STEM Network
Reading Apprenticeship
Types of Schema
World Knowledge
Text Knowledge
Language Knowledge
Discipline Knowledge
Schema analysis moves me to prepare to support student schema...
Schema are the bits of information that we know when we attach something new. The schema that we rely on come from our world knowledge, text knowledge, langauge knowledge, and disciplinary knowledge. What our students bring to our courses can be significantly different from what we have in mind when we plan our course. How might students get tripped up or launched forward by how you support schema development?
I have a schema that scientific texts are convoluted. But our schema is actually more plastic. I can gain an ability to manage the texts.
Thinking about texts this way can be distracting if you get too concerned about the categories, but this exercise is a tool for helping us to shed our expert eyes and see things in a way that can help scaffold them for our students.
Filling out the sheet gives insight into which areas we have more schema development in. If I filled out the world knowledge category the fastest, that helps me understand that I have more schema already developed in that area.
When students aren't making it to the planned goals, I can use probing questions to help students get back on the path.
Day Two
Having a plan and a goal for how these activities can go changes the level of quality when we do active learning activities. They seem to be more spontaneous, but with design and careful planning we can maximize the time and bring the most connections between content learning and developing these transferrable skill.
Having a plan and goals to drive metacognitive communication creates focus in active learning....
How do we construct high functioning active learning activities?
Anticipating what schema students are bringing to the text or not bringing, we can create experiences for students where they can experience more success.
This is wonderful for lab! It allows me to hear what they are thinking. In chemistry there are real dangers, "Don't blow me up!"
Even though it seems that some of the things we say in a think aloud seems to be stating the obvious, I realized that for me it was an important part of my process to state the obvious.
What answers have we uncovered to our inquiry question from the beginning of the day?
What are you thinking about?
Are there any terms you're unfamiliar with?
How are you connecting the figure and the text?
Where is your understanding breaking down?
P. 99 in Reading for Understanding.
Reading for Understanding pages 234-250
Binder: Day 2 tab; p.9