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).
“Murray Cohn has, for twenty-three years, run Brandeis according to his own lights. He believes in cleanliness and order—and the halls of Brandeis are clean and orderly. He believes in homework, especially writing—and the students do it, even if they don’t do enough. He believes in publicly praising achievement—and the schools bulletin boards offer congratulations to attendance leaders and the like. What Cohn and other administrators like him impart to their schools is nothing quantifiable; it is an ethos.”
James Traub, as quote in The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education (1985)
“mental age n.: A child’s performance on a test of mental ability expressed as the average age of children who achieved the same level of performance in a standardization sample. Thus a 10-year-old child who achieves the same score as the average 12-year-old child in a standardization sample has a mental age of 12. The concept was introduced in 1905 by the French psychologists Alfred Binet (1857-1911) and Theodore Simon (1873-1961). See also Binet-Simon scale, IQ. Compare chronological age, social age. MA abbrev.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“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.
“Education is the jewel casting brilliance into the future.”
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Unimportant * Irrelevant * Nonsensical * Embarrassing * Distressing
Patients undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis must be free to say whatever comes into their head, however unimportant, irrelevant, nonsensical, embarrassing, or distressing it might seem to be, and yet be sure of receiving the same level of intent listening from their analyst.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“This discussion rejects the doctrine that students should first learn passively, and then, having learned, should apply knowledge. It is psychological error. In the process of learning, there should be present, in some sense or other, a subordinate activity or application. In fact, the applications are part of the knowledge. For the very meaning of things known is wrapped up in their relationships beyond themselves. Thus, unapplied knowledge is knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning.”
Essays in Science and Philosophy
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
Moving right along on this frigid morning (two degrees when I left my building at 6:03 a.m.), here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on short-term memory.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Now let’s take a look at these people (these earliest humans) dressed in skins, as they paddle their boats made of hollowed-out tree trunks towards their village of huts on stilts, bringing grain, or perhaps salt in the mountains. They drink from splendid pottery vessels, and their wives and daughter wear jewelry made of colored stones and even gold. Do you think much has changed since then? They were people just like us. Often unkind to one another. Often cruel and deceitful. Sadly, so are we. But even a mother might sacrifice her life for her child and friends might die for each other. No more but also no less often than people do today. And how could it be otherwise? After all, we’re only talking about things that happened between three and ten thousand years ago. There hasn’t been enough time for us to change.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“heuristic: A rule of thumb or procedure that works to provide a satisfactory if not optimal solution to a problem; a technique of discovery, invention, and problem solving through experimental or trial-and-error techniques. Some examples of heuristics include throwing out parts of a problem and solving the simplified version; breaking a problem into parts and solving each one separately; and means-end analysis–defining the current situation, describing the end state, and then taking steps to reduce the differences between them.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
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