Chapter 5: Agency Matters
Developing in children a sense of agency is not an educational frill or some mushy-headed liberal idea. Children who doubt their competence set low goals and choose easy tasks, and they plan poorly. When they face difficulties, they come confused, lose concentration, and start telling themselves stories about their own incompetence. In the long run they disengage, decrease effort, generate fewer ideas, and become pa**ive and discouraged. Children with strong belief in their own agency work harder, focus their attention better, are move interested in their studies, and are less likely to give up when they encounter difficulties than children with a weaker sense of agency (Skinner, Zimme-Gembeck, and Connell 1998). Feeling competent, these children plan well, choose challenging tasks, and set higher goals. Their concentration actually improves when they face difficulties, and in the process of engaging difficulties they learn more sk**s. Of course the whole process is cyclical because these relationships are reflected in their academic success, which then reinforces their sense of agency. When children decide that they have no agency with respect to their learning, their learning is limited to term of both personal experience and potential trajectory. Performance differences between children with a stronger and weaker sense of agency continually diverge, particularly from fifth grade on.
The concept of agency in literacy and learning is not only central from the individual's sense of competence and well-being, and for his or her performance (Eder 1994; Ivey, Johnston and Cronin 1998; Kinner, Zimmer and Gembeck, and Connell), but also indispensable to democratic living, though individual agency is not enough for that. As we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7, both individual and collective agency are important to develop because there are many situations in which an individual cannot have a major influence and because collective agency offers the possibility of developing an identity through affiliation. Both independence (an aspect of agency) and belonging are documented contributors to children's cla**room engagement (Blumenfeld 1992; Roeser, Midgley, and Urdan 1996; Wentzel 1997).
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Chapter 6: Flexibility and Transfer (or Generalizing)
A colleague tells a story about his daughter learning to write. Her teacher tells him in a conference that she is doing badly at writing in school. My colleague protests that she writes wonderfully at home, however, the teacher shows him examples o her school writing that, he concedes, confirm the teacher's view. He takes the matter up with his daughter, who is genuinely surprised that the two activities are related in any way. What she knows about writing at home does not seem at all relevant t school writing. I have certainly had this experience with children, especially in math. Strategies used to calculate are for a math quiz seem to have no relevance when the child is faced with calculating garden space. Children often know things from their writing that they fail to use when solving problems in reading. Some children keep home and school spaces rigidly separate, believing they are unrelated. The stories they tell in these different life spaces are different – different genres, settings, characters, and goals.
These are problems of transfer – the failure to generalize learning from one situation or problem to another. Teachers and other researchers of all stripes have puzzled over this problem for a long time. However, in some cla**rooms children quite flexibly generalize what they have learned. For example, in one cla**room children had been using the strategy of “stepping into” characters – taking their perspective. One of the children then did this in science as they studied ducklings. He hypothesized about the basis for the duckling's behavior by taking the duckling's perspective. When he did this, another child, used to looking for such parallels, noticed and pointed out to the cla** what he had done. It seem that the less compartmentalized we make children's problem-solving to other situations. These children were also flexible in the ways they applied strategies to solve a given problem. Rather than repeating the same strategy, or quitting, they were likely to use multiple strategies. What make this possible? How do teachers build bridges between activity settings, making it so that the agency a child exercises in writing transfers to her reading or math? How do they get a child to apply strategies flexibility and in new situations?
Actually, a lot of the conversations we have already discussed have implications for flexibility and transfer. For example, encouraging children to entertain certain identities can help. Consider this. A study compared the arithmetic learning of a group of high school students apprenticed to shopkeepers with that of a group of shopkeepers. Both groups were taking an adult education cla** to improve their arithmetic (Beach 1995, cited in Cobb and Bowers 1999). Which group would you help predict to be more successful at learning arithmetic? It turns out that the shopkeepers were more successful at transferring their learning to their out-of-cla** shopkeeping lives, most likely because they held the same goals and activity frames in and out of cla**. In both situations they had the same goal: making their business more profitable. The high school students, on the other hand, had different goals in the two settings: acquiring knowledge in one setting generating a profit in the other. This helps explain why children who learn their words for their spelling test commonly don't transfer the learning to their writing. Once a child incorporates into his identity a sense that he is a writer doing writerly things (or a scientist, mathematician, and so forth), he can ask himself In a new situation (not necessary consciously) what he might do as a writer, since those roles do not stop at the border of a single activity setting. Imagining oneself as the writer of a piece can also help transfer writing experience to one's activities as a reader.
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Chapter 7: Knowing
As its deepest reaches, education gave me an identity as a knower. It answered the question “Who am I?” (but it also the question) “what is the world?” … and the same knowledge that gave me a picture of myself and the world also defined the relation of the two…What is the nature of the knowers? What is the nature of the known? And what is the nature of the relations between the two? These questions belong to a discipline called epistemology.
PALMER 1993
The common pattern of interaction between teachers and their students has been called IRE for teacher Initiates, student Responds, and teacher Evaluates (Cazden 2001; Coulthard 1977), or sometimes IRF (for Feedback, see Wells 2001). For example, consider the following interactions (Johnston, Jiron, and Day 2001, p. 226; T = teacher, S = Student):
T: We have been working all year on what is called sequence.
What does sequence mean? [I]
S: Order? [R]
T: That's right. [E] … Tell me some things that happened in
Mr. Popper's Penquins and we'll put them in sequence. [I]
S: He paints. [R]
T: OK. That's one event… [E]
S: The guy was talking on the roof. [R]
T: OK, [E] do we know who? Does it give his name? [R]
S: No. He's the tightrope walker. [R]
T: Thank you James… [E]
S: Captain Cook built a nest. [R]
T: OK. Very good. [E] What is called when a penguin builds a nest? [I]
This sequence is very controlling for a couple of reasons. First, the underlying premise is that the teacher already know what needs to be known and therefore takes the role of judging the quality of the student's response, positioning the teacher in the role of authority and knowledge giver and the student as the knowledge receiver without authority. Second, the IRE might better have been called a QRE since the initiating is almost always a question. Questions exert even more control by not only insisting on a response, but also by specifying the topic of the conversation, and often the form of the response. Questions that have, or suggest, right/wrong answers exert further control by constraining no only the topic, but the range of response. This sequence offers an implicit answer to the questions posed above by Parker Palmer: knowledge is composed of facts possessed by teachers, who have the authority to transmit it to children, and children know about the world only through the knowledge that it transmitted to them. Gordon Wells calls this view of knowledge and communication “transmissionary ” (Wells 2001).
There are alternatives to this epistemology in which children play a more active role in the ownership and construction of knowledge. As Barbara Rogolf and Chikako Toma (1997) point out, “Learning to act as a recipient of information and to display receipt of the information… [is not the same as] building on ideas in a shared endeavor [in which] participants” roles can vary widely, such as leading a shared inquiry, playing around with an idea together, or closely following other people's lines of thought” (p. 475). The following examples of talk lead to conversations, the (unspoken) premise of which is that the students are experienced thinkers who have something to say that is worth listening to. These conversations pivots are, I believe, invitations to a more productive epistemology (Johnston, Jiron, and Day 2001).
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Chapter 8
Recall that “children grow into the intellectual life around them” and recall that that intellectual life is fundamentally social. The social relationships within which they live are a part of their learning. Children just like adults, learn better in a supportive environment in which they can risk trying new strategies and concepts and stretching themselves intellectually. This is not just because a supportive community enables individuals to extend their minds beyond themselves without risk, but also because the relationship a**ociated with the learning is an inextricable part of what is learned. And learning communities are not simply about being supportive. For them to be evolutionary, they also require challenge, not as a contest for power, but to “help each other and check each other's tendencies to purely idiosyncratic or self-interested thinking” (Young 1992, p. 8).
Some teachers are particularly good at building, learning communities in which individuals feel valued and supported, and that sustain productive and critical learning. Children must have the experience of communities if they are to know what to aim for in constructing their own environments. Students in British and American schools have limited histories in this regard. Even when they work in groups, they rarely work as a group, sharing ideas and working toward a common goal (Tsuchida and Lewis 1996, cited in Rogoff and Toma 1997). Because we tend to internalize the kinds of conversations in which we become involved, we should think seriously about the nature of these school interactions and their implications. The bottom line is that we need to understand how to construct or become involved in learning communities so that we extend our own development.
The comments in this chapter show how teachers use language to build caring and respectful learning communities, communities that are playful, but in which participants take each other's ideas seriously in the process of getting things done. A basic property of such communities is that they have some shared understanding of this situation and activity in which they are jointly engaged. This does not mean that they all agree, but they agree to try to understand each other to become mutually involved. They essentially agree to be parts of the same social mind for a period of time. We want communities that provide democratic and evolutionary intellectual environments (Rogoff and Toma 1997; Young 1992).