The Knowledge Principle

The Knowledge Principle

Good learning designs recognize concepts as tools, situate those concepts in the context of their use reflecting authentic activity, conceptual tool, and culture, and analyze content for generalizable knowledge.

I’ll be honest, I’m a little on the fence about the idea of concepts as a tool. I can understand how that makes sense in secondary grades, but in elementary grades, the learning goal is learning the concept, and it might not be fully realized or applied until later on. Sometimes don’t you just need to understand the concept so that other functions of the world make sense? On the other hand, I completely see how “find the greatest common factor” should not be the learning goal. In fact, the learning goal can’t be accomplished if students don’t have a chance to apply the skill in a context that isn’t just a practice problem. This goes back to the idea from the Situated Cognition that says students have to understand how to use the tool, which also means they have to understand the culture of the tool. Students can’t fully understand greatest common factor until they observe a situation in which they think “hmm, maybe if I could figure out the greatest common factor I could figure this out.”

When considering design processes, it’s important to include Authentic Activities, Background Building Activities, and Constructing Activities. This I wholeheartedly agree with. We can’t get around the fact that we explicitly need to teach salient vocabulary and math procedures! But then once that has been taught, the students need a chance to practice it in a way that’s going to be meaningful to them. I think if teachers are providing authentic enough activities, we might be able to eliminate that “when am I ever going to need this” question. I do have one caveat, however. Sometimes, especially with EL students or low income students that lack their own background knowledge, the background activities take more time than I’d like them to. I can’t get to including Authentic Activities or Constructing Activities because the students require so much of the Background Activities. I have one class that includes mostly TAG and Young Scholars students, and one that has a lot of ELs and SPED students, and it’s incredible the difference (in just two weeks!) in activities we do in these two classes. It’s really a shame, because I want my second class to see how multiples are used in the real world like my first class is getting the chance to, but the second class is still having trouble skip counting and applying vocabulary words. I wish timing wasn’t a factor.

I also wish timing wasn’t a factor when it comes to exit experiences. The amount of time it takes for students to work up to an exit experience is unfortunately sometimes time that we don’t have. But I definitely see the value in an exit experience--in the real world, when we work hard for something, we get something out of it, and students deserve to get more than a good grade.

This week, I’m going back to my classroom thinking about how I can balance Authentic/Constructing Activities and Background Building Activities. I’m pretty confident I can make that balance work for my homeroom class, as they have a collectively broader background knowledge, but I’m nervous about my second class. I’ve seen already that they take longer to learn a new concept, and still need more practice with things that the first class can work with functionally. I don’t want my second class to miss out on authentic activities--what I’m sure the students consider “the fun stuff”--but I also need to make sure I’m giving them what they need. I’m wondering if there’s a way I can better infuse background activities in with authentic activities.