Tag Archives: cognition/learning/understanding

The Weekly Text, 19 January 2024: The First of Two Lesson Plans on Painting and Sculpture from The Order of Things

It’s been awhile since I posted any materials I adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things, so here, before we begin Black History Month 2024 (which starts next week on this blog), is a lesson plan on painting and sculpture, the first of two. This one is really more about periodicity in art history. Here is the worksheet with reading and comprehension questions.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

The Doubter’s Companion: Answers

“Answers: A mechanism for avoiding questions.

This might be called obsessional avoidance or a manic syndrome. It is based on the belief that the possession of an education—particularly if it leads to professional or expert status, and, above all, if it involves some responsibility or power—carries with it an obligation to provide the answer to every question posed in your area of knowledge. This has become much more than the opiate of the rational elites. It may be the West’s most serious addiction.

Time is of the essence in this process. An inability to provide the answer immediately is a professional fault. The availability of unlimited facts can produce an equally unlimited number of absolute powers in most areas. Memory is not highly regarded. Right answers which turn out to be wrong are simply replaced by a new formula. The result of these sequential truths is an assertive or declarative society which admires neither reflection nor doubt and has difficulty with the idea that to most questions there are many answers, none of them absolute and few of them satisfactory except in a limited way.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Term of Art: Social Cognition

“social cognition: A term used by social and developmental psychologists to refer to how people come to be concerned with the actions, thought, and feelings of others. This area of study examines how social perceptions develop, how individuals make social judgments, and how others affect an individual’s self-concept. Many children with learning disabilities have significant deficits in social cognition as well as academic difficulties.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Motivation

“motivation: Factors within a human being or animal that arouse and direct goal-oriented behavior. Motivation has long been a central subject of study in psychology. Early researchers, influenced by Charles Darwin, ascribed much of animal and human behavior to instinct. Sigmund Freud believed that much of human behavior was also based on irrational instinctive urges or unconscious motives. Walter Cannon proposed that basic human drives served homeostatic functions by directing energies toward the reduction of physiological tensions. Behavioral psychologists, in contrast, stress the importance of external goals in prompting action, while humanistic psychologists examine the role of felt needs. Cognitive psychologists have found that a motive sensitizes a person to information relating to that motive: a hungry subject, for example, will perceive food stimuli as larger than other stimuli. See also behavior genetics, human nature, learning.”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Term of Art: Standard

“standard: An officially sanctioned description of what a student is expected to learn and how well it should be learned in specific subjects taught in school. Standards may be created by school districts, states, federal agencies, subject-matter organizations, or advocacy groups. Although the federal government is by law barred from creating or influencing curriculum, various federal agencies have done so, including the National Science Foundation and the U.S Department of Education. Following the example of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress, most states identify achievement levels on their tests as basic (adequate); proficient (skilled); or advanced (superior). See also content standards; performance standards.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Term of Art: Simultaneous Retrieval Memory

“simultaneous retrieval memory: Recalling multiple items or procedures at the same time. This form of recall is particularly involved in writing tasks. For example, in writing a sentence one must simultaneously recall information about correct spelling, word order and syntactic patterns, and appropriate punctuation. For many individuals with learning disabilities, difficulties in this area may result in performance that does not reflect their actual knowledge of such elements as spelling or punctuation rules. The presence of errors can refect difficulty in accessing knowledge in long-term memory on demand and simultaneously, rather than in isolation and with time for thought and reflection.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Term of Art: Systematic Phonics

“systematic phonics: Direct reading instruction that explicitly teaches the relationships between letters and sounds in a sequence of interconnected lessons.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

The Weekly Text, 29 September 2023: Styling Sentences Lesson 10, Prepositional Phrase before Subject/Verb

Here, as your Weekly Text, is the tenth lesson plan in the Styling Sentences Unit, this one on composing a sentence with a prepositional phrase before the subject and verb.

This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the subject of a sentence. Subject is one of those tricky, polysemous words in English. As you know, the subject of a sentence is the noun or noun phrase that is doing something–which the verb describes–in a sentence. Students, in my experience, struggle with getting beyond the the meaning of the noun subject as a specific category of learning at school, e.g. maths, science, social studies, English language arts. All of this, I suppose, is an indirect plea for educating students in the many, and vital for understanding all sorts of things, uses of the word subject–it works as a noun, adjective, and verb in English. Finally, here is the worksheet with explanatory and mentor texts that constitutes the principal work of this lesson. Please note, once more, that this document contains no supported material such as sentence stems and cloze exercises, although I have some ideas about developing some. For this worksheet, students will work from mentor texts to develop sentences of their own in the form under review.

If you find typos in these documents, 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.

Vowel

“vowel: Speech sound in which air from the lungs passes through the mouth with minimal obstruction and without audible friction like the f in fit. The word also refers to a letter representing such a sound (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y). In articulatory phonetics (see articulation), vowels are classified by tongue and lip position; for example, high vowels like the i in machine and the u in flute are both pronounced with the tongue arched high in the mouth, but in u the lips are also rounded. Single vowel sounds are monophthongs; two vowel sounds pronounced as one syllable, like the ou in round, are diphthongs.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Term of Art: Systematic Instruction

“systematic instruction: A teaching approach that identifies the specific steps needed to teach a given lesson. Systematic instruction includes clear objectives describing the content to be learned, detailed strategies to teach that content, and diagnostic assessments to determine whether students have mastered the content. See also Direct Instruction (DI).”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.