Conducting Knowledge Application Lessons By 4th Grade Reading Chapter 5 Conducting Knowledge Application Lessons By 4th Grade Reading

1. Why is unassisted discovery an ineffective instructional tool, and for what reasons is enhanced discovery more powerful?  Unassisted discovery is an ineffective instructional tool because students are pretty much left to their own devices in their exploration of specific declarative or procedural knowledge.  Enhanced discovery is a more powerful instructional tool because students learn the content as a result of well-planned direct instruction lessons and practicing and deepening lessons

2. What behaviors do students exhibit when strategies for engaging them in cognitively complex tasks produce the desired effects? What purpose does engaging students in these tasks serve?  Students are clearly engaged in their cognitively complex task. Students can explain the conclusions they have generated. Students can defend their conclusions. Students have produced artifacts from their cognitively complex task. These tasks require students to think deeply about the content and to apply what they have learned in novel situations.

3. How does a teacher’s role shift when he or she provides students with resources and guidance to help them engage with cognitively complex tasks?  The teacher’s role shifts from providing new content (which is his or her role during direct instruction) or orchestrating the ways students are analyzing content (which is his or her role during practicing and deepening lessons) to providing support as students work with some relative independence on knowledge application task.

4. In your own words, describe how claims are distinct from facts 4. In your own words, describe how claims are distinct from facts. Provide an example of a claim a student has brought up in your classroom and how the student could have supported the claim with facts.  A claim is your opinion about something.  A fact can be proven.   My example would be that Cindy claimed Johnny had her pencil. Cindy could have supported her claim by stating the color of her pencil, the color of the eraser, and that her mother had written her name on all of her pencils with a permanent marker, thus providing proof of her claim.

5. What design question relates to implementing knowledge application lessons, and how can teachers transform the elements related to this design area into focused planning questions?  The design question pertaining to implementing knowledge application lessons is, After presenting new content, how will I design and deliver lessons that help students generate and defend claims through knowledge application? The three elements that pertain to this design area provide specific guidance regarding this overall design question.  Teachers can easily turn these elements into more focused planning questions. Element 12 :How will I engage students in cognitively complex tasks? Element 13:  How will I provide resources and guidance? Element 14:  How will I help students generate and defend claims?

6. What is backing, and why is backing the area of greatest need among an argument structure’s components? Describe a classroom situation in which you could incorporate prompting students to demonstrate backing.  Backing is providing evidence that supports our reasons that makes us think at deeper levels.  It requires a higher level of rigor that teachers rarely ask students to demonstrate.  This type of thinking is at the core of effective learning, or the gradual accumulation of an integrated set of concepts, generalizations, and principles that occurs through a disciplined execution of the process of argumentation. An example of a  simple classroom situation might involve prompting students to demonstrate backing the teacher’s decision to have indoor recess when the outside temperature is below 50 degrees.