Haley Holt - Chapter 6

a) I found myself profoundly impacted by the following excerpt from page 209 of the reading:

         When our objective is simple recall – that is, when students  need to retrieve classroom material very quickly, to ‘know it cold’ – then wait time should be short.  Students  may sometimes benefit from rapid-fire drill and practice to learn information and skills to  automaticity.  But when our instructional goals include more complex processing of ideas and issues, longer wait time may give both our students and us the time needed to think things through.

I have only taught math, but I could imagine this could apply in many other content areas, however, I find myself expecting my students to have a high level of automaticity when it comes to basic skills – multiplication, division, adding and subtracting integers, shapes and graphs of functions, factoring and various pieces of function equations, etc.  I often have very little wait time when discussing these topics and often make my students create gestures according to correct responses for their responses.  At the same time, I can also reflect back and say that I instruct my students to write down written responses for questions that are more complex and require greater thinking/connection making.  In turn, I wonder if these are successful strategies in fostering both simple recall as well as complex processing. 

In addition, as I read this, I was in the middle of going through Cognitive Coach training with Knox County Schools.  One of the things we talked about today was pausing.  With pausing, you allow both yourself as the coach, as well as the coachee time to think and then react vs. reacting before thinking.

So, all that to say, I think I want my kids to understand/know/show that they have both simple recall knowledge, which may seem tedious to learn, but helps them answer complex questions about all types of authentic problems and tasks.

I apologize for the disjoint nature of this post, but my brain is full and bouncing around with ideas as a result of this reading on top of that training.

b) As far as my case study – it is regarding high school students seniors that are unengaged.  Based on cognitive views of learning and what I would want as a teacher – basically, I would want the behavior to chance.  From a cognitive perspective this means I need to encourage and foster a change in thinking for these students.  In other words, I need help them foster goals and thinking about the class that will help them be successful in the class.  First, this would take knowing their thoughts on the class, why they are there, etc.  From this point, it would require us creating rapport – so they trust me and I trust them.  From there, it seems I would want to foster buy-in into the course to the point that they become engaged, stop being disruptive to my class, but more importantly, understand the class as a means to an end, at the very least, so they understand there is some importance for them in being successful/attentive in the class.