Eyeballs and Teaching

Some people have eye-opening experiences. Some people go through life with their eyes wide shut. Today I had more of a ripping-my-eyelids-off-my-face experience.

I worked with some very…challenging high school students today. I was invited to be a guest speaker about the 1990 Oka Crisis involving the Mohawk people of the Kanehsatake Reservation outside Montreal, Quebec. For my older readers, you’ll remember how the Canadian military converged on this small community over a territorial land dispute between the Mohawk people and a golf course owner looking to expand his operation onto Mohawk territory.

Many of the students I spoke to today are Aboriginal students. I thought they would be 100% into what I had to share because it involved other First Nations people. The students recently learned about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so I thought this would be a perfect segue for my discussion. I could not have been more wrong! These kids are in a modified program and have been treated poorly by the education system for most of their school career. They were no more interested in hearing what I had to share with them than a bulldog is in sharing his supper! I knew I had my work cut out for me, but was confident I would win them over.

But hang on...They didn’t care! Here I was trying to talk to them about the basic rights afforded to all Canadians being denied to the Mohawk people in this crisis and they didn’t care. How on earth could this be possible when the majority of the students in the room were First Nations students? This was when I lost my lids. Wasn’t this important to them on a personal level?

So I rolled up my sleeves and I dug my heels in a little deeper. I was there to go over the Charter, but what a cumbersome thing THAT is to look at! These kids are not strong readers, and asking them to look over my four-page, already condensed document was much like what I imagine pulling teeth from an alligator must be like – dangerous and more than a little yucky.

I told them it was a pig of a document and threw it over my shoulder asking how many of them felt like reading all that “Blah, blah, blah”. My eyelids were starting to crawl back to their rightful place when I noticed a smile creep across some of those downturned lips. Ok, so maybe I can get their attention again with a little realism. I told them I agreed it made my own eyes roll to the back of my head when I thought about reading the Charter. I asked them what they would say if I told them I thought there only about 15 words in that entire document that I thought were worth reading. They laughed. I told them it was true and I was going to show them.

Summarizing and Note Taking

They already had a copy of my condensed version of the Charter (still four, very full pages) and I pulled up my copy on the LCD projector. I showed them how most of what is written in the Charter is just “fluff” as far as I was concerned and that we could just cross it out and disregard it. I showed them the key words and got them to highlight them. I showed them how they can cross out entire sections and sum them up by just writing the main idea. Then they highlighted that newly written main idea. I started them off to show them how to do it, and then I asked them to try it on their own.

By the time we were finished with that big wordy Charter, we highlighted a total of 18 words. They said they felt guilty marking up the Charter, but I told them there was no point in kidding themselves that they would ever read that entire document. I told them that learning less than 20 words was going to prove to be more beneficial to them in the long run.

This strategy is a pretty common one and is a really great cognitive tool for students of any age. Cognitive learning theories (Grider, 1993) tell us that when we learn, we are hooking new information onto that which we already know. Having students summarize a text requires that they think about and make judgements about pieces of information:

“Is this part duplicating what I already highlighted?”

“Can I reword this to use simpler terms?”

“Is this piece of information really adding to my understanding?”

What these questions translate into is a subject finding a way to hook the new information onto something already known about the topic. These questions force the subject to think about the new information and actually find a place for it to live in that great big filing cabinet in the head. This cognitive process ultimately makes it easier for a subject to recall the information at a later date.

Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers

Filing and organization just might be the secret keys to learning something new. I know this, so I tried to slide a few nuggets of cognitive gold while working with those tough kids I was telling you about.

These strategies all require a student to actively engage in thinking about what they are about to learn. They cause a subject to pause and consider how new information fits with existing schemas. The best thing, from the perspective of a subject struggling to remember information, is that all three of these strategies put the focus on key points, rather than oddities (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, Malenoski, 2007)). Pitler et al. describe these strategies in great detail in “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works” (2007).

Cues should be like Flash files – in your face and really obvious. Their purpose is to let a person know that something really important is coming up next; something worth paying attention to. This in-your-face trigger is a great cognitive tool, isn’t it? The response to a cue is something like this, “Hey brain! Are you with me on this one? Whatever happens next goes in the "stuff-to-keep-drawer”

Questions work the same way. Great teachers know the value of great questions. Asking questions that promote Bloom’s higher-level thinking kick the filing system into overdrive “Oh, I know the answer to this one! I know that character behaved in this way because he is living during the Russian Revolution. That means he’s too afraid to let his nephew know where his parents are in case the Secret Police are lurking in the shadows!” or something like that. Higher-order questions, and especially longer wait times, allow students to dip into their existing knowledge base (Pitler et al, 2007). They find ways to hook new information onto something they already know.

I admit it was tough finding the right questions to ask these kids today. I started out a little rusty, but it didn’t take me long to find my groove. The great thing about cues and questions is that students will let you know what is working and what isn’t. The trick is to listen with your eyes more than your ears!

Luckily my eyes told me they regularly glanced over my shoulder to look at what was next the agenda. I had my web site for the day’s discussion up on the LCD projector. I guess you could say it was an advance organizer because it clearly laid out what I had planned for students. Novak compares advance organizers to cognitive bridges (1980). These bridges are so effective because they link information a subject has previously learned to information they are about to learn. Again – another great cognitive tool because they force students to actively think about what they are learning.

So remember when I had my eyelids ripped off earlier today? Well they’re back in place now and I’m very much looking forward to closing them for in a little while. Luckily for me I know about these strategies because they really came in handy today!