The Meta Lesson Plan( continued)
ARTICLES
The Meta Lesson Plan( continued)
DISCUSSION
The factor attributed with the causal role of generating the effects observed in response to the meta lesson plan is talk. Clark( 2008, p. 44) describes talk as a“ form of mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding … whose critical role in promoting thought and reason( i. e. learning) remains surprisingly ill understood.” It is talk, which is wide ranging and not necessarily directly related to the topic at hand, that gives voice to and develops the cognitive processes of the minds of students. In this manner, teenage socialness, talk and attention engage with the mind of the teacher to create shared experiences of life. It is the accumulation of these snapshots of shared experience between the teacher and student minds that act as the‘ mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding’ upon which the student mind organises itself.
The significant role for talk in the classroom identified in this research is explained by two lines of thought. Foremost is James’( 1890) weighty finger of subjective interest. James notes that if something has subjective interest, the remembered experience of that interest( though far removed from the topic at hand) has far more power to shape thought than more relevant experiences in which one has less interest. It is to this interesting experience that the student mind agrees to pay attention and cognitively process the information to construct an‘ intelligible perspective’ on the meaning of that experience. In talking about this experience with the teacher and peers in the classroom, the student mind is more directly guided in the cognitive processing and construction of the meaning of that experience. Evolving from such open talk is the willingness of students to voluntarily cooperate and cultivate a classroom learning environment in which the thoughts of all students are given equal time for discussion. With the accumulation of this experience, familiarity with one’ s own meaning-making process facilitates students’ cognitive processing skills such that they become self-sufficient learners.
A scientific view on how talk acts as a cognitive scaffold is provided by Ulm( 2013). This review describes the brain’ s processing of language that occurs when two people talk to each other. Simply, as talk is shared between the teacher and student( s), the brain regions active in processing this exchange become synchronised in both parties, i. e. cognitive processes become neurocoupled. With more frequent talk, the neurocoupling becomes more tightly bound such that both parties become able to predict the nature of the upcoming exchange. This occurs via simultaneous bottom-up and top-down processing: The sounds of talk are built up( through the phonological loop of working memory) to phonologically construct and give meaning to the sound of the talk while the high level cognitive process of literacy is constructed in advance of these lower level cognitive process. This allows the formation of a common perceptual filter in the minds of the teacher and students( s) that facilitates more efficient extraction / prediction of the meaning of talk and therefore, more effective cognitive processing for learning.
Was and Woltz’ s( 2007) examination of the contribution of available long term memory to working memory provides a scientific mechanism by which subjective interest and the neurocoupling of talk may converge in the classroom to have the observed effects. They reported that available long term memory mediated the relationship of both working memory and prior knowledge to listening comprehension. In their work, different types of verbal cues( questions) were used to activate long term memory to investigate how its availability impacted upon working memory. The cues appear to represent a cognitive trajectory through which teacher’ s progress as they move through the material to be learned by students. In ascending order of cognitive demand, these questions included,‘ Were there more words meaning …’,‘ Were there more examples of …’ and‘ Were there more attributes of …’
It is the latter question which is associated with the most effective cueing of long term memory. Such questions require students to think more broadly and comparatively in order to generate a response. This offers more opportunity for sustained dialogue with students and thus ongoing dialogical negotiation on how to formulate an acceptable answer. Thus, open-ended questions lead to more open-ended questions and consequently, the availability of more long term memory for use in working memory. Alternatively, the remaining two types of questions descend in their comparative requirements, requiring less comparative thinking and lending themselves to the student mind generating a simple reflex response that terminates ongoing dialogue in negotiating acceptable answers.
On the whole, Was and Woltz( 2007) proposed that the ability of working memory to predict language comprehension is due in part to the increased availability of long term memory for attention-driven process that occur in working memory. Hence, when the teacher’ s primary learning resource is dialogue, LTM is more likely to be sequestered into working memory where it was subjected to cognitive processing.
Regarding the conventional perception of talk as being a distractor to attention, the uncoupling of talk from its social function( giving voice to cognitive differences as the mechanism to establish self-esteem) has a demonstrable consequence upon cognitive processes. The conventional lesson plan aims to inhibit talk about subjective experiences in favour of objective engagement with the learning resource at hand, i. e. the worksheet, ICT activity, video etc. Though the resource may be well positioned within the ZPD of students, the student mind does not voluntarily pay attention to the resource because it has little
32 SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 67 NO 1