What Can Schools Do?
In order to help students build cognitive strategies, schools and educators should focus on eight instructional issues.
Issue #1: Use Mental Models
Issue #2: Build Vocabulary
-sort information
-assign information to a pattern or group
-communicate shared meaning
Issue #3: Direct-Teach the Processes
Issue #4: Have the Students Develop Questions
Issue #5: Change Our Approach to New Learning by Making It Relational
Issue #6: Enhance Content Comprehension
Issue #7: Evaluate and Calibrate Student Work
Issue #1: Use Mental Models
- Mental models are how the brain holds abstract information.
- There are generic mental models.
Issue #2: Build Vocabulary
- Vocabulary is the key tool for thinking. Students use vocabulary to:
-sort information
-assign information to a pattern or group
-communicate shared meaning
Issue #3: Direct-Teach the Processes
- Students need to be taught the process or the "how" of completing a task.
Issue #4: Have the Students Develop Questions
- Question making allows students to look inside their brain and decide what they know and what they do not know.
Issue #5: Change Our Approach to New Learning by Making It Relational
- Relational learning occurs when learning happens in a context of mutual respect, and students have a group to which they belong for learning.
- Relational learning becomes a support system for students to rely on each other as they learn new things.
Issue #6: Enhance Content Comprehension
- Content comprehension means that students understand the content at a level where they can manipulate and use it.
- To do this, students must know the vocabulary, purpose, structures, patterns, and processes of that particular content.
Issue #7: Evaluate and Calibrate Student Work
- Monitoring and evaluating student work is essential to measuring student learning.
- Curriculum calibration ensures that assignments given to students are calibrated against the standards for the grade level.
- Calibration occurs through artifact analysis.
Issue #8: Create a Future Story
- A future story is a plan for the future.
- A future story gives schooling and work purpose and significance.