ARTICLES
The Meta Lesson Plan: Helping Students construct Cognitive Memories of their Classroom Learning
By Stephen Tynan
The article below by Dr Stephen Tynan is of importance to readers of‘ Science Education News’, not only because it defines the results of a different approach to teaching specialist material to students which is demonstrated to be significantly more successful than the regular approach. There are many teachers, usually( but by no means only) in high schools, who at some point consider the challenge of working to gain a PhD, whether in Education or in one specific topic. Their motivation may be to better understand aspects of their subject, improved opportunities for promotion, or even a switch from teaching in school to a different career. This article shows the typical format of a PhD thesis in each of its parts. It may therefore be of great interest to readers, either to encourage them to make the attempt or convince them that‘ the devil you know is better than the devil you don’ t’. – Ed.
ABSTRACT
The question asked in this work was,“ Will students learn differently if I change my classroom teaching according to my knowledge of neuroscience?” Cross sectional and longitudinal comparison of matched student cohorts showed a positive difference in r at the 95 % CI for my cohort. They acquired a prior learning effect size of f 2 =. 85 and a reading effect size of f 2 =. 1. Their matched cohort gained a prior learning effect size of f 2 =. 3 and a literacy effect size of f 2 =. 03. This three-fold increase in the student learning response is credited to the cultivation of talk as a part of classroom learning. This talk promoted the neurocoupling of memory systems and tapped into the default mode of social cognition to facilitate voluntary attention to classroom learning. It is concluded that the meta lesson plan accounts for at least 11 % more classroom diversity than the conventional lesson plan.
KEYWORDS
Classroom Learning; Lesson Plan; Educational Neuroscience; Memory Formation; Talk; Cognitive Development.
INTRODUCTION
As a teacher, one of the most demanding requirements of professional practice is the imperative to address the diversity of student learning needs to ensure that all students progressively develop in their education. From the university teaching qualification to the classroom to whole school professional development to the bureaucratic office, the diversity of student learning needs is conventionally seen to reflect the diversity of the social environments from which students originate.
To address this diversity, professional practice utilises a plethora of learning resources. For example, scaffolds and worked examples, textbooks and note taking, videos and work sheets, direct instruction via‘ chalk and talk’, hands-on and ICT activities etc. Theoretically, their use is anchored to Vygotsky’ s zone of proximal development( ZPD)( Vygotsky, 1986) and thus used in a prosocial setting. The ZPD describes that composition of long term memory that represents prior learning associated with the topic at hand. Thus, resources are selected to fall within the range of the class’ s prior learning so that the minds of students are challenged by their engagement with the resource but not disheartened by the resource being too hard a challenge.
In the classroom, the prosocial environment is cultivated via group work. This allows individual strengths and weaknesses to be balanced off against those of other students in the group. Consequently, a collective of prior knowledge and cognitive skills become available to group members to share and facilitate the learning of themselves and their peers. Thus, the influence of social background on the ability of students to progress in their learning is socially mitigated over the school year and all progress in their education.
Such professional practice reflects the constructivist philosophy to knowledge creation( Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). Generically, constructivist teaching dictates that it is the student’ s responsibility to discover within the resource provided the knowledge that the teacher wants the students to learn. Accompanying this philosophy is the expectation that cognitive skills( reading, writing, numeracy and literacy) will develop in parallel with the subject being learned as they engage with the selected resource. Accordingly, students develop literacy( the ability to read and write) of the content being learned to produce clear and concise thoughts about their learning.
In practice, the constructivist philosophy removes the teacher from having a direct role in the process of student knowledge creation in favour of a minimalist role in which the teacher is the monitor of student engagement with the provided resource. In this role, professional practice focuses on student behaviour as
25 SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 67 NO 1