Pattern: Round and Deep
Pattern: Round and Deep
| Summary |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Status 
| beta | Confidence
| 3 | ||
| details... | Group | none
|
|||
Problem
You want the whole class to benefit from the experiences of individual students in your class.Context
An experienced student is likely to gain a deep understanding of a complex concept by relating it to his or her own experience. But the same experience which results in a deep understanding may also limit it because a rounded understanding of a complex concept can only be achieved by considering different perspectives. To gain a deep understanding of a complex concept, the student needs to consider it from many different perspectives, but your own experience is necessarily limited and a classroom exercise (in a University or Industrial setting) is necessarily too simple to cover adequately the deep issues surrounding the concept.Experienced students will relate a new concept to their own real-world experiences, and will form a deep understanding of it, but if their experience does not validate the concept, then its significance may be lost, and if their experience does validate the concept then although understanding may appear deep, it may also be narrow.Solution
Therefore, use the students' experiences to complement your own and provide the alternative perspectives required.This can be achieved through group (preferably) or individual activity which exercises the concept from a number of perspectives, followed by presentations and discussion to exchange ideas, concerns, lessons learned and so on. Asking students to present findings to you and to fellow students compels them to clarify their own thought. This in itself can deepen the student's own understanding, while the presentations and discussions deepens the collective understanding of the class by sharing other students' experiences, misconceptions and breakthroughs.How well this pattern works depends on how many and how varied are the experiences in your class and how prepared the students are to expose their understanding of the concept. Some perspectives may conflict, but good learning experience will emerge from their resolution and compromise. You will also learn quite a lot and broaden your understanding!
Related Patterns
list other patterns related to this one, under categories such as component, assisting, conflicting, uses this, etc.
This pattern is part of the Teaching from Different Perspectives pattern language, developed by the pedagogical patterns project.Support
* Source and Additional Supporting Cases
Source Case (chosen from Case Studies)
Other Cases (chosen from Case Studies)
Links to External Case Stories & Examples
* Rationale (theoretical justification)
Theoretical justification.
In terms of the Conversational Framework (Laurillard, 2002; 2008) this pattern relates to the discussion between students leading to the development of learners' conceptions.In terms of Black and Wiliam's (2009) theory of formative feedback, this is an example of key strategy 4: activating students as instructional resources for one another.
General theories of cooperative learning are well developed: “There are at least three general theoretical perspectives that have guided research on cooperative learning. The most influential is social interdependence theory, whose roots extend from Kurt Koffka in the early 1900s to Kurt Lewin and Morton Deutsch in the mid-1900s, to the authors of this article. Its central proposition is that the way social interdependence is structured determines how individuals interact with each other which, in turn, determines outcomes. Positive interdependence (cooperation) creates promotive interaction, negative interdependence (competition) creates oppositional interaction, and no interdependence (individualistic efforts) results in an absence of interaction. From the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky comes the cognitive development theory, with the proposition that when individuals cooperate, socio-cognitive conflict occurs that creates cognitive disequilibrium, which in turn stimulates perspective-taking ability and cognitive development. Both the work on structuring academic controversies and research on cognitive restructuring are drawn from this orientation. Based on the work of Skinner, Bandura, Homans, Thibaut and Kelly, and more recently, Slavin, behavioral learning theory focuses on the impact of group contingencies on learning; its main proposition is that actions followed by extrinsic rewards will be repeated.” (Johnson & Johnson 1993) (taken from http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/temp/assessment.html). There may be work in Work based learning that could add specific support for the importance of the kind of perspectives sharing being suggested here. It is however important to define how this process will be carried out as there are a range of approaches in the literature that could be applied to implementing such a pattern.
* Verification (Solutions that were derived from this pattern)
Scenarios / solutions which were developed using this pattern.
Notes, Links and References
Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects
This pattern and its related pattern language are derived from the Pedagogical Patterns Project (http://pedagogicalpatterns.org/). This website is a little out of date but the pattern languages published there have been shepherded through several Patterns conferences (in the PLoP series). This pattern has appeared in "Teaching from Different Perspectives" (Eckstein, Manns, Sharp and Sipos, 2003)Licensing
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
