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Question: Is the practice of RTI, often practiced in schools, influenced by sociocultural theories?

Answer: RTI definitely appears to be influenced by sociocultural theories. (For those who are unfamiliar with this term, RTI is a remedial program for students whose test results indicate that they are not learning enough from core instructional practices to consider them as meeting a somewhat arbitrary learning goal for their grade level.) Ideally, RTI is nothing more than good teaching within a student's ZPD. The"research-based practices" recommended for RTI programs are just the appropriate scaffolding that good teachers provide as they work with students within their ZPDs. Teachers providing instruction within the RTI program give a lot of formative assessments. They need to know whether the students are making good progress toward the benchmarks set by the standards-based curriculum. The tricky part is determining whether or not the benchmark and the upper limit of the student's ZPD are aligned. If they are not, you are going to find many frustrated teachers and very disengaged/unhappy/angry students. (NMB)

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Question: Who are the "Just Plain Folks" that Brown, Collins, and Duguid talk about?

Answer: Lave’s concept of “Just Plain Folks” (JPF) points out the
difference between the activities and culture students
encounter in school vs outside of school (Brown et al., p. 35).
According to Lave, JPF and practitioners learn through apprenticeship and enculturation (what Vygotsky would call appropriation and internalization of "spontaneous knowledge" which he thought was different from school-learned "scientific knowledge.") As we have read about situatedness,
the context in which learning takes place is crucial. The context that JPFs use to construct meaning is
within the problem itself. Their
activities are situated in the cultures in which they work, within which they
negotiate meanings and construct understanding.
The issues and problems
that they face arise out of, are defined by, and are resolved within the constraints
of the activity they are pursuing We see this in the example of the dieter trying to determine ¾ of a ⅔ cup of cottage cheese
(Brown et. al., p. 35). The dieter ultimately solved the problem
pouring out the cottage cheese in a ⅔ cup and then dividing it
on a cutting board. The problem was therefore solved using
the physical environment and tools one would authentically use in a kitchen (e.g., measuring cup, knife, board). A student in school, on the other hand, is often required to remember specific problem- solving formulas and operations and solve the problem using prescribed steps. In other
words, the JPF solves the problem within a real world context whereas the student too often has to solve the problem outside of a real context and using tools that might not be the best for the situation at hand. Situated cognition experts advise that working more like JPFs would make learning more authentic and more meaningful. (NMB)

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Question: What is an ill-defined problem?

Answer: Brown et al. contrast real-world problems which are often "messy" with those provided in schools. For example, when things are divided, they don't often come out evenly, able to be measured and described in nice, neat numbers. The theorists argue that schools incorrectly prepare students for real-life applications of theories, concepts, and background knowledge because too often,
schools rely on well-defined problems and specific procedural solutions. Practitioners (that is, cultural experts) and JFPs, are aware that problems are often "ill-structured," and they rely on
innovation, as referenced by the Weight Watch example in the Brown, et al. article: “The
dieter's solution path was extremely expedient and drew on the sort of inventiveness that characterizes the activity of
both JPFs and experienced practitioners" (p. 35). Situated cognition proponents criticize problems in math, or in discussions of social studies and literature that have neat resolutions, saying teachers are not giving authentic work to students since it is more likely that problems encountered in real life are most often "ill-structured," things that need to be grappled with and that are not always resolved neatly. Moreover, often in authentic, "real life," we have to go to "experts" who have the experience to show us how they grapple with such problems (Have you gone to YouTube lately to help you to do something you don't know how to do?) Thus, situated cognition theorists encourage teachers to
give more authentic work that JPFs would do, and could help students do, rather than made-
up "busy work" that is easily graded, but not very typical of
what we would find in real life. (NMB)

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Question: We know Bruner was influenced not only by the sociocultural ideas of Vygotsky,  but also by the cognitive constructivist ideas of Piaget.  Can we say that Bruner was a stage theorist, like Piaget?

Answer: NO- Bruner believed that when we are learning conceptual information, we learn through these modes, usually in the order given: first enactive, then iconic, and finally symbolic, but he did not see them as distinct and invariable stages. Bruner's three modes of representation are enactive (using physical movement), iconic (using images, maps, and pictures) and symbolic (using language and other symbol systems).
The implication of this theory is that teachers should involve
all three modes in their instruction in order to reach students at their own level of development. (Jones and Reeves, p. 59).
Piaget thought it was largely a waste of time to ask students to think on levels they were not developmentally ready to achieve. Bruner, on the other hand, thought instruction should be geared towards moving students along, through scaffolding, in their developmental process towards higher mental processes (we can see the influence of Vygotsky here). For Bruner, instruction should be scaffolded, providing students with facility with higher modes of representation as their ZPDs allow.  Piaget. on the other hand, considered it largely senseless
to try to move children into a higher stage before they had
completed the stage they were in. (Here's how one of my former students used Bruner's modes: "An example of this kind of instruction in teaching French
pronominal verbs to 9th graders: Using gestures (pointing to
self, pointing to others, which makes sense for the meaning of
two types of pronominal verb, reflexive verbs and reciprocal
verbs, respectively) to activate the enactive mode; then using photos or video of a storyline involving the verbs to make use of the iconic mode; and, of course, use of the linguistic structures themselves in the modes of listening, speaking, reading and writing to activate the symbolic mode. At the same time, as the unit proceeds, we would move away from the enactive and the iconic in order to help move students towards using the linguistic structures alone, which would help students to move up developmentally and to
obtain the symbolic mode as their dominant mode of
representation.") (NMB)

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Question 5. Some information about project-based learning which is based in situated cognition theory. 

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Question 5. Some information about project-based learning which is based in situated cognition theory. 

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Since some of you are interested in teaching through inquiry, let me say just a little here: Project based learning and authentic activity are not always the same thing, though both rely on learning using real-world connections. A teacher can provide authentic work for their students as part of a very small lesson designed to teach specific skills (for example, an English teacher can teach students interviewing skills by asking them to prepare for, conduct, and report on a real interview as a news reporter might, teaching the skills for each of those steps along the way. A math teacher can have students learn about area by having them measure a room and use formulas to determine the area, just as rug salespeople do).
Project based learning is much bigger and, ideally, it is a longer activity in which a student identifies a project that is usually something the student feels passionate about and very often involves some type of problem--either a social problem, a mechanical problem, a political problem, etc. To solve the problem, it must be defined carefully and an inquiry is set up using the steps we saw outlined by theorists like Bruner. One of the teacher's jobs is to help students to formulate an inquiry question that can guide the student through the project. The objective in the project is to answer the question. Students may or may not create some kind of product as a result, but the main emphasis is upon answering the inquiry question that initiated their project and reflecting on the answer to see if generalizations can be made. If you are interested in project-based learning, here are two good examples of projects, one on the elementary level and one on the middle/secondary level: https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2019/03/22/leveraging-pbl-in-the-literacy-classroom?utm_source=TW-04092019&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ThisWeek&utm_content=PopularOn-3/.

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What question do you have about situated cognition or other sociocultural theories?  Ask it here, and I will answer (NMB)

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What question do you have about situated cognition or other sociocultural theories?  Ask it here, and I will answer (NMB)

# data[].attributes.headline
What question do you have about situated cognition or other sociocultural theories?  Ask it here, and I will answer (NMB)

# data[].attributes.subject
What question do you have about situated cognition or other sociocultural theories?  Ask it here, and I will answer (NMB)