Why Engagement Is not Enough

 

Karin Hess wants teachers to know that schema matters. In Chapter 3 of Rigor by Design, not Chance, Hess shares citation after citation that establishes that expert learners have schemas that support the learner in the construction of “mental representations, search for appropriate problem-solving strategies,” and allows learners to “evaluate the strategies and store information for later use” (Hess, 2023, p. 56).  This suggests that schema, which is built from prior knowledge and experiences, can serve as the glue that holds together learning and enables students to dig deeply into content, knowledge and skills.  Not only that, because “learning activities that build schemas (mental models) in each content domain is crucial to students’ long-term retrieval,” teachers need to consider how to build schema if they want students to transfer their new learning to different situations (Hess, 2023, p. 56).

Building schema is not as easy as going over a few slides with background knowledge or key terms; rather, teachers must consider the unifying concepts and essential skills they want to target for deeper learning. They must also be able to analyze the content “parts,” that is: consider the concepts, skills and structures that interact within the learning. For example, a teacher must consider what processes and skills a student may need to answer a problem or write a thesis. This means teachers need to know their students  and be able to answer questions like: what do my  students know? What misconceptions do my students bring? Teachers   Among the schemas Hess says teachers must build are:

• · Structural schemas, or helping students understand frameworks that guide content. Take a story plot: early in a student’s schooling, they will learn parts of a plot and start to apply those parts to understand what we call “story grammar,’ or the typical story structures. This helps students anticipate what will happen and discern what information is important and what may be extraneous.
• ·         Procedural schema, a understanding of a process, such as a math computation. It is important, though that teachers help students see that most problems offer multiple procedures by which they can be solved. Procedural schemas may also help students identify important steps they may need to take in the classroom, such as checking work or annotating a problem.

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham poses a principle that “memory is a residue of thought,” (p. 25, 2021), which means that in order to really and truly learn something, students must be engaged with and think about the content. Willingham admits that both motivation (a desire to learn) and repetition (practice of a skill) can support learning, but these alone do not support memory, a necessary component for deep learning. “The obvious implication for teachers,” Willingham writes, “is that they must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material.”  

While a seemingly simple idea, it is also important to recognize that when it comes to academic learning, meaning can shift with different contexts and display different characteristics.  Willingham discusses the  characteristics of a piano: as a musical instrument, as a symbol of wealth, as heavy object to move. His research found  that when prompting a subject about a piano using  their understanding of piano (ie: “it’s  heavy and makes music”), people are far more likely to identify the meaning of piano if the cues shared use the characteristics of piano they already have stored a piano. 

Therefore, in schools, we not only have to think about what we want our students to know, but what aspect of that content we need our students to think about.Doing this, Willingham warns, is not as simple as schema building activities: in fact, he warns, without a clear understanding of how schema and learning targets interact, a teacher may actually use schema building activities inappropriately. For example, Willingham shares of a learning activity his nephew engaged in: to use a plot diagram to understand a story structure. However, the teacher had students draw pictures to represent the plot elements, a decision Willingham argues distracted his nephew because he “thought very little about the relation between different plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a castle” (Willingham, 2021, p. 35).  This is a problem because, as Willingham notes, we cannot store everything we learn away, so our mind stores what we have thought about. So his nephew will remember a castle but not how rising action introduces a conflict into the narrative because that was what he thought about. 

As a mentor teacher and instructional coach, I have seen this happen all the time: teachers come to me excited because the students have been engaged by a lesson they planned. The teacher may even show me a work product: a video or illustration depicting a key concept or idea. It’s true: students like novel learning strategies and there are some strategies that can “maximize” that engagement. The problem, though, is that often these activities do little to prepare students for the end assessments.  When I ask, “Why did you have your students create wanted posters for Lenny?” in a unit about Of Mice and Men, they can only articulate that this reinforces what happened in the book.  While this is true, is that really all we want our students to know about the novel?  My next step is to pull out the curriculum map and look at the unit plan.  What we find is that the essential questions and enduring understandings focus on big ideas like justice,worker’s rights, or the “American dream.”  If too much time is spent thinking about wanted posters and Lenny's actions which resulted in an accidental death, the learner is not thinking about the lack of resources or safety Lenny endures as a migrant worker, or the vigilante justice that condemns him wihout taking into account his intellectual disability or his inability to have purposefully killed somebody. While I want these teachers to make sure the students are "getting" what they are reading, the really engaging and stimulating activities should have those students asking powerful questions about the consequences and causes of what has happened, not just the sequence of events themselves. 

This lends important credence to the connection Hess makes to building schema and actionable assessment cycles. Before planning for deep learning, teachers need to build clarity and really identify and understand that “enduring understandings are insights gained over time, cutting across units of studies and grade levels” (Hess, 2023, p. 61). Once those enduring understandings have been identified, teachers can spend time thinking about the schema that may show patterns and relationships and prepare students to deeply think about the content. Whether teachers use mind maps, sketch noting, picture sorts or graphic organizers to build schema, the important thing is that teachers use those activities to gain insight into whether the schema being built prepares students for the essential understandings that truly matter. In essence, these activities become assessments that must be constantly analyzed to drive instruction and to make sure that the students are thinking about what we want them to. The difficult truth for teachers, then, is that engagement matters, but only that engagement leads students to think deeply about what we want them thinking deeply about.

 

Hess, Karin. (2023). Rigor by design, not chance: Deeper thinking through actionable instruction and assessment. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). 

 

WILLINGHAM, D. T. (2021). Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say? American Educator, 45(2), 34–38.