids into the culture to show them how to use a tool and provide them multiple opportunities to use the tool within the context of the activity.  Tool- Activity- Culture… This is The Golden Triangle and students learn best when we combine these.  In the library, if I want the students, especially my 4^th and 5^th graders, to understand the importance of keeping the shelves neat and using shelf markers to assist them in keeping the books in order, are they going to learn it by hearing about it in a book or watching a cute video demonstration? Probably not! It’s more likely that they will gain the knowledge if I immerse them in the authentic activity of giving them books to shelve.  That way they see and will hopefully understand all that goes into it.  They need to understand the concepts, or structures, of call numbers, the different sections of the library, the Dewey decimal system and different types of books.  They also need an understanding of the processes of alphabetizing fiction books by the first 3 letters of the author’s last name, whereas the books in the biography section are alphabetized by the famous person’s last name.  Although the culture is within the school, this understanding can be applied to any type of library and is purposeful and meaningful to any student who wishes to be a library patron.  I also learned two very important questions to ask when designing these authentic learning activities: Why do they need to use it?  Who uses it?  Another important insight that I gained is the role of the teacher referred to as a cognitive apprenticeship.  Teachers need to model their thinking, metacognition, with students.  This was always a principle that I lived by during writer’s workshop when I taught in the regular classroom (kindergarten, first and second grade).  During my mini lessons, I always connected what we were learning to the previous concepts taught, modeled my thinking as I specifically shared  what I was doing while writing and explained why.  Then I gave students time to try it out right there with me.  I linked it to how they could do this as writers, today and every day when writing, and sent them off to have more time to try it out on their own while I conferenced with students, coaching alongside them.  As students grasped the conventions of writing, and honed their author’s craft, my support faded.  I also used many books as mentor texts where we analyzed what the authors did.  When doing read alouds with the students, I always shared the bios about the authors with the class, and we often visited their websites so the children could better understand that authors/writers are real people like them who have stories to tell with many of their stories coming from their life. 

In reading the other articles, I learned even more and saw many overlaps of knowledge design principles.  They spoke to the importance of engaging students in authentic activities or authentic context.  Both the SPD and AeCTS articles spoke of having a clear outcome/product. We must ask ourselves, “What do I really want students to know?” All three articles, including ABCs, spoke of process and providing the students with constructing activities to allow them opportunities to test their knowledge with teacher guidance so students can construct their own meaning and understanding.  Lastly, we must consider the patterns of communication that they use and provide them with sharing activities so students can receive feedback and compare the meanings they have constructed about knowledge with their peers.

I see the importance of all of these aspects in creating carefully designed learning opportunities. But I am struggling to think of ways to create culturally relevant, as well as,  purposeful and meaningful activities regarding information using outcomes such as web searching, citing sources, and evaluating sources to name a few.  Suggestions are welcome.