Musings of an Educator, Writer, & Lifelong Learner

The need for differentiated instruction within the classroom is a humbling experience for novice teachers to attend. When I first started out, it would bemuse me to notice my lesson plans working so well for some of my students, well enough for most, but, at times, not so much for a select few. There are great guides out there on how differentiation can be done systematically and effectively with an appreciation for all the processing and subject-specific needs a student may have. I wish to offer something conceptually grounded that can supplement those how-to guides, with an eye to assessing the differentiation needs of each individual learning profile. Experienced educators are able to contradistinguish the cognitive processes involved in a given learning task and perceive how these processes relate to the task. What I’m putting forward is a framework to aid the informal diagnostics done by teachers on a daily interactive basis, something to lower the chances of key considerations being passed over. All of this is a distillation of my own experience.

The 3 R’s of Teaching and Learning are the 3 R’s of Cognition if we think about cognition in a contextually embedded way. We may divide any learning task into 3 aspects of cognition such that the fulfilment of all 3 would lead to the successful completion of said task. The 3 R’s, by this reckoning, would be:

1) Cognitive Relevance. How relevant is the proposed learning task to the learner?

2) Cognitive Readiness. How ready is the learner for the different modes of cognition involved in the proposed learning task?

3) Cognitive Resourcefulness. How prepared is the learner to use the resources available to help them complete the proposed learning task?

I’ll discuss these 3R’s from the school student’s perspective first, before going over things an educator can do to help students overcome their unique learning challenges with respect to the 3 R’s.

Cognitive Relevance in Learning. Here, we consider the student’s motivation, intrinsic or extrinsic. When we think about a student’s intrinsic motivation, we’re asking ourselves how the student sees themselves, who they are and who they wish to become. If they see themselves as a high-flyer, they will invest sufficient effort in a learning task even if they dislike it or find it “irrelevant” because it is still relevant to their deeper existential goal of being a student who excels academically. (Like Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls who seems to find learning far more vexing than joyful but persists in securing good grades, all the same.) Conversely, there are students who don’t see themselves as being cut out for academics, most likely due to negative past experiences. And, of course, particular students prefer particular subjects, maybe for the simple reason that they have a history of being good at some subjects but not the others. Or motivation comes down to career ambitions: the student who aspires to become a scientist will take STEM subjects seriously because those are relevant to their projected identity. Social Studies and Literature? Not so much. They’ll keep up their letter grades for those subjects for college admission purposes, but that’s about where their interest in those subjects ends. And that’s touching on extrinsic motivation. Commonly, these motivators fall into the buckets of: 1) the social status that comes with good grades, 2) the desire to get into particular colleges, 3) the future earning potential of a particular job, 4) the social status conferred by a particular job, 5) and the approval and praise of parents. These factors can make a learning task relevant to the student but such motivation tends to be scattershot. These factors might not of themselves lead the student to grasp the deeper, if smaller, local why behind a particular cognitive task, like formatting citations of evidence accurately. Without grasping such a why, the student may not have the patience to get through the many particular rigors of an assigned task.

Cognitive Readiness in Learning. Here, we’re thinking about the student’s discipline-specific knowledge and skills, academic literacy in general, and the funds of knowledge a student may draw from, whether this fund is situated in their home life, community, personal history, or wherever else learning as social adaptiveness may be found. With any given 5 students presenting the same blank worksheet, there could be 5 vastly different stories behind why they couldn’t get started with the assignment. This pertains to the notion of thick description, a term invented by ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his essay on what thinking, as behavior, is and adapted by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to his own discipline. The student may have processing needs (visuospatial or auditory learning conditions, etc.). They may have struggles with attention and the organization of the learning material. (Why should the layout of a textbook be an intuitive interface for the collation and presentation of information?) They may simply not have enough prior knowledge in the content area; you can’t do algebra without first understanding arithmetic. Or they may, and this one is common, not have a firm grasp of writing with academic language, formatting, and conventions; you ask such students to express themselves verbally, and they prove to be adept at the modes of higher-order thinking the learning task requires, but the task of writing impedes them from expressing this ability. As for funds of knowledge, these are certainly helpful, but they may starkly differ from what academic literacy requires. Colloquial forms of language, such as AAVE, serve their own rhetorical and semantic ends, but, in the context of academic writing, the student’s work could seem to show an insufficient understanding of grammar or an unusual acquaintance with standard lexis. Culturally responsive instruction is needed to transform diverse funds of knowledge into helpful resources for academic tasks.

Students face varied roadblocks on their path to content acquisition; learning isn’t as straightforward as filling up a checkbox comprising discrete items of knowledge. The uni-dimensional extent to which a student “knows the content” or not is a reductive conceptualization of academic preparedness.

Cognitive Resourcefulness in Learning. Aside from making the most of required learning materials, educators are trained to exploit whatever resources available to them (usually songs, charts, or YouTube videos) to generate buy-in among their students and to make the learning process more engaging and accessible.

But what about on the user side of this equation? Do students know how to exploit the cognitive resources provided to them? Do they know how to find or create their own? The mark of an autodidact, or a student who’s comfortable with self-directed learning, is precisely their high level of cognitive resourcefulness. On this topic, we should not minimize the impact SES has: some students simply have access to more and better developed resources from their early years because their parents have had the means to procure them. It is to be expected that higher SES students are generally more adept at finding out and using cognitive resources in the classroom learning environment, as a result of this continued exposure. They’ve had more school-oriented opportunities to practice cognitive resourcefulness due to the privilege they have of accessing expensive educational resources in the first place. This is not to disregard the funds of knowledge (mentioned above under Cognitive Readiness) found in homes of lower SES backgrounds; these are, absolutely, cognitive resources in their own right. It is still to be acknowledged, however, that nothing prepares a student more directly, and hence adequately, for a standardized test than targeted practice tests and and a test-taking coach. The point I’m making, though tautological, bears stating: academic preparedness at home prepares a student well for academics in school. Indeed, standardized tests like the SAT, which are meant to measure college preparedness, have come under fire for entrenching class privilege because they seem to measure, above anything else, the amount of test prep parents are able to secure for their children. Learning conditions, as well, affect how successfully students access and exploit cognitive resources.

All these considerations make the question “how cognitively resourceful is the student?” a very loaded one.

Nonetheless, the range in levels of cognitive resourcefulness across a classroom population is a reality an educator cannot overlook. Knowing how to use a calculator or a dictionary by a certain age is not a given. Knowing how to ask the teacher for help with an assignment in an orderly way, such as raising your hand and waiting your turn, is not a given. Being able to get the adults in your life to help you with your homework is not a given. Mini-lessons or workarounds might be necessary to address these gaps. Keep in mind that universal literacy itself, something taken for granted in the modern world, is a very recent accomplishment: British male literacy got up to 97.6% only in the year 1900.

It bears pointing out, too, that the relevance of the cognitive task greatly influences how resourceful the learner is. Think upon the lengths to which self-taught musicians go to get good at playing because they see proficiency at their chosen instrument as an aspiration that speaks to the core of who they are.

What can educators do to address the struggles their students face across the 3 R’s?

Cognitive Relevance in Teaching. The educator should start by thinking about generating buy-in. Show your students what practical applications the learning task has in the supposed “real world” (I suppose that makes school a form of virtual reality; in all fairness, high school and middle school drama can feel a lot like reality TV.) Show them as well the cooler or flashier things that you can do with the acquisition of such knowledge. Narrating and framing your proposed activities as being a critical part of the overall learning unit, which is itself a critical part of the discipline, is helpful. Students often wish to grasp what the thing they’re learning to do is for, and they’re not always looking for pragmatic answers like career prospects or earning potential. Becoming more knowledgeable in a discipline can be an intrinsic motivation. That being said, know your audience. Script your exhortations to your students strategically. Some students want pragmatic responses. Give them just that to get them back on-task in a one-on-one dialogic check-in. Project-based learning, which increases learner autonomy by allowing students to shape their own inquiries into a given field of knowledge, is also a good idea. (The success of PBL is, of course, contingent upon the skills of cognitive resourcefulness you’ve taught your students to acquire.) If not a project, group work itself can go a long way. Students may have many socially motivated reasons to show competence in a content area inside the classroom environment, such as competitiveness–or the fear of embarrassment!

Cognitive Readiness in Teaching. If the majority of the class are not yet prepared for the learning task, a re-teach of a previous unit is in order. If it’s only a group of students, pull-out instruction or station teaching would be the appropriate intervention. If there are persistent skill gaps in academic literacy with particular students, a push-in SPED instructor would be a great help. One-teach-one-observe with a co-teacher is also a good way to collect data on the cognitive-readiness needs of students; and to evaluate how well they’re being addressed. Time-sensitive accommodations like extended time for a task or flexible deadlines are great. A revision overview or cheat sheet will take some time to prepare, but it’s a show of good faith to students that you will only test what you’ve taught! O the abatement of anxiety for a student when they believe everything that will come up in next week’s test can be found on just one document!

Teachers should also recognize the constraints of classroom teaching in improving cognitive readiness. If students show significant knowledge gaps from previous grades of schooling or in fundamental skills of academic literacy, they need intense, individualized academic intervention, such as remedial lessons or one-on-one tutoring; scaffolding or accommodations within the Gen-Ed classroom have their limits. The general principle is to go with the least restrictive intervention, academic or behavioral, but it’s also the educator’s responsibility to notice when desired results aren’t being produced and to advocate for a different instructional approach on behalf of the student.

Cognitive Resourcefulness in Teaching. I am inclined to think this the most important of the 3R’s for securing academic success, or any manner of success, in the long run. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime, and if the man is able to teach himself to fish and many other profitable skills? He’d be the Great Gatsby, practicing elocution and bootlegging prohibition-era booze all the zooming way to the bank. That’s the general idea we place our faith in as we think about the challenges in our own paths ahead. We trust in our ability to figure things out as we go along, making the best of the resources that we can get our hands on. And every student would benefit from internalizing this attitude towards learning; so that’s a good place to start, teaching them about the growth mindset. This particular R, aside from being the most important, is also the most inexhaustible to discuss. Practically anything could be turned into a resource for learning. Ask your students what helps them study and you’ll get a cornucopia of tips and tricks: music, a quiet room, a study group, snacks, walks in the park, the sense of urgency from an approaching deadline, and so on. And these unassuming cognitive resources are as crucial as they are person-specific. They’re all part of Social-Emotional Learning. Everyone has different ways of self-regulating and managing stress, and not being deliberate about establishing your own way might lead to outcomes that jeopardize your mental health down the line, such as burning out. A related cognitive resource is metacognition. Know thyself as thinker. Know the habits of your own mind as you make efforts at a learning task. Notice which mnemonics work. Notice the patterns in the errors you make. And the most obvious but most fundamental self-talk imperative of all when it comes to learning: know what you don’t know! Nothing sabotages the acquisition of knowledge quite as spectacularly as overconfidence.

The foregoing are attitudes and habits an educator should try to instil in their students. As for task-specific instructional strategies to help with your student’s cognitive resourcefulness, it breaks down simply and logically into 2 aspects:

1. actually provide them with all the resources they would need to complete the task, making no assumption about what they should already know by their grade level, but basing this decision on data acquired from formative assessments;
2. teach them how to use the provided resources where necessary!

There are students who need assistance navigating scaffolds like a graphic organizer that lists clear sequential steps they have to take to complete a task. The scaffold, doubtlessly, is a great resource, but if the student, for whatever attentional or executive functioning reasons, is unable to utilize it well, you as an educator could show them how by modelling the process. The cognitive apprenticeship framework is a powerful tool for educators to use when they model a learning process. The essence of this approach is to announce your metacognitive thoughts as you navigate a learning task so your students would be able to understand how exactly you get from point a to point b. This is particularly helpful with something like writing a coherent paragraph that has a claim, evidence, and explanation structure; the thick description of this process would necessarily involve the writer’s many thoughts of trial-and-error regarding diction, mechanics, sentence arrangement, and such. The same goes for the process of editing. But what I’m suggesting is that even the skill of using a resource like a dictionary or a graphic organizer or the modern English translation inside a No Fear Shakespeare text could benefit from a cognitive apprenticeship set-up. Even something small like the fact that lines of verse start off with capitalized words even when it’s not the beginning of a new sentence might trip a student up. Showing them how you yourself navigate such uncertainties in a learning material when you encounter them can go a long way.

Lastly, never forget that students should use one another as resources. This is the very basis of the learning theory of social constructivism. In tackling a learning task as a group, students bounce their schemas off of one another, making contributions, making self- and other-directed revisions to these schemas, collecting and personalizing what they’ve heard in exchange. Conversations birth brilliant new ideas and innovations. That’s why classical Athenian philosophical academies and medieval universities were established in the first place: to put people with similar intellectual interests into conversation. As a K-12 educator, a systematic scaffolded way to get your students to benefit from one another as resources is the instructional model of gradual release of responsibility. Simply explained, this means the teacher first demonstrates how the learning task should be done, then the students do it in their groups, and finally the students attempt the task individually. Or more succinctly phrased: I do, We do, You do.

Coaching Your Students to Become Autodidacts?

The growth mindset is a very attractive outlook not just for students but for teachers. Who after all wants to have a fixed mindset? Definitely not when it is put in such bald terms! “Fixed”. Yikes. It’s over, then, before it begins. Why even try to surpass any of your perceived limitations?

I sometimes think the real task of pedagogy is to develop in students skills pertaining to cognitive resourcefulness and relevance, as much as possible. This may well be a consolatory thought. It is the thought that if they’ve missed out on certain key content takeaways from my lessons, they will nonetheless graduate with the skill to teach themselves anything they set their minds on. That they will do just fine at the tertiary level of education or the vocational field they choose. And maybe one day, when gray hairs have begun to sprout on their heads, they’ll find themselves writing a sonnet that scans and rhymes perfectly—just because they know how they can. Just because they are genuinely curious to see how it turns out though they were not before, so many years ago in the classroom with a teacher in front of them doing his best elevator pitch for the continued relevance of the sonnet.