Patterns

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This is a response to a critique and reading in Week 5 of the Cognition and Learning 6411. The reading is:

Moskaliuk, J., Bokhorst, F., & Cress, U. (2016). Learning from others’ experiences: How patterns foster interpersonal transfer of knowledge-in-use. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 69–75.

The response prompt is:

  • Combining Willingham’s (2009) explanations in Chapter 4 and the findings of the article above, would you use the pattern format in your teachings to reinforce the abstraction and knowledge transfer in your classes and why?
  • According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, at which stage/stages do you think a teacher should use the pattern format (e.g. remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating)? Why?

To begin, you need to know that I’m chuckling behind these lines since I’m seeing my patterns showing!

You’ve asked if we would use a pattern format in teaching to reinforce knowledge transfer and abstraction, and if we do, why. I teach students to become teachers. In this challenging world of education, there are so many variables and problems, there is no way to predict or see a pattern in any given day. The only commonality will be fluid and dynamic change, from one lesson to another, from one class to another. Not only that, but, just as you stated Pinar, the knowledge-in-use is implicit and tacit. Learning to teach is “embedded in daily experience and thus highly situational” (Moskaliuk, Bokhorst & Cress, 2015, p. 70). Teachers who become masters of the craft, those who can think in abstraction and transfer in a blink, are hard pressed to explain why they do things in certain ways or how they detect the patterns in the chaos of the classroom.

So with that in mind, how do you teach someone to observe the underlying patterns, learn from the experiences of others, and build the internalized and externalized actions that make up quality teaching? You start with basic patterning of course. Mozkaliuk et al. (2016) state that “from a cognitive perspective, patterns are external text structures that are analogous to the internal representation of knowledge-in-use” (p.70). Enter the much hated planning templates. Every educator who goes through the Faculty will say the same thing, and bemoan their use, while not recognizing that its the patterning that is important. Abstract thinking and transference of learning won’t happen without it.

The lesson plan format we require teacher candidates to use becomes the foundational ‘patterning’ document, where the basic sequence of a lesson is explicitly learned. The unit plan template provides explicit opportunities for teacher candidates to recognize the patterns in building a series of lessons toward a culminating task. From these explicit patterns, teacher candidates can then internalize the patterns they see delivered in action, from the teachers in the Faculty of Education, their associate teachers, or from mentor teachers. When teacher candidates are on placement, they experience firsthand the patterns in the daily ebb and flow of a classroom, come to recognize the pattern in the actions/reactions of teaching, and see how teachers deal with problem situations when the pattern doesn’t go as planned. Along with this experience in patterning, teacher candidates are expected to reflect daily on what they are seeing, hearing, feeling, and understanding. In this way teacher candidates externalize their observations and experiences of patterns from another person, or of their own, thus strengthening the analogic reasoning of knowledge-in-use to new or unknown situations in future teaching experiences (Moskaliuk et al., 2015).

The second question asks at what stage/stages of Bloom’s taxonomy should patterns be introduced. In my opinion, based on experience in the classroom, and current educational climates, pattern detection and recognition should be done at all ages and stages, both explicitly and implicitly. Patterns for remembering information are as important as patterns to enhance higher order thinking skills, such as evaluation and creating.

Let me use a personal teaching scenario as an example. I teach media production to teacher candidates. I start with basic information about the history of teaching media, the core concepts that encompass media instruction, and the necessary elements when teaching media. Since this is basic knowledge, it is stuff students need to remember – lower level thinking, but there’s a pattern to the remembering. The media triangle becomes the pattern. Every time I reference this basic information, I’ll make a triangle shape with my hands, thus engaging student’s internalizations of these core concepts.

When we get into the evaluation and creation of media productions, the patterns I use are the storyboard and the story arc. These patterns become the internalized text structures that allow students to learn from other examples e.g. from the StoryCenter, while they create their own story patterns. These patterns also support the externalization and transfer of the patterns to their own creations. But I also integrate my hand sign of the media triangle as a reminder of the basic knowledge about media that the students are applying to their media productions. As Moskaliuk et al. (2016) state “patterns seem to foster knowledge integration, and, in turn, knowledge transfer to new situations” (p. 74).  So patterns are critical for every level of Bloom’s taxonomy, at every grade level, and every type of teaching and learning event.

Reference

Moskaliuk, J., Bokhorst, F., & Cress, U. (2016). Learning from others’ experiences: How patterns foster interpersonal transfer of knowledge-in-use. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 69–75.

Image attribution: https://pixabay.com/en/fractal-pattern-abstract-chaos-520434/