Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

“In identifying important organizing principles, it is necessary to note that the criteria, continuity, sequence, and integration apply to the experiences of the learner and not to the way in which these matters may be viewed by someone already in command of the elements to be learned. Thus, continuity involves the recurring emphasis in the learner’s experience upon these particular elements; sequence refers to the increasing breadth and depth of the learner’s development; and integration refers to the learner’s increased unity of behavior in relating to the elements involved.”

Ralph W. Tyler

Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

“Practice, exercise, are involved in the acquisition of power, but they do not take the form of meaningless drill, but of practicing the art. They occur as part of the operation of attaining a desired end…. All genuine education terminates in discipline, but it proceeds by engaging the mind in activities worthwhile for their own sake.”

John Dewey

How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

I’ve posted a lot of learning supports on Mark’s Text Terminal, but here is a teaching support in the form of an outline of principles on designing cognitive apprenticeship environments.

For the record, this was lifted from Allen M. Collins article “Cognitive Apprenticeship,” which I read in R. Keith Sawyer’s (ed.) book The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

“We have a pretty low tolerance for reading unknown words. And writers use a lot of words, many more than speakers do. If I’m talking about my cheap friend, I might use the word cheap three times within a few sentences. But writers like to mix things up, so my friend will be ‘frugal,’ ‘stingy,’ ‘thrifty,’ and ‘tight.’ Texts that students typically encounter in school have about 85,000 different words. Somehow we need to ensure that children have a broad enough vocabulary so that they are not constantly colliding with unknown words.”

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.