Cognitive apprenticeships, modeling, and teacher self-inquiry (Blog Post # 3)

When I taught Kindergarten in NYC public schools, we did a months-long study of trees in the city. Students learned about:

• The different types of trees

• The critical role trees play in an urban ecosystem and beyond

• Threats trees face in our community and in the world

•  Ways we can work to protect trees.

Of course, the content itself facilitated vocabulary development and built critical background knowledge to support reading comprehension in the early grades. But, perhaps more importantly, the study functioned to support the development of  transferable cognitive and process-based habits that could be applied broadly to many areas of study, including:

• Asking questions

• Reading for answers

• Writing about learning

• Engaging in scientific observation

• Interviewing experts

• Social and environmental advocacy

In other words, we developed the study, in large part, to teach students how to think and learn, not what to think and learn (I’m reminded of the age-old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish…). I like to think this is our fundamental purpose as teachers more broadly. 

This idea connects to the critical role metacognition skills play for teachers as much as students (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003).  In my opinion, any professional development worth its salt involves asking teachers to do “the work” we expect of students – whether that’s mental addition/subtraction, spelling a multisyllabic  word, or reading a text with lots of unfamiliar content-specific vocabulary – and to reflect on the cognitive processes and skills required to be successful in that task. The more you can bring awareness to these invisible processes, the more you can explicitly model and coach students in using them. This is good instructional practice for all students broadly, but especially for students like Terrance (described in the Greenleaf & Hinchman, 2009 article) – that is, those students who struggle in mainstream academic spaces and/or don’t come to school knowing the codes or rules for participating in what Lisa Delpit calls the “culture of power” (if you haven't read Other People's Children get on that!)

👆From an article on modeling practice (Schutz and Rainey, 2019) written by UIC’s very own Professor Schutz!

I’m also thinking about the ways that this week’s readings complicate last week’s reframing of “habits of thinking” to “habits of practice.” As a fieldwork instructor last spring coaching student teachers in their school placements, I spent a lot of time talking to teacher candidates about the idea that modeling is so much more than just showing students how to complete a task or engage in a practice. In fact, modeling – as I see it, at least – is most importantly about narrating and making visible the thought processes one engages in as they complete a task. Of course, this requires teachers to have high levels of insight into their own metacognition...which leads me to believe that cognitive self-inquiry should be a key feature of teacher-preparation programs. What do you think?