Volume 12 Number 6
CARNEGIE CHRONICLE:
Cognitive Apprenticeship as
Pedagogical Strategy:
Introducing Conversacolor
Cynthia Scheinberg, Mills College
In their article "Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible," John Collins, John Seely Brown and Ann Holum observe that:
[a]pprenticeship involves learning a physical tangible activity. But in schooling, the "practice" of problem solving, reading comprehension and writing is not at all obvious—it is not necessarily observable to the student. In apprenticeship, the processes of the activity are visible. In schooling, the processes of thinking are often invisible to both the students and the teacher. Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction that works to make thinking visible. (6)
Cognitive
apprenticeship is a method for teaching cognitive skills that eschews the use of
abstract terms in favor of "making visible"— showing rather than telling. This
concept can be applied to the uses of classroom discussion in a variety of
settings. As one example, I have developed a pedagogical tool,
Conversacolor,
to help students make links between their roles in the classroom and their roles
as writers. I began this work by asking whether we might transform one of the
most common pedagogical techniques—classroom discussion—into a more effective
technique for helping students connect the experience of class discussion to the
skills they need for intellectual discourse. My research, conducted during my
time as a Carnegie Scholar, explored this problem in relation to the expository
writing classroom (though I hope it will have
implications for other disciplines as well).
Most of us in the humanities use class discussion to varying degrees, but one shared purpose seems to be "to engage students," to transform the Freirian "banking classroom" into one where students can be more active participants in their learning. Classrooms where all the students are talking, and where the teacher offers a clear management of student comments and discussion protocols, are generally well received. However, I began to wonder if being "too good at facilitation" might hinder one kind of student development crucial to becoming a good writer. As teachers, many of us become adept at directing conversation, using the role of discussion leader to synthesize reading assignments, pose probing questions that spark critical thinking, create transitions between different ideas, offer links and related references for new directions. Often, we enter the class with a larger theme for structuring discussion, and produce conversation summaries at the end of the class. In short, we become managers of content and ideas, shapers of the larger discourse; it is a role many of us (myself included) enjoy immensely.
However, when I began to analyze my role in the classroom, I discovered that my facilitation was analogous to the work of a good critical writer—the most important role I hope to teach my students. Despite that primary goal, I found that I rarely made visible connections between the work I do within classroom discussion and the work I do as a scholarly writer; my observations of and discussions with other teachers suggested that few of us make this connection. By maintaining this gap between "writerly" selves and facilitator selves, we render invisible some of the connections students might make between their work in discussion and their work as writers.
Thus, cognitive apprenticeship or "making thinking visible" is particularly important for the writing classroom because writing essays is a seemingly mystifying process for so many of our students, one that they often perform in isolation. While students write papers as "homework," class discussion is what they do in class. My literature survey reveals that most often teachers use class discussion for increased student "engagement" or related purposes; rarely does discussion ask students to take on roles, to "apprentice" skills they need for writing. Even one technique that might seem like apprenticeship, the modeling of sample essays or papers, only goes so far in providing the cognitive links for students, because in reading sample papers they do not themselves take on the roles of "transition maker" or "idea developer." Reading a model paper is not like writing your own paper, it does not require the reader to actually do the job of the writer and come to a deep understanding of the concepts used in writing.
"Conversacolor" (the name for the technique I developed to address this problem) makes a radical intervention into the typical college classroom scenario by connecting a content-based discussion to specific skills needed to write good papers. It asks students to practice the roles they need as writers in their class discussion. Conversacolor is a highly structured form of class discussion that is extraordinarily simple in design. Each student is given a set of colored cards with which to "play" during a class discussion. A color is assigned to each kind of statement that might occur in discussion: a statement of a new idea (red), a statement that develops an idea (green), a transition between ideas (orange). When the student raises her hand to speak, she must be holding the "correct" color card for the kind of statement she plans to make. In addition, there is a card (yellow) that allows others to challenge the student's color choice if it seems her statement does not match the color used, and a special card to request clarification of terms (purple). By insisting that a card accompany each contribution to class discussion, this game encourages students to classify their own statements in relationship with the comments of their peers, and engage in meta-cognitive work on the kind of statement they wish to make. Furthermore, the teacher can relinquish the facilitator role and become a player in the class.
The
game begins with someone offering a statement or question to the class on the
given topic. That person then calls on the next speaker, with each subsequent
speaker called on by the previous. This lack of a single facilitator is
important, for each person can thus choose how the discussion will unfold. As I
write in the instructions: "Want to see your point developed? Choose someone
holding a green card; want to have the last word on that idea and move somewhere
else? Choose a red card holder." The game insists that students take
responsibility for the direction of the conversation. However, if a challenge
(yellow) or clarification (purple) card is held up, these get priority over all
others, with purple getting priority over yellow. If there is a challenge, the
class must vote on whether they agree with the challenger, or whether the
original speaker used the correct card.
When I use Conversacolor with students, I am often most impressed with how they articulate aspects of the writing process that had hitherto seemed impossible to grasp through more common paper writing/grading/conference/classroom routines. I think this was because, as Collins, Brown and Holum suggest, "standard pedagogical practices render key aspects of expertise invisible to students" (6). After playing Conversacolor, students see what transitions, new ideas or developments look like as people talk, and the game asks them to create and critique these discursive moves on the spot. While adding this meta-cognitive dimension to class discussion often baffles students at first, it tangibly demonstrates concepts that had remained mystifying when I simply told them they needed, for example, a transition or development of an idea. In all my years of teaching writing and literature, I never had a class discussion about "what makes a good transition," but it came up as part of Conversacolor. Indeed, many classes engage in high-level discourse analysis as part of their "play"—the kind of analysis I never got when we would "go over" papers in class, or study from grammar books.
Conversacolor shows my students how to perform the roles of discourse mapping that are intrinsic to my own intellectual or "expert" work as a scholarly writer. Yet it was only when I was willing to critically examine an aspect of my pedagogy that was perhaps "too successful" that I became better able to help my students learn.
Reference
Allan Collins, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum. 1991. "Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible." American Educator (Winter): 6-12, 38-47.
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