Some thoughts on Schema - Fall 2016 and winter 2017
Caren Kongshaug
Bellingham Technical College
RA State Leader
“Basically, a constructivist stance maintains that learning is a process of constructing meaning; it is how people make sense of their experience”
(Merriam, Caffarella and Baumgartner, 2007, p. 291).
Beginning a lesson from what students know when they enter the classroom is especially rewarding and reflects the constructivist methodology. Here are two examples where I surface schema as a prerequisite to the main lesson. In each example, I intentionally engage in the Reading Apprenticeship dimensions.
First, identifying where our learners are positioned on a topic informs me about the timing and scaffolding needed for the lesson. For example, before I start the lesson on social justice in my developmental reading class, I first determine what students already know, their schema, about social justice. We begin by deconstructing the words “social justice”, and then conversations develop reflecting the group’s understanding of the term. I make a point to write everything they say on the board, so we can refer to our definitions later. Below is an example of my Fall 2015 class.
After this discussion, I find that students are curious and ready to begin the main work of the lesson. When I give them a New Yorker article (yes, a New Yorker article) such as “Before the Law” by Jennifer Gonnerman, they take it in stride. Please note that some of them have never read a magazine article in their lives, let alone a seventeen page article.
Students begin their reading in class and complete it at home. They are asked to note the events in the story that have particular meaning for them. When students return to class, they complete a worksheet that asks: do the events in this article change or verify your ideas about social justice? Please describe and use evidence from the text. We then, return to our ideas about social justice. We expand our original definitions on the topic. Notice the change in thinking around social justice.
As we move to the next unit on political cartoons and inference, students are asked to preview three separate articles on the topic Ebola. One is a scholarly research article from the 70’s; one is an Op Ed from the New York Times, and one is a contemporary panel report from The World Health Organization. This time, I do not ask the students what they already know about subject. Instead, I focus on text features and how these features inform the reader about the content. I ask the students to tell me everything they can by just previewing the articles. Depending on the class, we may do this preview/think/discuss routine anywhere between 20 and 60 minutes. During the ‘discuss’ phase, students eventually identify the year of publication, authorship, and facts vs opinions. Deep into the conversation, we question credibility and someone usually suggests doing some additional light research on the internet. Although students are always surprised that they could spend this amount of time previewing an article, they continually admit how valuable the lesson was as well as being more informed and ready to actually read.
In both lessons, student input is at the heart of our efforts. By in large, student schema expand from the invisible to the visible and from the personal to the collaborative.
Bellingham Technical College
RA State Leader
“Basically, a constructivist stance maintains that learning is a process of constructing meaning; it is how people make sense of their experience”
(Merriam, Caffarella and Baumgartner, 2007, p. 291).
Beginning a lesson from what students know when they enter the classroom is especially rewarding and reflects the constructivist methodology. Here are two examples where I surface schema as a prerequisite to the main lesson. In each example, I intentionally engage in the Reading Apprenticeship dimensions.
First, identifying where our learners are positioned on a topic informs me about the timing and scaffolding needed for the lesson. For example, before I start the lesson on social justice in my developmental reading class, I first determine what students already know, their schema, about social justice. We begin by deconstructing the words “social justice”, and then conversations develop reflecting the group’s understanding of the term. I make a point to write everything they say on the board, so we can refer to our definitions later. Below is an example of my Fall 2015 class.
After this discussion, I find that students are curious and ready to begin the main work of the lesson. When I give them a New Yorker article (yes, a New Yorker article) such as “Before the Law” by Jennifer Gonnerman, they take it in stride. Please note that some of them have never read a magazine article in their lives, let alone a seventeen page article.
Students begin their reading in class and complete it at home. They are asked to note the events in the story that have particular meaning for them. When students return to class, they complete a worksheet that asks: do the events in this article change or verify your ideas about social justice? Please describe and use evidence from the text. We then, return to our ideas about social justice. We expand our original definitions on the topic. Notice the change in thinking around social justice.
As we move to the next unit on political cartoons and inference, students are asked to preview three separate articles on the topic Ebola. One is a scholarly research article from the 70’s; one is an Op Ed from the New York Times, and one is a contemporary panel report from The World Health Organization. This time, I do not ask the students what they already know about subject. Instead, I focus on text features and how these features inform the reader about the content. I ask the students to tell me everything they can by just previewing the articles. Depending on the class, we may do this preview/think/discuss routine anywhere between 20 and 60 minutes. During the ‘discuss’ phase, students eventually identify the year of publication, authorship, and facts vs opinions. Deep into the conversation, we question credibility and someone usually suggests doing some additional light research on the internet. Although students are always surprised that they could spend this amount of time previewing an article, they continually admit how valuable the lesson was as well as being more informed and ready to actually read.
In both lessons, student input is at the heart of our efforts. By in large, student schema expand from the invisible to the visible and from the personal to the collaborative.
Ginger Burnett
Walla Walla Community College
Washington State Penitentiary
RA State Leader
Schema!
What do our students already know? What can they relate to? Our students already know so much! But if they are like I was, I assumed everything I was about to learn in college was brand new to me and difficult. Opening the steel trap of our students’ brains is the first step to getting them to learn!
When teaching my students about subtracting fractions, I first ask them a few questions before I even indicate where I’m going. I ask them if they’ve ever used a laundromat and had to get change. I ask them if they have ever cut up a pizza. I ask them if they’ve ever put a dollar into a vending machine to buy something and got any change back. Then I tell them that if they have done any of these things they have already used fractions. I ask them what they think/know about subtracting fractions. I write their answers on the board and we talk about the various information shared. They will already have some information about fractions because we would have already learned about adding fractions including how to find the LCD.
When I actually begin to teach about subtracting fractions I want them to understand the concept not just the steps. I want them to think, to visualize! So I begin with a story about Bob unexpectedly having five friends stop by his place on a hot summer day. They all want a cold drink. Bob checks his fridge and he sees he has 3 loose cans of pop on the shelf and two 12-pack cases. (I’ll often leave it open about the 2 cases and let the students decide the size of the cases of pop.) I let the students talk about what kind of pop they’d like to drink on a hot day. Letting them envision the situation and putting themselves in the story keeps the steel trap doors of the brain open. I ask the class what they think Bob plans to do to serve his friends. Should he open the 3 cans and split them between 6 glasses? What are his options?
I ask questions so they can tell me what Bob should do. The students naturally come back with the idea that Bob should break open one of the cases of pop and get more cans of pop. I emphasize they are suggesting breaking into a WHOLE case of pop and getting out PART of the case. I ask them about the remaining case of pop. What is going to happen to that case? What is left in the case that was opened?
So by the time we have worked through the story, the story then becomes mixed numbers on the board, the “borrowing” from the full case of pop becomes 12/12, the other case of pop just sitting in the fridge untouched is still a whole number, then the handing out of pop to himself and his buddies is the actual subtraction, and finally what pop Bob has left in the fridge in the remainder of the pop. This is real life schema for our students. This is now a story they can relate to and subtracting fractions is no longer fearful! It makes real life sense!
Walla Walla Community College
Washington State Penitentiary
RA State Leader
Schema!
What do our students already know? What can they relate to? Our students already know so much! But if they are like I was, I assumed everything I was about to learn in college was brand new to me and difficult. Opening the steel trap of our students’ brains is the first step to getting them to learn!
When teaching my students about subtracting fractions, I first ask them a few questions before I even indicate where I’m going. I ask them if they’ve ever used a laundromat and had to get change. I ask them if they have ever cut up a pizza. I ask them if they’ve ever put a dollar into a vending machine to buy something and got any change back. Then I tell them that if they have done any of these things they have already used fractions. I ask them what they think/know about subtracting fractions. I write their answers on the board and we talk about the various information shared. They will already have some information about fractions because we would have already learned about adding fractions including how to find the LCD.
When I actually begin to teach about subtracting fractions I want them to understand the concept not just the steps. I want them to think, to visualize! So I begin with a story about Bob unexpectedly having five friends stop by his place on a hot summer day. They all want a cold drink. Bob checks his fridge and he sees he has 3 loose cans of pop on the shelf and two 12-pack cases. (I’ll often leave it open about the 2 cases and let the students decide the size of the cases of pop.) I let the students talk about what kind of pop they’d like to drink on a hot day. Letting them envision the situation and putting themselves in the story keeps the steel trap doors of the brain open. I ask the class what they think Bob plans to do to serve his friends. Should he open the 3 cans and split them between 6 glasses? What are his options?
I ask questions so they can tell me what Bob should do. The students naturally come back with the idea that Bob should break open one of the cases of pop and get more cans of pop. I emphasize they are suggesting breaking into a WHOLE case of pop and getting out PART of the case. I ask them about the remaining case of pop. What is going to happen to that case? What is left in the case that was opened?
So by the time we have worked through the story, the story then becomes mixed numbers on the board, the “borrowing” from the full case of pop becomes 12/12, the other case of pop just sitting in the fridge untouched is still a whole number, then the handing out of pop to himself and his buddies is the actual subtraction, and finally what pop Bob has left in the fridge in the remainder of the pop. This is real life schema for our students. This is now a story they can relate to and subtracting fractions is no longer fearful! It makes real life sense!
Elizabeth J. Demong, M.Ed.
Basic Skills/GED Instructor
Renton Technical College
As instructors, we are constantly trying to engage our students by doing our best to connect course concepts to the wealth of prior knowledge and experience that each student brings to the classroom. By teaching our students strategies for externalizing their own metacognitive processes, we empower them to bring that wealth of prior knowledge, or schema, to each new learning experience.
Consider the following life-science practice question that I give to my students on the first day of GED® Preparation class at Renton Technical College:
When carbon dioxide is combined with water, in the presence of light energy, glucose (sugar) and oxygen are produced. This process is called photosynthesis.
Light Energy
6CO2 + 6H20 → C6H1206 + 602
Which statement about the process of photosynthesis is true?
Basic Skills/GED Instructor
Renton Technical College
As instructors, we are constantly trying to engage our students by doing our best to connect course concepts to the wealth of prior knowledge and experience that each student brings to the classroom. By teaching our students strategies for externalizing their own metacognitive processes, we empower them to bring that wealth of prior knowledge, or schema, to each new learning experience.
Consider the following life-science practice question that I give to my students on the first day of GED® Preparation class at Renton Technical College:
When carbon dioxide is combined with water, in the presence of light energy, glucose (sugar) and oxygen are produced. This process is called photosynthesis.
Light Energy
6CO2 + 6H20 → C6H1206 + 602
Which statement about the process of photosynthesis is true?
- When 6 units of water are consumed, 2 units of glucose are produced.
- When 6 units of carbon dioxide are consumed, 2 units of oxygen are produced.
- When 6 units of water are consumed, 1 unit of glucose is produced.
- When 2 units of carbon dioxide are consumed, 6 units of oxygen are produced.
Like many students who are preparing for the GED®, I am a high-school drop-out who never took chemistry. I explain to my students that I kind of freaked-out the first time I encountered a practice question containing this type of chemical equation because it did not look like anything that I’d ever read before. I go on to explain that, once I was done freaking-out, I decided to look for at least ONE thing that looked familiar to me; then I ask them to do the same.
After a minute or two of looking at the chemical equation, someone invariably speaks up to tell the class that H20 means water (chemistry schema activated!). “OK, now we have a place to start reading”, I say as I write the word, “water” above 6H20 in the chemical equation on the board. Next our schema around math alerts us to the idea that the plus signs mean that things are being added together or combined, which then leads us to agree that the right-facing arrow looks suspiciously like an equals sign. So, we have things being combined, and we have things being produced. Once these elements are labeled, I begin to wonder aloud about the different types of numbers that I see: some are small and some are the same size as the letters. At this point I tell my students that, when I approached this type of problem for the first time, my math schema was activated once again when I realized that the numbers that were the same size as the letters looked a lot like coefficients in algebra. I therefore drew the conclusion that there were 6 units of water in this chemical equation. This conclusion seemed to be confirmed when I looked at the answer choices, and saw that two of them referred to 6 units of water.
OK! Finally, I ask my students to take a look at the short paragraph which precedes the chemical equation. After a student reads the short paragraph aloud to the class, I ask them to notice that there are five things mentioned: carbon dioxide, water, light energy, glucose (sugar) and oxygen. Water and light energy are listed as the second and third items in the paragraph AND in the chemical equation. At this point, we agree that it seems safe to assume that the other items are also listed in the same order in the chemical equation as they are in the paragraph above. This assumption seems confirmed when someone activates previously unexamined chemistry schema by recalling that characters in television shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER often refer to oxygen as O2.; oxygen is the final item in the paragraph, and O2 is the final item in the chemical equation.
Once all of the parts are labeled, and we congratulate ourselves on how much we seem to already know about chemistry, we test each potential answer to find that when 6 units of water are consumed, 1 unit of glucose is produced (answer choice C). By activating student schema, and externalizing my own meta-cognitive process in a new knowledge area we have already, as a class, become more confident readers of GED® science questions. What a great first day of class!
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