SBLAC 5: Incremental Cognizance
The benchmark curriculum is a type of standards-based curriculum. The SBLAC system (remember? Skills-based Learning and Assessment Curriculum) is a type of benchmark curriculum. SBLAC assumes that higher order thinking is a product of intellectual capacity. Intellectual capacity is created and expanded through the accumulation of skills and knowledge stored in a person’s mind like a tool kit. Just as there is an infinite variety of tools based upon use, specialization, quality and the experience of the person using the tool, intellectual skills have infinite variety.
When we set out to establish a true standards-based curriculum such as SBLAC, we must first identify the skills and knowledge that will make up the benchmarks. What are the standards? Fortunately, we have two source documents which provide the pool from which to select the standards; CCSS and ACT’s CRS for core subjects and ISBE’s ILS for non-core subjects. Our chore is merely to determine which of them to benchmark and where to put them sequentially. For purposes of college readiness, nearly all of the CRS and much of the CCSS skills are relevant. With the exception of a few CCSS high school standards and late high school ILS descriptors much of the late grade school continuum is rather sporadic for a focused approach. The ELA reading and writing standards become esoteric in that they take off on tangents which, if not fully developed in earlier years, become new information rather than developmental skill building. It must be clear that both the CRS and the CCSS are progressive and sequential. Therefore, placement within a curriculum map must be carefully considered. Identification and placement of the targeted, benchmark skills are crucial.
For every skill taught in grade school, there is a set of sub-skills which must be mastered before the new skill – the benchmark, in this case – can be mastered. Once mastered, this benchmark becomes a sub-skill of the next level of skills and benchmarks. The progressive nature of skills and knowledge must be evident to the individual accumulating the skill (i.e., the student) in order to assimilate it into the skill set or tool kit. When teachers and students think of resources to assist in problem-solving, be it math or ELA, these mental skills are as valuable, if not more so, than dictionaries, graphing calculators, progression charts or rulers. Just as a tradesman has course and fine tools from which to choose, a problem solver needs a progressive set of intellectual skills which may be applied to a given situation. But the problem-solver must be aware that the skill exists, what it is used for, and when to apply it given the situation.
Often children are taught skills and have accumulated knowledge for which they have no known purpose or application. Just as often, a teacher becomes frustrated by a child who may have demonstrated mastery or proficiency of a skill previously but cannot bring the skill to bear when needed at a different time or within a different context. A child will claim to not know information or how to do something when the teacher knows absolutely that the child has successfully negotiated the same terrain earlier. What went wrong? Is this child just lazy?
A child can master a skill only if it is presented as a skill. More often than not, however, children learn tricks and tidbits that they perform on certain cues. This is a basic drawback of content-based instruction which relies on units of information. Remove the trained cue (attempt to apply a skill within a distinctly different context) and the trick is gone. Unaware that the trick has value outside of the initial context, without the original context the tidbit becomes trivia. Try to connect the dots with no numbering system. This is what happens to students who perform tricks in class to satisfy a short-term requirement from a specific teacher within a specific unit of study. The phenomenon is common in content-based curricula because topic-related units are taught followed by unit tests. There is no appreciation that a valuable skill, which has relevance in a multitude of applications, may be utilized by the child as a gift to be placed in his/her tool kit. Students (and, perhaps, the teacher) may be clueless that a valuable skill has been brought to bear in a problem-solving way.
There is a metacognitive transition which must occur for the child to claim ownership of the new skill. He/she must acknowledge the event. Children know that to master a new Wii® application a person must start slow and train the fingers and hands to make certain, often times unnatural, movements in association with a television screen in order to negotiate a new game. The more they play, the better they become. Eventually, they can show others how to negotiate particular aspects of the game because of their own mastery of the necessary skills. The relative value of such mastery notwithstanding, this is a metacognitive experience. The child (or adult) deliberately thinks about what mental and physical skills to bring to bear in order to solve problems and negotiate obstacles. Once mastery evolves into expertise, deliberate thought is not necessary to bring the basic skills to bear and the child (or adult) manipulates the challenges and obstacles with ease. At this point, the deliberate thought can be focused on improvement of skills and nuances of the game, itself. It is the same thought process which must be tapped into for the child to learn algebra or English grammar.
We can identify the skills and knowledge. But we seem to have significant difficulty both incorporating them into our classroom goals and objectives and developing strategies which encourage children to focus on the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in life after high school. Why is it so difficult to focus on those tasks we have identified? Why can’t we train, instruct, assess, and develop the skills we want the students to master? Why do we spend so much time doing other things? Tangents! We spend a lot of our time and our children’s time with, well, drivel when we need to focus on the things that experts say are necessary for the children’s success in life after high school; and for what the state is paying us to teach, it seems pretty plain and simple.
The basic idea of SBLAC is that for students to progress beyond the Third Grade Brain they have to know that there is meaning and value to this whole education thing. They also must be shown how the progression works. They are not as smart as they think they are, but they are not dumb, either.
Regarding the need for metacognition, it may be possible that it is unnecessary for deep understanding and there could even be people, I imagine, capable of a certain level of complex communication and/or expert thinking without knowing it (please read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Dr. Oliver Sacks). But these tasks of deep understanding, complex communication, and expert thinking have serious limitations when considered independent of conscious thought. To deeply understand something without knowing it is clearly the exception. To unwittingly engage in complex communication seems absurd. For the mind to conduct expert thinking unaware that it is taking place is an infinitesimally rare event.
Naturally brilliant people will use their minds to gather extensive knowledge. The experts are capable of being experts only in so much as they are aware of their expertise. Even so, technical expertise is only as valuable as its technical currency, which requires constant and continual updating and upgrading. Expert thinkers must be aware and conscious of their thought processes in order to be of value. Problem solving demands that the person or people solving the problem possess the potential skills and knowledge to do the work.
The idea that person can develop his/her mind is not at all unlike the athlete (or any person for that matter) developing muscles on the body. With or without a toned body, a person can go to the gym and “work out.” But an un-toned person can lift weights, do exercises, get tired and leave sweaty and will have accomplished little more that lifting weights, doing exercises, and getting tired and sweaty. If that was the purpose, then hallelujah. Themselves, these attributes do not assume a quality workout and likely do not portend a well-toned physique. While it may be doing work or even working out, it is random physical activity that likely risks injury and may or may not have value other than psychological.
The modern gym is equipped with weight machines which identify for the user which muscles or muscle group a particular activity is to utilize and strengthen/tone. The person doing the exercise must consciously be aware of which muscles he/she is using to perform the task and limit exertion to those muscles. To do otherwise risks injury because the direction, arc, hand and leg placement are specifically designed to work with a particular muscle or muscle group in a specific manner. It is particularly risky when one overloads the weight before he/she has control of his/her muscles. The mind will convince the body to get the weight moving through the repetitions but all the muscles of the body will pitch in to get the job done. Back and groin strains are a common result.
By consciously training the muscles, one can build targeted muscles and muscle groups and develop physical definition through a conscious, directed regimen of physical exercise. The mind is similarly developed. Unfortunately, however, we seat our students in the classroom and do not tell them what muscles we’re working on. To the child many classrooms are places where educational things happen like the gym, where sweaty things happen. Continuing with the weight machine metaphor, often we want to teach and learn more so we overload the weights (by increasing the “rigor”) we are using and the kids just give up. Equally as dangerous is when students cannot push the weight and we simply lighten the load, often to the point of no real work being accomplished, anyway.
The point here is the need for conscious recognition by the student that the work is being done for a specific purpose which has specific take-aways. The metacognitive acknowledgement demands that the student is aware of his/her own thought processes. The child must know the skill, the value of the skill, where it lies within the established skill bank, and what its purpose is in a variety of applications. Without these conscious attributes present during the instructional activity, learning is marginalized. We’re back to performing tricks or less.
The problem, of course, with performing tricks is that as an intellectual activity it is essentially mindless. While the activity being taught is, from the standpoint of the teacher, problem-solving, from the point of view of the student these tricks and activities are ethereal. They are not tied to real life regardless of how well the teacher may present the functional application of the material. Too few students appreciate the progressive nature of problem-solving and continually start back at the beginning of any individual task at hand. Unable to search their own knowledge for solutions and processes previously associated with a specific challenge they will “best guess” with a related trick or give up altogether (a la B, B, B, B . . .). Without an acknowledged tool kit students are helpless.
So forget the tricks. They are little more than random, fluffy educational activities designed to make us all feel good about ourselves and our students. Unless classroom activities are specifically focused on building the skill base, unless they are designed to put a tool in the tool kit or improve a tool already there, we are wasting precious time. Regarding the Rigor and Relevance Framework (See http://www.icle.net/rrr.html.), Christine LaRocco of the International Center for Leadership in Education tells us that we must keep relevance in front of rigor. Particularly when students are failing our expectation already, making instruction more difficult or complex is not a solution. We need to make our instruction relevant, first.
And be mindful that the skill base is built incrementally. Just as a person cannot walk into a gym one day and walk out with a perfectly toned body, a student’s tool kit cannot be filled up in a single semester. Most students are unaware that they even have a tool kit much less know that they have any tools to put in it. They must be made aware of the skills and knowledge that they possess. They must be enlightened as to the progressive nature of both CCSS and CRS. They must accept a realistic perception of their skill levels in the various disciplines before any meaningful progress can be made. Just as a person who goes to the gym to get fit, lose weight, or train for the marathon, students need a good diagnostic sense of where they are relative to the standards, good advice on where to set their goals, and a plan and tracking system to measure progress. Only then are they ready to begin filling up their tool kits.