Page 205 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 8 How Can I Use Discourse Powerfully? 177
Principle 6: Thoughtful Discourse: Questions are Planned to Engage Students in Sus- tained Discourse Structured Around Powerful Ideas. Research shows that effective teachers structure a great deal of content-based discourse in their classrooms. Teachers pose broad, open-ended questions designed to spark conversation rather than close-ended questions which tend to close discussion. Please see Chapter 14 for a more in-depth description of this principle.
Thoughtful Discourse
learning using discourse. Before knowledge becomes truly generative—usable for inter- preting new situations, reasoning, or solving problems—students must elaborate and question the new content, examine it in relation to more familiar content, and build new knowledge structures (Resnick & Klopfer, 1989). Otherwise, the knowledge may remain inert—recallable when cued by questions or test items like the ones used in prac- tice exercises, but not accessible when it might be useful in everyday living.
Active Construction of Meaning
The core idea of constructivism is that students develop new knowledge through a pro- cess of active construction. They do not merely passively receive or copy information from teachers or textbooks. Instead, they actively mediate it by trying to make sense of it and relate it to what they already know (or think they know) about the topic. Each student builds his or her unique representation of what was communicated, and this may or may not include a complete and accurate reconstruction of what the teacher or textbook author intended to convey. Sometimes the learning is incomplete or dis- torted, while other times the learning goes beyond the teacher’s expectations due to a student’s experiences.
Even when the basic message is reconstructed as intended, different learners construct different sets of meanings and implications of “the same” set of ideas. For example, after reading about a group of citizens in a community who worked together to make improvements to their local park, one student might remember and think about the text as primarily a story about citizens working together to make change; another as a story about the services local government provides; and yet another as an illustration of the relationship between humans and the environment. The students all read the same text and their reconstructions all include the same basic story line, but they emphasize different meanings and implications.
Students routinely draw on their prior knowledge as they attempt to make sense of what they are learning. Accurate prior knowledge facilitates learning and provides a nat- ural starting place for instruction, but inaccurate prior knowledge can distort learning. If new content gets connected to existing ideas that are oversimplified, distorted, or other- wise invalid, students may develop misconceptions instead of the target conceptions that the teacher is trying to teach. For example, students learning about U.S. history for the first time often overgeneralize what they learn about Jamestown, so that they come to think of colonies as very small villages surrounded by wooden stockades. Most of these students later expand their concept of “colony” as they learn about events that occurred between 1607 and 1776. Some of them do not, however, so that they retain their original “Jamestown” image of a colony even when they begin studying the American Revolution.
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