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Masterful Instruction: Wiring the Brain
Susan Jones, Director,
Human brains adapt to the environment in which they exist, meeting challenges and coping with peculiarities. This adaptation is manifested in the creation and strengthening of networks, memory traces, and communication lines which empower the brain to function. Each time the human brain is forced to go beyond standard connections existing within its architecture, it literally grows connections or synapses to form the new lines of communication and intertwine networks to expand meaning and ability. As orchestrators of environments, educators must create classroom activities that grow brains for these new connections. . .
If futurists are correct, the 21st Century is indeed going to be a thinking century. Projects and tasks will reach levels of complexity requiring the collaboration and creative solutions of many skilled people— so the simple repeating of information to prove mastery is no longer adequate. Workers will need to apply an expanding body of information in new, unique scenarios: to strategize and discover solutions to arising dilemmas. This takes skill to a new level: one of problem solving and collaborating.
How do we develop this ability in young people? This intelligence that enables students to dig into a deep repertoire of personal experiences, sort out those with application, recombine them to solve the dilemma at hand? How do we impart to our students the skills and abilities to function beyond the classroom, and in the workplace of the 21st Century? How do we turn-out students from our institutions that are good problem solvers, flexible workers, plus effective in teaming and communication skills?
Professional educators must orchestrate learning environments that entrap children: from which they cannot escape without learning. In the eyes of the student, there must be authenticity and meaningfulness to tasks. Processes and scenarios need to engage the human brain, motivate human behavior, and cause it to learn because there is a reason to do so. The entire process results from careful approaches to instructional delivery, with an acceptance of the role of content versus process versus product. It is a classroom environment that alters and sets the wiring of the human brain to that which allows for desired cognitive functioning.
Content
The traditional classroom has too long focused on a demonstration of mastery in formal assessments of content, or application of knowledge and skills. There is generally a pre-conceived notion of the form, correct idea, proper manner of reasoning, or appropriate appearance in teaching and assessment. A consistent call for replication and uniformity exists. In such an approach, content is an “end,” rather than a means to an end: there is a commitment to a body of basic information and skill to provide all components of solutions needed to function in society. It is static and defined. Yet with today’s exploding quantities of new information, mastering information that can be quickly obsolete is both futile and unproductive.
Brain Friendly Scenario
In orchestrating extended learning scenarios involving authenticity, there should be a defined framework and plan that is clearly understood by students. A task requiring a final product is assigned, and clear criteria for excellence of the final product is set. This may entail the sharing of exemplars, explanations, and rubrics governing assessment; but in any case, the students will have no doubt as to what mastery must include. Students are given a specific time period for completing the work, as well as requirements and rules that must govern their process in completing the product. They are given the mandate that this product can be in any form they choose, as long as they follow the “rules” and demonstrate mastery of the skills/content detailed by the teacher.
The product assigned includes evidence of mastery as defined by the teacher through those rules. The educator must first have a clear understanding of curriculum requirements appropriate for the grade level or discipline being taught. Perhaps these are drawn from state standards, benchmarks, or school district mandates. But they are not negotiable, and there is accountability on the part of educators that their student master them. They form the framework for the accomplishment of an assigned task — in the form of expectations or guidelines toward the accomplishment of some product or demonstration. These can be content-based or skill based, but they are essentials. Assessment of the final product will be based upon the mastery of these, via a pen-and-pencil summative assessment, a rubric, a performance rating or a combination of means.
The process or “work stage” of an effective learning scenario, on the other hand, is multi-faceted and evolving. It is here that real instruction, real manipulation, and real learning occurs. Students must strategize to determine a way to meet all teacher-demands in order to produce the assigned product. There will be a need for information and resources (obtained through acquisition of research skills or practice of skills already mastered, building and reinforcing earlier learning), instruction from the teacher and information acquired from primary and secondary sources other than the teacher. Inherent in the process will be:
- generation of new ideas
- creative, divergent thinking to determine what “pieces” are needed to accomplish the task
- collaboration between the student and others to acquire knowledge and skill
- the “putting together” of pieces in a workable fashion
- manifestation of the work in a desired product (displaying the assigned evidence of mastery).
The importance of Product
In doing this, students go well beyond the lower level thinking skills of Bloom’s Taxonomy of the cognitive domain—far beyond simple application. They must take information and analyze it, determine which bits and pieces are applicable to the dilemma (assignment) at hand, and arrange these through synthesis into a new combination appropriate to a chosen solution. The final product must then be viewed in its totality — to determine its worth and value, according to the criteria set in the initial teacher-mandated rules. Now the student has carried thinking and action through all higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: to create a product using content as a vehicle, skills as an enabler, strategizing as a planning tool, formative assessment to “diagnose” progress and allow for fine-tuning along the way, and evaluation of mastery. Does any of this belittle the product, so long held in high esteem by educators as the most important part of the learning process? No: it only recognizes its role in the entire scenario. Product is the snapshot proof, the manifestation of all trials in the process. Most importantly, product grows self-esteem: for self-esteem comes from accomplishment.
Keys to Excellence
But as professionals engaged in the empowerment of young people, the process segment of the learning scenario is far more important. Inherent in this process stage is choice. Choice is foundational to any creative process that involves strategizing anddivergent thought. Its presence improves positive brain activity, with cognitive processing in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, as well as emotional centers of the brain. It increases problem solving ability, as it is in reality the practicing of problem solving — sculpting the brain through formation of connections enhancing proper communication of appropriate networks. And it increases intrinsic motivation, as self-selection of avenues for such processing reflect the emotional and attention preferences of the person(s) involved. Such bonuses for learning in the classroom!
Choice, then, becomes the springboard for the brain’s creativity — to enable one to become a problem solver, to think divergently with a challenge that limits resources and/or time. It requires more than simple imagination; it requires knowledge -- plus judgment based on teacher/student-generated criteria. This is where the brain is forced to grow beyond standard neural connections, to form new connections and networks to comprehend and solve. This is where the brain’s architecture is changed through adaptation to demands of the environment. This is how a human’s repertoire of experience becomes a deep pool from which to draw new components for novel combinations to solve problems. From an environment orchestrated by the teacher to grow intelligence!
Accessing content, thinking with content, and manipulating content is the skill combination of the future. Note that all three have to do with producing — with doing: not the replication or repeating back of content. And it is all possible in a learning scenario that forces brains to grow new connections while producing within the confines of a rigid framework. It is a scenario that forces brains to go beyond standard connections and rote memory -- to develop and demonstrate mastery!
Bibliography
Brooks, Jacqueline Grennon and Martin G. Brooks, In Search of Understanding the Case For Constructivist Classrooms. ASCD, Alexandria, VA, 1993.
DeLisle, Robert, How to Use Problem-Based Learning in the Classroom. ASCD, Alexandria, VA 1997
Harris, Douglas E. and Judy F. Carr, How to Use Standards in the Classroom. ASCD, Alexandria, VA, 1996.
Herman, Joan L., Pamela R. Aschbacher, and Lynn Winters, A Practical Guide to Alternative Assessment. ASCD, Alexandria, VA, 1992.
Lewin, Larry and Betty Jean Shoemaker, Great Performances: Creating Classroom-Based Assessment Tasks. ASCD, Alexandria, VA, 1998.
Sternberg, Robert J., Successful Intelligence. Simon and Schuster, NY, 1996.
Torp, Linda and Sara Sage, Problems as Possibilities: Problem-Based Learning for K-12 Education. ASCD, Alexandria, VA, 1998.
Walker, Decker, “Technology and Literacy: Raising the Bar,” Educational Leadership, Volume 57, No. 2, October 1999, p, 18. Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA.
Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design. ASCD, Alexandria, VA,1998.
© Susan Jones 2001
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