Interrogating teaching practice

Why, What if, and How to "do better"

24 July 2024

Image credit Colleen Farris

“You know better!” 

I always process how I think the school year went over the summer. This summer I asked myself why, at the end of the year, some students still were not demonstrating what they learned in the classroom when working in the kitchen. I found myself repeating “You know better! Show me what you know.” I started processing my thoughts about this phenomenon in my previous blog post entitled “Do better.” 

Why is this happening?

Since arriving in Ireland, the Mindsets for Innovation course has helped me think about this problem. The course readings from How People Learn (Bransford, 2000), have been instrumental in identifying some answers to my question, “Why is this happening?” My hypothesis is that I have not been identifying with and engaging with students’ misconceptions and beliefs about the content I teach. As a result, students revert to their old ways of thinking in the kitchen, even though they have learned something different in the classroom. This behavior is consistent with the research on learning discussed in How People Learn (Bransford, 2000). 

Reteaching won’t fix it.

As Mitchel Resnik so eloquently puts it in his article Lifelong Kindergarten, “When you make something in the world, it becomes an external representation of ideas in your head (Resnik, n.d.).” This sentence crystallizes the problem I face. When students fail to integrate and/or transfer learning I can observe their misconceptions in their actions; however, reteaching does not work in this case. 

They actually know the information on one level, but their beliefs get in the way when they start making. If I follow the advice of How People Learn (Bransford, 2000), I need to meet them at the level of their beliefs, misconceptions, and prior experience. Then, they must own the new information they are learning in order for it to replace their erroneous beliefs.

What if I change the way I design learning experiences?

I need to do a better job of connecting with my students. If I draw from the best practices of the TPACK framework, and design thinking process, I can identify context as the problematic area that needs my attention (Koehler, 2017; Shanks, n.d.). This requires me to engage in proactive empathy, as well as apply my content, pedagogical, and technological expertise. 

My students come from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. I need to better understand their individual home contexts with relation to my subject area and curriculum. The factors that I predict are important, and that I have not adequately taken into account in instruction are:

• Cultural norms about gender, roles within the household/family, age/status in the household, and tasks considered appropriate.

• Cooking styles and equipment (technologies).

• Ingredients and foods prepared and eaten at home.

• Prior knowledge and misconceptions about cooking.

How do I do that?

The TPACK framework is a useful guide to help me focus on which approaches to use. It reminds me that I must discover student contexts and then design meaningful activities to connect them to the culinary arts classroom and kitchen contexts. In addition, the Right Question Institute models for questioning and Warren Berger’s Why, What if, and How questions offer roadmaps to foster student-driven innovation and increase student engagement in learning (Berger, 2023). Asking more questions and designing activities that draw out the above factors will help me work toward the goal of increased learner knowledge transfer. 

What’s next?

I tested the insights highlighted above by using the design thinking process to create a lesson prototype. Read about how it went in my next blog post entitled “Maker learning hits the spot.”

References

Berger, W. (2024). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury.

Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2014). Critical constructivism. In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research (Vol. 2, pp. 204-206). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406. 

Koehler, M. (2017, June 9). TPACK explained. TPACK.ORG. https://matt-koehler.com/tpack2/tpack-explained/.

National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, W. D. C. on B. and S. S. and E., Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Expanded Edition. https://ezproxy.msu.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=ED481522&site=eds-live&authtype=ip,guest&custid=s8364774&groupid=main&profile=eds.

Shanks, M. (n.d.). An introduction to design thinking process guide. web.stanford.edu. https://web.stanford.edu/~mshanks/MichaelShanks/files/509554.pdf.