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Jonas Park's Response to "Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents: What We Don't Know about the Potential": 

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Jonas Park's Response to "Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents: What We Don't Know about the Potential": 

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Mark W, Conley asks a following question in pages 97: "How can teachers understand adolescent literacy, if they don't understand much about motivation or learning?" (Conley 97). In fact, Conley argues that some teachers don't know the content so much that they have problems "articulating what students want to know" (Conley 97). I think what Conley believes that students will be willing to learn from their teachers if their teachers are willing to listen to and respond to students in their classes (Conley 102).

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“How the Brain Works” made me think of kinesthetic activities that I have done in some of my classes. At different points in high school and college literature courses and high school history courses, my classmates and I did taste tests or physical activities that made the subjects more memorable. For example, we tried Turkish delight whilst reading “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, since that food is one of the main character’s favorite sweets during a college course on children’s literature. My classmates and I also were walked through Revolutionary war military patterns that enabled an army to continuously shoot in a high school US History course.

What Inglis says about work in the classroom seems to show the value of these exercises, she says that according to Medina’s “Brain Rules” both being able to exercise and use all of their senses in the classroom helps students learn. She explains that, “According to some neuroscientists, aerobic activity, such as walking, running or other cardio exercise boosts the ability of the brain to focus, pay attention, and solve problems, which is precisely how educators desire their students to participate in a class setting” (Inglis 30). Sure, kneeling down to load a fake gun and standing up to fire it repeatedly isn’t the most aerobic exercise in the world but it is cardio exercise. If neuroscientists are correct about the connection between exercise and focus, it is no wonder that I remember that lesson more than half a decade after it happened. Inglis also notes that each different sense is important for learning and states that, “Smell and taste are, believe it or not, primarily emotional observations” (Inglis 33). For me that means that trying foods from books is valuable, because it enable students to make deeper insights about characters from those books and feel more connected to them. I guess my question boils down to what do you think of these activities. Are their practical applications for the activities that I have described doing in classrooms?

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Coming from a performing arts background, I was really invested in looking at the relationship between learning and movement. specifically how it was identified in the text to how "research suggests the relationship between movement and learning continues throughout life" (Movement and Learning 85). We, as musicians, inherently physicalize our learning from the beginning of our musical education, training our muscle memory for proper technique, passage navigation, etc. For myself, I have noticed this connection between movement and study has materialized in other places. When trying to memorize some set of facts, I will pace around the room, using my body's momentum to ingrain the knowledge into me. In classrooms I am aloud to get up and walk around in, whether in a moment of concentration, passion, or confusion, seem to deepen my understanding of the conversation, almost as if it makes it more real.

What I think is worth while to consider, in regards to this article, is the current academic landscape, with students hunched over their computers all day, grasping at concepts that are hard enough as it to learn when they are there on the board in front of you. I think it is more critical than ever that teachers are accepting of student movement during the class time, not forcing them to sit still with their camera's on staring blankly at their monitor. The physical and mental fatigue that I have felt personally accumulate is only remedied by when I turn off my camera and just walks around the room briefly, still paying attention, headphones in, but allowed to take up my own physical space in my learning.

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As I continue to browse the teacher forums, reading commentary online or listening to dissatisfied teachers on YouTube, I constantly question if I am in the right field. They all echo similar sentiments, “don’t get your hopes up; don’t design your dream classroom until you gain your students’ respect,” and so on. I try to maintain a level head, a realist not pessimistic disposition. Maybe they’re right, maybe I just need to keep my head down and do my work.

But I’m encouraged by articles like this one. Crumly characterizes students as “active participants,” a contrast with the antihero students I read about. She talks about “changing the balance of power from the teacher to the student” a contrast to the grave warnings I’ve been given to maintain control of my classroom and not let the students walk over me.

I’m sure there is a healthy balance somewhere, but I struggle figuring out who to believe. I optimistically want to point to this article and say “I told you so,” but I’m not a teacher yet and I haven’t told anyone anything. I want to design a classroom that caters to emotional intelligence, with comfortable seating and low lighting. Crumly talks about the militaristic design of traditional classrooms and the authoritarian teacher lecturing for hours. Should I be afraid that students will spill drinks on my new couches, or run from a broken classroom model that stamps out individuality?

It seems ironic, but the more my fears of being responsible for the learning and maturity of multiple teenagers grows, the more I want to step back and allow the students to become independent learners. Is it right to be uncomfortable? Unconfident? I don’t know, but if “all roads lead to Rome” and that fear motivates me to create a student-centered learning space, maybe in the end it isn’t a bad place to start.

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1.  Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents: What We Know about the Promise, What We Don’t Know about the Potential

Cognitive strategies are by definition the constructive actions taken with both digital and written texts where “good” readers and writers are constantly creating meaning. There is the notion on page 93 that science educations frequently mistrusts tests becaus the texts communicate misconceptions. I understand that because often the texts may discount the information students need but at the same time finding texts that do not create those misconceptions or reading certain parts of the text can be helpful to students. Also the text mentions that science candidates only or usually pass down to their students how they learned science and that is not always a good thing. In my personal science experience I enjoyed it but not all my teachers taught the best way that I was able to grasp and retain the material. My hope as a science educator is to learn new ways to integrate material. For example I never watched videos or studied digital texts in my class but I think they are an important way to help students realize how science is used in daily life and affects us as humans and animals. Using cognitive strategies such as diagrams to help students is something that is necessary that can assist in creating more memorable material.

1.   Fostering Kinesthetic Literacy through Exertion in Whole Body Interaction

I know that I am a kinesthetic learner and would love the “Pushing Pixels” activity. This activity allows participants to focus on synchronicity of actions using a modified pulley machine to match the movements of one other participant. There is digital recording of actions and positive reinforcement when participants are in sync. The researchers focus on two types of kinesthetic literacy; learning to move vs moving to learn.

The first is focusing on participants body awareness in order to acquire skills and techniques for physical activities

The second is “the physical activity in the context for a means of learning” (pg 2).

These two types of learning are essential in understanding social skills, competition and cooperation as well as knowing when and why different movements are appropriate and effective.

This article reminds me of the first day of dance class or learning to play volleyball. One helped me with the other and made it easier to understand because of my personal experience with dance. In terms of health getting up and moving around is essential instead of living a sedentary lifestyle. I wonder how I can incorporate this style of learning into my classroom such as with lab experiments or group projects. An example came to me about the cellular membrane of both animal or human cells. If the assignment asks students to use their bodies to show how certain organelles move will that help them understand plant and animal processes better or will the movement lose the importance of the material?

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I like how from the beginning of the scholarly article, Shanahan & Shanahan challenge notions of "literacy" pertaining to American children in the 1990s; that kids who have rudimentary reading skills or abilities are "literate" (39-40).  Shanahan et al. focus on specific examples, including when students first learn to use day-to-day vocabulary such as if, of, and the. The aforementioned students only know how to use and apply these words in specific contexts (40). Although Shanahan et al. don't write this verbatim in their article, they're alluding to problems when young kids (I believe the students in the example were kindergarteners) use rote memorization to learn new vocabulary. If students are taught to use and apply words in a variety of contexts, instead of a specific example, it will lead to more robust language proficiency and communication skills making learners of a new language more confident.

Shananan et al. advocate for advanced literacy instruction further challenging the notion that basic (for lack of a better word) language learning is insufficient (40-41). Shanahan et al. elaborate on this subject: how proficiency in a subject, ranging from learning a new language to studying chemistry, used to be taught. Therefore, if students knew the basics of a topic, it provided enough structure so they could teach themselves to master the material on their own (41). Using data from a range of vocational fields (from accountants to engineers), Shanahan et al. point out that once students ascend in their field, it requires greater mastery and a higher-level of learning in order to succeed (40-41).

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I enjoyed the Shanahan piece's deep dive into the different kinds of reading (and thinking) required by various disciplines. I've been involved in teaching both math and ELA, so it was useful for me to see some of the different literacies I've acquired described explicitly. I had fun noting where disciplinary literacies seemed to overlap with each other. For example, this description of chemistry literacy I felt also applied well to how I read (and teach) mathematics: “...in chemistry, different or alternative representations (e.g., pictures, graphs or charts, text, or diagrams) of an idea are essential for a full understanding of the concepts. These various representations are processed recursively as reading progresses” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 49-50). As a mathematician, I am constantly looking for new ways to represent a concept in order to better understand and teach it. And this description of history literacy applies extremely well to literature as well: “The point is that he reads with a view in which both author and reader are fallible and positioned” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 50). And this history issue is a problem to some extent in all subjects: “Students believe that they are reading to learn “the facts” and fail to take into account potential bias unless they are explicitly taught to do so” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 50).

Also, not to sound like a broken record, I would have really appreciated it if this study had included at least one creative or artistic disciple (painting, literature, music theory, etc.). They claim on page 46 that “one of the requirements of the initiative was to involve members of the arts and sciences in these efforts...” and while history is technically a liberal art, I would be more likely to describe it as a social science or part of the humanities. I guess maybe the thinking was that literacy discussions usually focus on literature, but it might have been revealing to include something like painting, as “reading” paintings is a very different form of literacy.

As for the “Movement and Learning” piece, I honestly found it very badly structured both as a piece of writing and as an argument. The most frustrating part for me was their incredibly loose and fluid definition of movement, and, later in the piece, they started equating the arts with movement, which baffled me. The quote from Norman Weinberger in the concluding paragraph doesn't even mention movement, instead extolling the virtues of “arts education” including that it “enhances creativity,” which is obvious and great, but not what the article was supposed to be about. The authors totally failed to back up or even clearly state how they believe arts education relates to movement. Obviously dance involves movement, but things like painting or drawing don't require any more movement than traditional academic activities such as writing. This is made even more confusing by immediately following a section on stretching, giving the impression to the hurried reader that stretching and/or movement enhances creativity, which might be true, but wasn't proven or even claimed within the text. In general, I think this piece needs a heavy rewrite, which is a shame because the topic was interesting to me.

Edit: I totally forgot I was supposed to include a question, so here it is: What do you think  complex literacy in your discipline(s) looks like?

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On page two of Jensen’s, “Movement and Learning” he discusses the erroneous perception of the cerebellum as a part of the brain that solely focuses on physical movements like gum chewing or walking etc. He delves into the complexity of the cerebellum and the possibility of its being the brain’s, ‘sleeping giant’ in the following passage:

What would happen if the cerebellum, an area most commonly linked to movement, turned out to be a virtual switchboard of cognitive activity? [...] the cerebellum [...] has some 40 million nerve fibers, 40 times more than even the highly complex optical tract. Those fibers not only feed information from the cortex to the cerebellum, but they feed them back to the cortex. If it was only for motor function, why are the connections so powerfully distributed in both directions to all areas of the brain?

Jensen confronts the age old dilemma of body and mind separation and in the past most educational pedagogy defined thinking as thinking and movement as movement. This often results in the unfair cutting of dance, theater, and physical education for the sake of math and sciences, history, writing etc in the face of financial crisis. His argument for motor development and learning as contingent on one another is backed by numerous case studies involving students who don’t move their bodies and students who do. Exercise not only shapes the heart, but also the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and corpus callosum. The quote above is interesting to me because it deals with the Cartesian question of “I think, therefore I am” and subverts it— knowing that our brain is fed information from our bodies lets us understand that,”I am, therefore I think”. I wonder how movement can be better  incorporated to disciplines that require you to sit down and read for extensive periods of time (some examples are provided like charades in class, or energizers after readings, but they are designed for in person classes), but I wonder what is best for the current online Zoom school format.

-Brian

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Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content Area Literacy, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan

‘Disciplinary literacy’ is a very off putting term at first. My initial thoughts when encountering the term in the title, had to do with the term discipline in the sense of punishment, yet we soon learn that disciplinary literacy has to do with academic disciplines. (This is just one example of how words like discipline make English so difficult; ugh, homonyms!). The Shanahans define Disciplinary literacy as, “Literacy skills specialized to history, science, mathematics, literature, or

other subject matter” (Pg. 44) What disciplinary literacy is seems to be the notion that students need to learn unique skills and techniques specific to their discipline; for example, a scientist uses different skills than a historian, and the way in which knowledge and information in constructed and shared is also different within the disciplines, thus the notion is that the literacy surrounding these disciplines are inherently different due to the unique way the disciplines are practiced. The Shanahans discuss how each discipline has “specialised literacies” and that those disciplines are accompanied by certain norms and expectations required to engage in these specialised literacies. The Shanahans posit that when one learns these norms and expectations one is then equipped to acquire a deeper appreciation and understanding of the literary content they encounter. The Shanahans also point out a sort of hierarchy in literacy, in which disciplinary literacy is on top (Basic Literacy→ Intermediate Literacy→ Disciplinary Literacy).

It seems that disciplinary literacy is an inherent part of liberal education, but less so in more traditional or conservative educational institutions. Disciplinary literacy seems to be a required ‘skill’ for the intersectionality of disciplines. For example to read Frankenstein as a Gothic literary work is common, but to read it through a scientific lens requires a different set of literacy skills unique to the norms and expectations found in the science field. My question is do others agree with my notion that disciplinary literacy is a requirement for academic intersectionality?

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Holly J Inglis’s piece “How the Brain Works” was simultaneously relaxing and distressing. The former because the technical, generous prose helped (me anyway) parse down the process of learning, especially down to a single word: “change” (29). It was interesting to think about how kind I am to others when great changes are going on in their life, or how attentive I am to transitions in my own life, mostly because if I’m not, the difficulty of it all will cause lots of spiraling.

Yet, the tone of a lot of classroom environments, arguably, is not in tune with validating the difficulty of the task. I fear the wedding of “routine” to “simple,” and that therefore any student who doesn’t immediately succeed believes—rather than that they are doing something immensely difficult and difficulty is very natural—they are simply not cut out for it.

Or, even worse, perhaps some teachers do not confront the reality of the task, which makes sense(!). I hate when people force me to realize I need to change, or change is thrust upon me anyway. If a teachers job is to force change upon students, this is a momentous task.

Inglis’s piece concretely breaks down the anatomy of the brain, and how learning affects the organ. The only question I have for this method, is that students brains do not exist in a vacuum. Emotions inflect learning (32-33), whether good or not, and often the emotions of students are being actively impacted by the social and political world, which a teacher has little control over. What are ways to think about the learning brain that acknowledges and recognizes and is willing to work with brains (in other words, people) which have been harmed?

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So if you have seen my writing, you might notice that it can be a bit...off putting?  Its also true in my speech, I sometimes use the wrong word than I intend too.  This is because I, like my dad, have Dyslexia, which makes reading very complicated (this ties into why I never take notes in class and why I avoid handwriting as much as I possibly can).  My dad has it as well.  However I am also from a hyper bibliophilic family, where reading is constant.  So despite the fact that I can struggle with mixing up words, I read unbelievably fast.  I can get through a massive book in only a few days, which helped me tremendously in academia. And a big part of the reason why is that my brain uses most of the short cuts and impression of words mentioned in the article, that I can sort of go around the words, as mentioned in page 127 of the article.  Ironically though, what helps me get through this personally is the flow of the words, if a book is written with a clear flow of words, then I can use that to sort of follow the words through pages.  But if the text is choppily written, full of platitudes, or worse dry, I find myself fixating on the words specifically and then I get stuck and find it unreadable, which is why I am so sensitive to poor writing in academia.  incidentally  , this text falls into that category.  Page 129 has the information I found the most useful, and yet was the most ineloquent in its language use.  When I finally got through it, I found it was really useful, the fact that people are able to get words they don't know via context clues (this is constant for me, I am always learning new words based on usage more than definition).  Also its fun seeing Chomsky in his linguistic work rather than his political.  The idea here "Meaning is cumulative, built upon a piece at a time."  My issue is that I don't really know what to do with the information in this article?  Like they have the sample story but I don't really see any practical advice to take from this.  I have the same problem with the other reading about Designing a Student-Centered Learning Environment, despite it having a better flow, it reads like an advert, a bunch of enthusiastic phases without practical examples or demonstrations of practice.

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In both pieces Goodman and Crumley, though writing in very different eras are both in some way speaking to the autonomous act of learning that must occur for students to fully grasp new information. Crumley’s article says this a little more explicitly, stating, Designing a student-centered classroom should be built on autonomy. It does not include or involve traditional teaching practices; rather, it is based on collaboration, project – and problem-based learning with integrated technology to allow open discussion, conversation, and debate between students… This does not make the instructor obsolete but, rather, changes the instructors rolls from the traditional ‘imparter of knowledge’ to that of a facilitator and coach of knowledge.” (Crumley 2) 	
	These is a relatively simple idea that we’ve come across in other classes and is often treated as a new idea in classroom teaching. And yet, Goodman hints at this notion of autonomy in his piece written in 1969. He discusses the work a child must go through to read, even if they appear to be struggling, their ability to read and decode information is a complex process that goes past the traditional, “‘end of the nose’ view of reading will not work. The reader is not confined to information he receives from a half inch of print in clear focus… Readers utilize not one, but three kinds of information simultaneously. Certainly without graphic and put there would be no reading. But, the reader uses syntactic and semantic information as well. He predicts and anticipates on the basis of this information, sampling from the print just enough to confirm his gas of what’s coming, to queue more semantic into tactic information. Redundancy and sequential constraints in language, which the reader reacts to, make this prediction possible. Even the blurred and shadowy images he picks up in the peripheral area of his visual field may help to trigger or confirm guesses.” (Goodman 132) 
	In this piece, Goodman is pointing out the role of the child’s thinking, uninterrupted by a teachers instructions, that allow him to learn to read. My question, following these lines of thought, is: what are some specific practices we can implement in the classroom that can allow students to push themselves in their thinking, analyzing, and synthesizing practices, and will help them grow far better than manual instruction from the teacher?   

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Thinking about this article, I found it interesting how the correlation between literacy and income has increased over time, but how simultaneously reading levels among students in middle and high school do not reflect this. I was interested in the theory presented which was disproven that if a high enough level of literacy is established early on, that more complex and specialized levels will automatically follow. On page 43, Shanahan states, "Strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into more complex skills that enable students to deal with the specialized and sophisticated reading of literature, science, history, and mathematics...Most students need explicit teaching of sophisticated genres, specialized language conventions, disciplinary norms of precision and accuracy, and higher-level interpretive processes" (43). I found it fascinating how the idea of disciplinary literacy, as in literacy pertaining to a specific discipline of study, was so difficult to grasp until general literacy failed to pay off without it. To me it does feel like disciplinary literacy should be a core part of any student's education as these skills will help students not only interact with whatever they are studying, but it will give them the skills necessary to branch out and interact with other disciplines as well. Studying literacy specific to one's discipline opens up doors for students that otherwise might not have been accessible. My question is, at what point in one's education should disciplinary literacy begin to be explored? should one completely master general literacy before beginning disciplinary literacy?  Students are always learning literacy and evolving so at what point would they be deemed ready to begin disciplinary literacy?

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There were a few parts to Conley’s article, Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents, that really spoke to me. “Our initial findings show that, well into our teacher-education program, prospective teachers hold fast to their views of teaching and learning based on their own experiences as students.” (97) Something that I have keep noticing throughout the MAT program so far, is that often times we (the students) are asked by our professors to call upon our own educational experiences in all of these pedagogy-focused courses. Though usually it is to deconstruct the act of learning within our own lives and schooling, I can’t help thinking that it only further reinforces how we draw on those experiences to inform how we plan on teaching (or now actively teach in the case of my classmates who are in classrooms right now).

I disagree with Conley’s comment that this usually means passing down knowledge as it was taught to us – I actually think that this reliance on our own experiences is more that our methods of teaching, how we pass down knowledge and how we interact with our students, are responses to those experiences. We aren’t intending on modeling our teaching on that of our own teachers, but rather our methods are responses, both of acceptance and rejection, of what we experienced.

There was an additional quote from Conley that reminded me of last week’s class. “Students should be ready and willing to accept the transmission of knowledge, although many of our prospective teachers admit to having some fear that adolescents are not so willing.” (97) So long as I’m not misremembering class, I recall Timand mentioning something along the lines of students don’t learn because they want to, but because they can. To that point, I’m curious as to how that actually does play into students being accepting of the transmission of knowledge. Perhaps it isn’t that the adolescents aren’t entirely willing, but more so about the connection to whether they consider themselves capable of learning in the classroom.

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In Holly J. Inglis’ article “How the Brain Works” I keep coming back to her idea of “to stress or not to stress.” Inglis starts with the premise that, “teachers who understand how to use stress effectively to create alertness can contribute to their student’s learning.” Inglis continues that, “if teachers can gain a better understanding of the role emotion plays in the process of learning, they can potentially alter the emotional experience for students and create greater opportunity for learning to occur and memory to develop.” (32)

Inglis essentially argues that when stress is used properly it can induce a very effective learning experience. This is because stress curates an experience of increased awareness that allows for a direct transmission into long term memory. Stress also requires students to develop new approaches to problem solving. The other side of the argument, however, is that when we do not control the amount of induced stress it can create a negative experience. Students that end up feeling too stressed will not be induced into a state of awareness, but rather they will begin to panic as their amygdala’s flight response kicks in. The key to the equation becomes the degree to which the teacher is responsible for gauging how much stress to induce, so they can curate a space that is stress positive.

The question I have about stress is one that deals with the role of the teacher in knowing where the students are in their capacity for stress. I am thinking specifically about a public school setting in which the level of students' abilities might vary radically in a single class, but the teacher only has a forty-two minute time frame when they get to engage the students.  For instance, in an English class one assignment might cause excess stress for one student, while for another it might be seen as too easy. How can the teacher recognize this in a setting that might not be conducive to the individual attention necessary to gauge what the proper stress levels ought to be? I am concerned that the teacher might realize this too late, when the students' grades are down and begin to fail.

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I always thought I didn’t remember anything about elementary school, middle school, and even a lot of high school because I had a bad memory. I’ve recently come to accept that I have a fairly average memory—perhaps due to the neuroscience class I took my last year of undergrad! Cari Crumly’s paper has helped me realize it’s not that I don’t remember anything, it’s that I only remember what was important to me. I remember what I did with friends, some projects I worked on, novels that were important to me. This is what Crumly argues in her piece about student-centered learning. She says, of student-centered learning, “it is based on collaboration, project- and problem-based learning with integrated technology to allow open discussion, conversation, and debate between students” (p. 2). This encompasses exactly what I remember from my pre-college schoolwork—except for the novels, but that was only because I loved stories. We need to be building curricula that students will remember for years to come—if not, what are we even teaching for? I had a good school experience because I had close friends who were invested in school, and I competed with them. Crumly insists that this is a part of the student-centered classroom—discussion, competition, collaboration. Kids want to talk to their friends during class. Why don’t we let them?

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Ben’s Response: Learning, Motivation, and Neuroscience

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Ben’s Response: Learning, Motivation, and Neuroscience

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Reading these two articles I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite writer’s, Marilynne Robinson. In her collection of essays, When I was a Child I Read Books, she addresses the shear wondrousness of people:

Having Read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way, and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely. (8)

I would say that, in time, I will probably forget both of these articles for tomorrows class. Yet I keep returning to Robinson and this quote, which she refashions in different contexts. Why is that? Ironically, I think the articles answer it themselves. I am struck by her writing, it beauty in language and in ideas.

There is a video clip of Bobby McFerrin, the fabulously talented singer, demonstrating to an audience attending a panel on neuroscience and music how the two work together: he invites the audience to sing a tone along with him and then points to his feet as he simultaneously jumps to his left and sings the next note, a full pitch higher than his base note, or tonic. Jumping and singing, to model and practice this with the audience, he begins to improvise a melody while directing the audience with his jumps up and down the pentatonic scale. Finally, through this physical modeling, he jumps up and down the scale leading the choir to notes that he has not actually sung, yet they instantly produce the pitch on cue. McFerrin can’t explain the neuroscience of the phenomenon, that is, how the brain essentially knows what note is next in the scale without actually hearing it. They sort of hear it in their heads, intuitively, I guess. Now in the long run, will that audience remember the insights from the scientists or the song they sang with Bobby?

It seems to me that Robinson’s written words and McFerrin’s musical demonstration reflect excellent practices of teaching. McFerrin resonates with the idea of enhancing learning through physical movement, music, and richly captivating attention throuhg a creative and positive emotional experience. According to Inglis’ piece, he is literally putting David Kolb’s learning cycle to work: setting up a concrete experience that will readily move to reflection, hypothesis, and testing. Perhaps, his example bypasses the reflection stage in the moment, but probably not permanently. And Robinson is the example of “artists of learning/masters of teaching” par excellence—reflecting for us how she keeps reading and learning and shifting, expanding, opening, rekindling her views and understandings. Just before writing this post I responded to three different text messages. Inglis writes, under the section titled “Squirrels”, that “heavy multitasking can temporarily lower our IQ by as much as fifteen point,” (35). A question: will these articles stick for me, or will they soon be lost?

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Crumly’s article left me contemplating the role of the educator-turned-facilitator in a student-centered learning environment:

“This does not make the instructor obsolete but, rather, changes the instructor’s role from the traditional “imparter of knowledge” to that of a facilitator and coach of knowledge (Crumly, 2).”

As an environmental education educator, I usually find myself teaching in an informal setting where student-centered learning has increasingly become the norm. It is when I enter formal learning environments to deliver a program, like K-12 schools and institutions, that this practice of student-centered learning is hard to impart upon teachers and students alike. Crumly draws attention to the “role change,” whereby the educator steps back into a supporting role and allows the student to take ownership over their own knowledge and skill development. From what I have seen in formal learning contexts, one of the major challenges for educators using student-centered learning as a pedagogical tool is to remove the stigma that educational institutions are grounded in the classical view of knowledge, expertise, and learning. Where Crumly describes her traditional schooling experience in the section “Taking It Personal,” I believe she is referencing instructivist pedagogy. My understanding is that instructivist pedagogy emphasizes the role of the teacher is to disseminate knowledge and the role of the student is to passively receive that knowledge, whereby access and control of knowledge is top-down rather than student-driven. Many teachers still see a sharp distinction between formal, instructivist teaching and informal student-centered learning. After reading Crumly’s piece, I am left wondering how do we reconceptualize formal teaching to give students the ability to be active learners in seeking and creating knowledge across subjects? Perhaps giving learners greater control over inquiries that are personally relevant and engaging without them being restricted by formal, instructivist teaching would allow students to feel empowered in learning from each other.

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I chose to write about Mark W. Conley’s Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents: What We Know about the Promise, What We Don’t Know about the Potential. As Melissa mentioned in her commentary, cognitive strategies are defined as “constructive interactions with text, both written and digital, in which good readers and writers continuously create meaning” (84). Conley also discusses The Essential Skills and Workplace Literacy Initiative from the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, an initiative which identifies and works with three types of literacy: prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitive literacy (86). Each literacy varies in its content and skill and requires different cognitive strategies. Conley’s assessment that, “the cognitive strategies required from one occupation to the next can differ dramatically” (86) have me wondering how each literacy can be introduced and honed in a classroom, particularly one where students have a wide range of career-related pursuits after high school. This part resonated with me on a personal level. My dad never went to college, instead opting vocational school to pursue a career in HVAC. My mom works int healthcare. I am completing my Master’s degree. The variation in our literacy degrees, though unproblematic, is astounding. I certainly lack the cognitive strategies my parents possess and highlights the “complexity of cognitive a actions that characterize various occupations” (86). At the same time, this personal example reveals the necessity of teaching transferable cognitive strategies in a classroom. I was drawn to examples of Ms. Gunning, who, in the second example, “provide[d] her students with a brief explanation for how the [graphic organizer as a cognitive] strategy is useful for learning” (90) in addition to modeling the activity. This activity served not only to help students use a cognitive strategy as a learning tool, but I believe there is transferability in this mode of thinking that can be applied to other types of literacy. The process of guiding students to a “critical understanding of subject matter ideas and a cognitive approach to learning” is applicable to any literacy type; the modeling of an activity/ task, and guided completion appears can appear in and beyond the classroom. I do wonder, however, why “we do not yet have the research needed to adequately understand and maximize the potential of cognitive strategy instruction in secondary content-area classrooms” (84), considering the granular level to which we can engage in a conversation surrounding cognitive strategy instruction.

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“Exercise boosts the brain’s ability to learn…the physical results of exercise–increased blood flow and increased oxygen–provide an enriched environment for neurons and brain tissue…Exercise and movement also support the development of memory associated in learning” (30).

Inglis introduces molecular biologist John Medina’s “Brain Rules” (rule #1 is quoted above) in which he explains the correlation between how our brains learn and how our brains are wired. Inglis highlights three rules in particular that she deems as important in understanding how the human brain works to “create learning” (30). Rule number one, however, emphasizes the importance of exercise or movement, as physical movement releases neurotransmitters, endorphins, which can help relieve stress–and while moderate stress pushes our brains to work harder, stress over a prolonged period of time, or chronic stress, decreases our brains’ performance.

When thinking of a traditional classroom setting, or even a virtual/remote class during COVID, I realized how little movement or physical activity actually occurs. Especially now, students are sitting in front of their computer screens for hours on end, attending classes virtually, doing homework, reading, watching movies, etcetera all on a screen during a time which has most likely produced high stress in many adolescent learners. Students’ lack of movement coupled with being in a high stress environment, with the added invisible and internal stressors of being an angsty teenager even in a normal world, seems to create a perfect formula for low achievement and simultaneously low learning.

So, I wonder as educators, how can we incorporate exercise or movement of some sort into our lessons? While I remember Dr. Vernee Butterfield discussing the 9-Dimensions of African American learning, as well as showing us the video of the Ron Clark Academy, how can we incorporate aspects of both into a public-school setting? I realize that in theory, many of these studies prompt educators to think outside-the-box in an idealistic-like fashion, but realistically, how can we work around the potential school politics, or district politics that might hinder our ability to become “artists of learning and masters of teaching”? Again, how can we subtly incorporate ideas from those like Kolb, Zull, and Medina into our pedagogy particularly during COVID?

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In Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents: What We Know about the Promise, What We Don’t Know about the Potential, cognitive strategies are defined as “constructive interactions with text, both written and digital, in which good readers and writers continuously create meaning” (84). Reports show that poor understandings of cognitive strategies is the primary reason why adolescence struggle with reading and writing. Activists which work on cognitive strategies are “asking questions to interrogate texts, summarizing, activating prior knowledge, and organizing and engaging prior knowledge with newly learned information” (84). The ability for a student to understand cognitive strategies, but also adopt them for themselves as a means for their learning, is necessary for students to be higher order thinkers in the workplace and in college.

While research has shown why cognitive strategies are important, there has been “no indication on how content area teachers can combine their conceptions of content, pedagogy, and learning with workplace-related cognitive reasoning” (87). An example which Conley points to is through the use of graphic organizers in Ms. Gunnings’ classroom (pages 87-91). In this example, he offers two ways a graphic organizer is used—the first being a graphic organizer as “an instructional activity introducing and developing key concepts against pollution” and the second using graphic organizers as “a tool to support students’ inquiry and cross-text comparisons.” In essence, his point through this example is to highlight the difference between doing a teaching activity step by step as a means for comprehension of terms versus using the graphic organizer in such a way which makes it an evolving and applicable tool for student use in the future.

Another issue Conley brings attention to is directed at teacher candidates. He found in his studies that new teachers assume that students are basically sponges and are “ready and willing to accept the transmission of knowledge...” However, these new teachers also have a particular fear that students will have a lack if motivation. So, there is an assumption that students by default desire to receive information and anytime in which they do not, it is from a lack of motivation. An example he uses to exemplify this point was found in a clinical study. In the study, a teacher observed a student who was learning about photosynthesis. The student also liked to garden at home—a natural starting place for instruction. However, the  new teacher did not recognize the students misconceptions about plant nutrition and assumed that the 8th grader was struggling because of a lack of motivation, not due to a low reading skill. Thus, Conley argues that beginning teachers “cope with the complexity of teaching by compartmentalizing and not connecting important problems, such as teacher content, teaching scientific reasoning, and understanding students” (98). I felt this was an important point for us to keep in mind.

While adolescent literary researchers have provided a “rich profile of adolescence” that have allowed teachers and administrators to move away from a linear view of and understanding of what literacy looks like, the focus of this research has been only on the moment. Research now needs to focus on the connections between adolescence and strategy development, particularly over time, so that we can have a better sense of how these strategies are utilized in and outside of school, as well as later in life (99-100).

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Fostering Kinesthetic Literacy through Exertion in Whole Body Interaction is a paper which introduces Pushing Pixels, “an augmented bodybuilding system for exploring the role of exertion in supporting the development of kinesthetic literacy through reciprocal guidance and motivation, or communal engagement” (1). Kinesthetic literacy consists of two main learning objectives: learning to move and moving to learn (2). In this study, students used a pulley machine where they had to match their opponents pull patterns. They received visual and audio feedback based off of their form and how efficiently they matched the pull patterns. This study reflected that when students used the Pushing Pixels machine, they not only engaged in physical exercise, but also developed moral character through expressing words of encouragement to their peers, learned the mechanics behind form (and how to improve from through fatigue), as well as developing a sense of perseverance—playing the game through fatigue.