I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hiddad. And this is Alpelance, a podcast featuring tips for ad teachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research-based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Welcome back fellow educators to Alpelance and to our mini-series, where we dissect the science of teaching one chapter at a time. In this series, we're exploring the research-backed principles from how learning works. And today, we're diving into principle three.
That tackles the fundamental question, how does the way we organize information in our minds influence how and what we learn? We'll be talking about the power of mental frameworks, why a solid structure is key to deep understanding and how we can help our students build a durable and flexible knowledge base. So, I guess the big question we talk about this is you guys, both work with students, teachers and other teachers. We talk about organization.
A lot of us says, I just want to let the students guide the direction. Are we where we talk about, I'm going to do inquiry. And so we're going to let it kind of flow from there. I'm taking that to our authors in this chapter might not agree with that philosophy that I'm over saying.
Well, not even that philosophy, but I think even that question of, you know, thinking about how an adult formulates a mental model to how an adolescent formulates a mental model and how they organize information and thinking about when you're presented with texts or presented with an idea. There's this chapter really emphasized to me just the mental work that I don't think we often talk about in our planning. We talk about these structures of lessons and we talk about this thinking behind teaching. But this additional mental work of getting to where your students are and how they process information.
You mentioned the student teachers, I was just on a student teacher visit, where they asked the seventh graders to find five key points of information. And they provided the text, but the text was in bullet points. So they had two bullet points, three bullet points for the seventh graders to find five pieces of information. Well, they're getting all these questions because the seventh graders, well, there's only two, but where do I find the other pieces of information?
They're already here. And it was a complete mental work just in how the information was even organized for them to process. We've had a lot of discussions around medical cognition. And I think we've always, you might have done a great job in those conversations to help us think through that.
But that's one of those big words that we kind of struggle with sometimes. It kind of kind of be thinking I was looking over this chapter. It may not be the exact same thing, but I really appreciated the conversation in this chapter around experts and how novice is thinking. I think we've talked about that before on the podcast, but I feel like this chapter, they did probably the best job, at least for me, the guy might thinking about all that.
Yeah. I think that's an important part, not only thinking about where our students are on that, but also from that medical cognition, where people are just thinking about how they think and how they're processing information. And as we prepare teachers and to Becky's point, and if I think about my teaching a lot of times, we don't necessarily think about how these concepts, this new knowledge that we want to share with students, how we're going to hang that knowledge on mental models or what students already know. And I think that chapter spends a lot of time helping us think and process that, because we think in chunks of data, chunks of facts, and we want to memorize beef reads, but why and how do we organize those and how are we going to memorize those types of things?
And it's not just a set of facts and data that we want students to be able to know and be able to do. It's how are they going to understand and map that to their memory and their working knowledge so that they can actually use that down the road and recall it when they need it. Well, in that idea, how are they going to understand? I think this chapter was really helpful for me in thinking about the weight of expertise.
I think how many times do I hear? I don't know enough about this. I am not an expert in this. Compared to your ninth grader, you are.
And so thinking about, you know, even for those who are first and second, your teachers, the knowledge base you have from your college education compared to where your high schoolers are, you know way more than they probably even need to know right now in that class. And even thinking then about how are those, how are those novices going to actually build those things out? And what do they actually need to develop to comprehend what's there? You think about, I think about my kids and how they would build, build these different structures.
Right now, they are three, seven, and ten. Each of them would assemble a very different kind of tower. And I think there are some interesting parallels we can think about in terms of how our students, depending on grade level, are really going to think about, are even going to think about how do these pieces fit together? Where do things build?
And how they actually, because we actually really need to spend a lot of time developing those structures for our students not just delivering that content. It's going to be thinking too, you know, I can be talking about the diversity of students running out. We're going to have students with different levels of experience, different levels of knowledge. But I also I think we just one of the things we deal with on our campus is helping the other research on our campus.
We say, how do we translate their science into English to be able to communicate with people? Well, a lot of it goes about their experts. I'm a novice and they have to be, you know, they're saying all the things they know, but we need to help them translate that to the novice. I think the same thing happens for our teachers.
As you mentioned, they're going to say they're not experts, but they're experts about certain topics. And they have to remember they have to present it in provider organization to help the novice to learn to figure out how they think to get there and then get them to that expert type of level. Because that novice is so superficial in how they're trying to know what they're doing. So linear in here, we start seeing more in systems.
We can go from step A to step D to step X without having to go through the other ones and the novice just can't do that the first time through. Yeah. The number of like, we just put it in the box and it happens. Like, we don't even, you don't even, as an expert necessarily even see that there's step B and C, just like, A to D makes sense to you.
So it's, it's a lot of work, I think, to go back as an expert and say, okay, what do I actually need to do? Or how do I actually need to logically work through this information to connect it? And it really, like, it's some time consuming thinking work. Yeah.
Yeah. And I, you know, spend a little bit of time as I think through this process is how do I operationalize it in the classroom? And so what's it look like? And so, you know, students need structure for recall and to be able to apply those things like we talked about earlier.
And so, you know, I use it at different levels, but concept maps or mind maps around relationships and how things are connected or interconnected and overlap. And I think of things like, you know, maybe a concept map around soil types or different types of crops and how do students start to organize and think about the differences and similarities amongst some of those crops and start categorizing and kind of hanging them on their own memory based upon those things. I think one of the things that I see that a lot of teachers do great is probably on the animal science side where if we're talking about digestive systems and what have you, there's rather than just talking about those parts and memorizing them. They're engaged in building models or building diagrams of the systems.
And to Becky's point, what a sixth, seventh, eighth grader might do to build that system is going to look probably a little bit more basic and a little more novice than if we had juniors or seniors doing it. And all of a sudden they add more detail, more information to those models and what we would see in different settings. So I think it's not only knowing that we have to do it, but thinking about what are those methods that we can apply in our classrooms and make that happen and be effective. I think it's a great example, Mike.
I think just to build upon that, to talk about that is, it's different. The novice level is learning those different parts of pieces of the digestive system. But if you move them to more than actually talk about how they all work together and the interconnectives and how they become a system to do that. And we have to, as teachers, not only do we have to, because we need to present it as an anonymous level, those, what those parts are.
But then we need to also teach them how to get, how to think about through how they all interact together in that system. You know, I said in a workshop a few months ago, and a faculty member was talking about the fact that they asked all of their tests, are the high level questions that they really want to teach, they really want to teach the problem, so I'm like, you've never showed them how to do that in the class. You can't make that the test. What all of you did was talk about the individual parts.
And so I think it's featured, we got to make sure that we're holding the students hands as we go through the process. Absolutely. And I think to that point, and I want to take that one step further, a lot of times in education, and I'm going to talk broadly rather than just ag, but we have this mentality that's one and done. We taught ruminant nutrition or ruminants in animal science for one unit in one class, one year, students got it, and it's done with.
And we don't ever have to talk about it again. Or, you know, we ought to get college credit for that class because they're going to teach the same thing and get the same thing in another. And I think to your point, Brian, and the case that this would make is that we got to revisit it, and we got to build upon it as students kind of grow and learn along the way. And so, you know, give that some thought as we, as we build out our programs and our courses, I think it's okay to revisit that content from time to time and allow students to reconnect and re inform themselves and grow around those areas.
I think all of this, we're getting some callbacks here to the How People Learn series. We did a little bit more talking about memory. We're talking about meta cognition. But when we're thinking, I think one of the things that really kind of brings some of these pieces together in terms of how do you build structures with the things that you're memorizing, how to how are you problem solving, where are you getting to revisit, make those connections are really what we often, I think, just lump into what's built in context and context can really be again on these black box terms where, okay, great, I just kind of dump it in there and context comes out and voila, my objectives now makes sense.
But we, but I think looking at all those pieces kind of coming together in this idea of context, it's really, it's really kind of thinking about how does that organizational structure that you're using match what your students are learning and what they're going to do with it. And so, you know, as you're talking about systems, thinking about where do these different pieces fit together, what are we going to do with it? And if our focus then is what are we going to do with it? There's kind of this implication that we're going to revisit that we're going to connect that this isn't where this stops.
So it becomes even more important for us to say, where is this going to connect again, not just here it is. Well, I think that's great. And I think that leads us to the idea of like how do you provide that conduct, how do you provide that structure? You know, I think one of the things that we don't use enough, at least for me is I think about how people take notes.
And so, you know, go and look at how your students are taking notes during your class, compare them to the type of notes that you have. And I think you're going to see a difference there. And the idea that something like using either, you know, a organizer or a skeleton or something like that to show the students how you take the notes also helps them understand what you see is being important. So you're not given them the answers.
You're actually making your thought process more explicit to them so they can kind of help see that as they begin to think that they begin to grow in their knowledge, understanding of the topic. To that point, I think helping them build those skill sets out. And I think that the book even goes a little bit further and helping encouraging students to work with multiple organizing structures and so not getting in one one size fits all because I think depending on the context, depending on the situation and all those things that you're doing, you're going to need different structures, just like you need different tools for different types of work. And so having a variety of tools or multiple ways of organizing structures, I think is a good thing for teachers to think about when they're working with students as well.
What do you mean multiple tools run up on the farm? I had a pair of pliers and that was a pair of pliers. It was a hammer or the screwdriver. It was a prime bar.
Yeah. It was all this. The multi tool on your hip. I'm told for multi tools.
We didn't have those when I was on the farm. And your dad probably sent you to the barn for the board stretcher too. Yeah, we have two of them. I want to go back.
Actually, something Brian said before, we got on board structures. Because they think when we're thinking about how we make our thinking visible to students, when we think about some of those, like just some of those organizing structures that help our students, where we connecting it, I know for myself, I often forget them also showing students how I access information that I've had that I have stored somewhere up there. And I think about like, I think about my own kids learning to use planners and having to get them signing going through that. Like, it's essentially a fine like system.
Like, where does this go at the end of the day? Where does this go at the end of the class? Where do we put these things so we can come back to them? And that idea, I think of how do I actually bring it back?
I think I've been guilty about forgetting about that in my own instructional design, thinking about, okay, great. Here you have it. Where do I really intentionally and what I'm asking you to do with the content, ask you to bring that to actually bring it back to show me you're accessing it again. And not just in the spitting it out, but like, how are we actually connecting it to something else?
And potentially changing what we thought about it before. Yeah, I think if we did some brainstorm and we could come up with all kinds of examples of organizational structures and how we go about that. And even so easily as, you know, students learn how to file a system for electronic documents instead of putting in the one folder for all of their courses or those. Kind of things, but, you know, I think I think that one of the main premises from the book that I really appreciate is and they drove home the point is it's not so much what you know, but also how you go about organizing what you know so that you really that's what really influences learning and student performance.
And so thinking about how to help students organize that is kind of that next level of being an expert teacher and mentor to help students really be impactful in their learning and how they perform with that the content that they have. I think a big piece of that is we think, OK, great. That's these are really great things to think about. How do I actually do that?
How do I plan for knowledge of organization? Like this, this feels kind of big, like this big idea of how do I plan for knowledge organization? Like I I learned how to plan and saying, OK, here are the components of my lesson here, the things that I need to need to do. One of the things actually that I think comes to mind for me here in Tich like a champion, they talk about double planning.
And it's kind of this idea that you plan what you will do and you plan what the students will do. And in that what students will do process, it gives you a little bit of time to think about, OK, are my students just just taking in. Or am I really taking some time to think about what are my students going to actually do with this content? How are we going to come back to it, even in that smaller in that smaller segment of a lesson to say, bring it back, access it, practice these pieces, whether it's in a review question, whether it's an additional activity.
I think some of these things can be already built into our lessons. It's often an opportunity for us to how do I really make that explicit to not just to me as a teacher, but especially to my students that you're you're filing information, you're putting it somewhere in your brain so that you can bring it back again. Yeah, I think you get it there. Becky, that's an idea of it's really teach them.
We say to go see how to think, but it's really showing them how you think and then helping them use that in the model to really see how to take it to the next level. I think there's some great, great idea to share there. And I think to that point, not only helping helping students see how you think, I think spending enough time letting the students kind of articulate about how they're thinking and how they're processing. I think is an important piece as well.
And so encouraging students just to reflect on how they see concepts connecting or how they're connecting those in their own mind, how that may have changed from the start of the course until where they're at there now or at the end of the course, I think are important pieces. You know, again, it ties into some of the things we've talked about over some of the other seasons, but just having been able to connect those things and having students understand that is an important piece. I think there are lots of ways we can do that. You know, when we think about how do when do we give our students opportunities to write and how do we key into how do we make sure we're looking at that writing and identifying where are they making or missing and missing connections to not just where are they making them where are they missing them or making inaccurate connections.
Can they draw? If you've already brought up concept now, like these don't necessarily have to be big, big things or huge structural shifts in your planning. It's just really thinking about it sometimes is how do we help our students make their thinking visible enough that they can really process how they're thinking about it. Because some of this is just about making those connections obvious.
It's just about saying, hey, here's the thing. Here's how we get from A to B and really forcing them to connect those dots whether we're working them through that process or being really like, here it is. Here's where this goes. But that also, I think again, is some additional, this is a lot of work in our planning as far as I need to know where those connections are.
I need to know where the dots are if I'm going to walk somebody through connecting them. Yeah, I just live that today. I mean, I was in a meeting there. There's a new software system we're using to manage money and it's a real fancy powerful system.
And this is a whole room full of highly intelligent people, experts in their field, but not experts in this field. And the person who got it really had to like, slow down, bring us down, help us figure out how these things all connect because he got this and he got this and he got this. And so you can just connect them all like, well, how do we make that connection? Show us slow down and really make those things very explicit.
And I don't remember if this was a specific strategy in the chapter. But I think we brought it up in other principles already. It's a great opportunity to connect with your fellow teachers and be each other's kind of critical friend in your planning process to say, okay, I'm going to cover XYZ and your co teacher across the hall who's maybe not an Ag or maybe not a CTE area says, you talk about what? Where are we starting?
And I think that just can give you a really good opportunity to think about, okay, now, how do I actually sort this and how do I work through this process of having a non expert friend who can say, I don't even know where you're starting because if we don't get off to start the same point, we're not going to get to the dot at the same time. Great point. My first step is to have friends. And then I got a number two, find a non expert friend to share with.
So that's my to do this today. You got the flowers left. That still happened for you, Brian. It could still happen.
I think this has been a great conversation. And I think one that we really, you know, probably very, very important in the sense of teaching and learning and what we do in the classroom, but probably something that we don't spend enough time thinking about once in a while and helping students figure out how to hang all of that knowledge and whether it's new knowledge or connected to prior knowledge that they have, I think, is all important pieces and being intentional with that. I think it's an important element. Yeah.
So I mean, really, it's an opportunity to just consider the mental models or students are building and it's an opportunity to ask ourselves, am I just giving them a pile of facts or am I helping them actually build a sturdy, sturdy intellectual shelf to put these facts on so they can find it when when they need it, when it's relevant when those pieces really connect. So with that, I think we can say thanks for joining us on this installment of our pellets in our next episode for this mini series will be tackling principle for where we're going to explore the importance of student motivation. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Al pellets. Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to stay connected and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by the Al pellets saying thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Al pellets tips for Egg teachers.