In order for learners to gain insight into their learning and their understanding, frequent feedback is critical: students need to monitor their learning and actively evaluate their strategies and their current levels of understanding.
How do you make this happen without forcing it?
the most effective transfer may come from a balance of specific examples and general principles, not from either one alone.
Balance, balance, balance!
A third contrast between schools and everyday environments is that abstract reasoning is often emphasized in school, whereas contextualized reasoning is often used in everyday settings
Being able to reason both ways seems important. Where is the balance in schools and teaching?
A second major contrast between schools and everyday settings is the heavy use of tools to solve problems in everyday settings, compared with “mental work” in school settings
Technology! I can only imagine where technology will be in five or ten years and know that for many students technology will be their main tool in the workplace. It is exciting to help them learn to better use this tool.
One major contrast between everyday settings and school environments is that the latter place much more emphasis on individual work than most other environments (
I feel students should be able to think for themselves and work independently, but that collaboration is equally important. In a school setting, what is the correct balance between the two? For example, should some tests be group tests instead of individual?
In the mind of a child, all of these questions can become more of the focus than the subject of fractions that the teacher is attempting to teach.
This is so important to remember when making references. When I teach fractions I always talk about pizza. Although I have never encountered a student who has not had pizza, I now I am thinking I should double check before I make that assumption.
thinking visible
I would love to know more about visible thinking!
connect everyday knowledge to subjects taught in school.
I try to put some emphasis on this in my weekly parent newsletters. I try to point out simple ways to take what we are learning in the classroom and use them at home such as having students help cook when learning about fractions.
The recapitulations highlight the generalizable features of the critical decisions and actions and focus on strategic levels rather than on the specific solutions
I need to leave more time after lessons for reflecting and allowing students to "show off" what they have done and share their thinking.
The teacher also models these procedures. Thus, the program involves modeling, scaffolding, and taking turns which are designed to help students externalize mental events in a collaborative context.
Modeling is so important!
Some learners can transfer after receiving a general prompt such as “Can you think of something you did earlier that might be relevant?” Other learners need prompts that are much more specific.
I want to start doing this! It is a general prompt, but provides students with something somewhat specific to think back to.
Studies show that abstracted representations do not remain as isolated instances of events but become components of larger, related events, schemata
So these types of representations are easier to chunk?
Research has indicated that transfer across contexts is especially difficult when a subject is taught only in a single context rather than in multiple contexts
I found some great resources for reading passages that are cross-curricular. I use these in ELA during corresponding Math, Science and Social Studies units to help expand on a topic and present the material in a new way. Here is the link for 3rd grade, but they have other grades as well! http://www.k12reader.com/subject/reading-skills/reading-comprehension/3rd-grade-reading-comprehension-worksheets/
For example, young learners are highly motivated to write stories and draw pictures that they can share with others.
I saw this in action this year with my 3rd graders. They were asked to think of an issue in our school or in our community and write a letter to a leader who could make a change (principal, mayor, local PD). When I told them I was going to mail their letters, many were way more motivated to write and to write well! We even got a few response letters from a police department and a public works department!
e.g., a person may be performance oriented in mathematics but learning oriented in science and social studies or vice versa
This is important to keep in mind. You cannot label students!
Challenges, however, must be at the proper level of difficulty in order to be and to remain motivating: tasks that are too easy become boring; tasks that are too difficult cause frustration.
Zone of Proximal Development!
Monitoring involves attempts to seek and use feedback about one’s progress. Feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning
I try to provide both written and verbal feedback for my students often, but struggle with helping them monitor their progress on their own. How can I improve this?
The implication is that learning cannot be rushed; the complex cognitive activity of information integration requires time.
This supports the idea that concepts need to be explored more than once. We cannot expect our students to fully understand the lesson we taught the day before. We instead need to take the time to revisit and provide opportunities for students to have meaningful practice.
Although many people believe that “talent” plays a role in who becomes an expert in a particular area, even seemingly talented individuals require a great deal of practice in order to develop their expertise
I have heard this before from my students when talking about sports. "He was born athletic. I can't compete with him." Although that might be true that some of us are born with more "talent" no one can be successful without practicing and putting forth the effort.
Students who only memorize facts have little basis for approaching this kind of problem-solving task
As a teacher, I want to help my students become problem solvers! Memorization is not going to be as helpful in the long run.
People’s mental models of what it means to be an expert can affect the degree to which they learn throughout their lifetimes. A model that assumes that experts know all the answers is very different from a model of the accomplished novice, who is proud of his or her achievements and yet also realizes that there is much more to learn.
Growth mindsets are so important!
Accomplished novices are skilled in many areas and proud of their accomplishments, but they realize that what they know is minuscule compared to all that is potentially knowable. This model helps free people to continue to learn even though they may have spent 10 to 20 years as an “expert” in their field.
I think this is a great mentality to help students reach. It is a growth mindset that would help them continue to learn and grow. The idea of being proud about what you know and what you have accomplished is sometimes hard to do when you know there is more work to be done.
Pedagogical content knowledge is an extremely important part of what teachers need to learn to be more effective.
I remember my first year of teaching I followed the curriculum as close as I could because I didn't know any better. Now after completing year three a lot has changed because I have a better understanding of who my students are and what my students need to know.
In each case, expertise in a domain helps people develop a sensitivity to patterns of meaningful information that are not available to novices. F
This idea of looking for and understanding patterns is interesting. It makes sense in terms of chess and now I am trying to think of other subject areas and how patterns play a role.
Steven then asked students to think about the circumstances that might drive them so mad that they would contemplate murdering another human being
I think this goes along with accessing student background knowledge. Doing so can often make lessons more meaningful.
Learning to drive a car provides a good example of fluency and automaticity. When first learning, novices cannot drive and simultaneously carry on a conversation. With experience, it becomes easy to do so.
This is a great way to explain this concept!
The idea that experts recognize features and patterns that are not noticed by novices is potentially important for improving instruction. When viewing instructional texts, slides, and videotapes, for example, the information noticed by novices can be quite different from what is noticed by experts
This supports the idea that different modalities for learning is so important!
Similarly, students in a literature class might be asked to explain the meaning of familiar proverbs, such as “he who hesitates is lost” or “too many cooks spoil the broth.” The ability to explain the meaning of each proverb provides no guarantee that students will know the conditions under which either proverb is useful. Such knowledge is important because, when viewed solely as propositions, proverbs often contradict one another. To use them Page 44 Share Cite Suggested Citation: "2 How Experts Differ from Novices." National Research Council. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9853. × Save Cancel effectively, people need to know when and why it is appropriate to apply the maxim “too many cooks spoil the broth” versus “many hands make light work” or “he who hesitates is lost” versus “haste makes waste”
This is a great point. Often times the questions my students receive on tests do not put these types of phrases in context, but instead asks students to pick the best out of a multiple choice list. As teachers, we need to make sure our students have a deeper understanding.
novices tend to Page 38 Share Cite Suggested Citation: "2 How Experts Differ from Novices." National Research Council. 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9853. × Save Cancel perceive problem solving in physics as memorizing, recalling, and manipulating equations to get answers.
What do we do to change this? Is this a mindset students need to overcome or is it a case of making sure as teachers we present the information in ways that help them understand conceptually and not just memorize the information?
It is left largely to students to generate the condition-action pairs required for solving novel problems.
This is a large responsibility to place on students, especially at the elementary age.
Research on expertise suggests that a superficial coverage of many topics in the domain may be a poor way to help students develop the competencies that will prepare them for future learning and work
Wow!
Within this picture of expertise, “knowing more” means having more conceptual chunks in memory, more relations or features defining each chunk, more interrelations among the chunks, and efficient methods for retrieving related chunks and procedures for applying these informational units in problem-solving contexts
This solidifies the reason we use "wait time" in the classroom. It takes longer for novices to search through their knowledge bank to find the information. As teachers and experts, taking this time can be difficult because we are able to find these chunks faster.