Process Trumps Content
The goal of education is not to prepare students for today's world, it's to prepare them for the dynamic and often unpredictable future challenges. We can't possibly give students a guidebook for all the problems they will face. We can provide them with the tools, frameworks, and strategies that enable them to be agile and creative.
In all my years in education – at UPenn GSE, Philadelphia Public Schools, Dalun Ghana, St. Paul's School, Maret, and St Albans, – have taught me one most important principle, it’s that process trumps content. Knowing how to conceptually approach a cognitive task is more important than the particular cognitive knowing the right answer.
Our educational philosophy and “Student Voice” approach enable students to connect their identities, voices, choices, and real-world experiences to the content their studying (the “what”), and the processes they’re using (the how) so that they can discover their own “why” at the center of their learning experience.
The relevant literature on student voice promotion holds that it positively affects motivation, engagement, retention and understanding, adaptive identity development, and civic and social engagement. My research examined, tested, and corroborated these relationships, and also discovered and argued that another dimension, trust and safety, is a relevant piece of the puzzle.
These dimensions interact in a cyclic and multidirectional fashion with endless permutations and combinations — Promoting student voice might inspire increased motivation, which yields greater engagement, and thus greater understanding and retention, which might in turn inspire more student voice, beginning the cycle again. Gains in motivation might inspire greater civic engagement and gains in civic engagement can be expected to yield positive identity development. Etc, etc. The most important point is that when you put students at the center of their learning experiences, good things follow.
A student voice framework dovetails neatly with the idea of process mastery rather than a wrote-memorization content focus. One practical application is the co-creation of content choices and leveraging students’ favorite movies, TV shows, and music to practice the analytical process.
I worked with a student who consistently struggled to understand and meet expectations for analytical writing. When I started working with him, his English class was getting ready to read Macbeth. Shakespeare is great! He’s the bee’s knees! Undoubtably! But I didn’t start with Shakespeare! Why? Because process trumps content.
A student might not be as motivated to closely analyze Macbeth, Ethan Frome, or A Tale of Two Cities because they might not feel a personal connection to the characters, setting, or narrative, or because they lack the analytical skills that would enable them to read more deeply and find such a connection.
When helping this student prepare for Macbeth, I incorporated their voice into our content selection because I know that once students understand the underlying processes, they’re more willing and able to apply them to more complex course content. We practiced close analysis with Pirates of the Caribbean, The Last of Us, The Breakfast Club, Dr. Who, and any other media/art form that excites and engages them.
My process-focused approach to this timeline task enables students to see the connecting threads and to actually grapple with the content so that they can integrate this new information into their constantly evolving understanding paradigms.
I tutored a student who had this exact timeline task. After beginning with a brief self-evaluation and reviewing a failed quiz, we created notecards with the historical event on one side, and on the other, brief summaries of the “who”, the “what” and the “why” for each event. We then shuffled the cards, and I asked him to put them in the correct chronological order.
My student skeptically asked me, “Shouldn’t we put the dates on the cards? We’re kinda supposed to memorize when all these things happened..”
“Great question!” I responded. “I wonder if we can figure out the right order to put these cards without even using dates at all?”
With Harkness-style and Socratic conversation, I guided him through finding connections between the “why” of each of these cards. We were able to first establish upper and lower bounds for the timeline, then through discussing the connections between the events and tracing the causal through-lines that connect all human history, he successfully ordered the events without the dates. When we later returned to strategies to memorize the dates, he flew through the activity because his understanding was contextualized.
This type of tactile activity helps all students understand the underlying process, and is particularly effective for students with ADD and visual-processing disorders. And it’s just one example of the way that I teach - with the understanding that process trumps content.
To give a simplified example – If a student memorizes the answer to “What is 10 x 20”, they will be able to parrot and regurgitate the information back to you whenever prompted. But if they don’t understand the underlying process, or the concept of multiplication, even a small change to the problem (What is 10 x 21?) can present a roadblock.
The “banking” system of education sees students as passive receptacles of information and teachers most often would lecture and employ rote-learning methods with handouts and textbooks (Freire 1968; Dull, 2004). This kind of learning stifles critical thinking. In advocating for the expansion of education programs around Brazil, Paulo Freire argued that true education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information (Freire, 1968). Freire’s solution to the “banking” model is called the “problem-posing education” though educational scholars often refer to it as critically reflective pedagogy, critical pedagogy, or the Freirean approach.
Freire contended, “even if the people's thinking is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in action that they can change. Producing and acting upon their own ideas—not consuming those of others—must constitute that process (Freire, 1968, p. 108).
I’ve built upon this framework and integrated a student-voice pedagogy to create deep learning for hundreds of students.
Deep Learning is Built on Students' Pre-existing Perspectives
Learning happens when students select inputs from their long-term memories and environment to use in their working memories (Lang, 2016). When a new idea, event, or experience does not fit a learner's current understanding paradigm, it creates expectation dissonance. Deep learning occurs with the resolution of this conflict when a learner adapts their understanding paradigm to integrate the new information (Piaget & Cook, 1952; Overoye and Storm, 2015). Provided it is done on a foundation of trust and safety, leaning into expectation dissonance creates a positive friction with which to build a base of understanding.
A learner understands reality by evaluating their past experiences and prior knowledge. Learners will either assimilate new information to their conceptual schema, or alter their schema to be consistent with new information (Piaget & Cook, 1952; Overoye and Storm, 2015), or reject new information entirely if they can’t understand or if it doesn’t fit within their conceptual schema.
Because deep learning is contingent upon a student continually redesigning their models of understanding, effective teaching must use learners’ perspectives and experiences as a foundation. This co-construction enables teachers to safely challenge students with a framework they understand and can therefore accept and adapt, and creates experiences that exist within Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”
Challenging students’ understanding paradigms can be a source of conflict that acts as an impediment to learning if not addressed correctly. Even though challenge yields deep understanding, students often prefer information that is already consistent with their understanding paradigm to information that forces them to evaluate and adapt their understanding paradigm. It is easy for students to initially resist or even entirely reject such challenges because critical self-reflection and evaluation are learned behaviors, not instinctive. Additionally, students “tend to prefer study practices that feel easy while opting against the use of more difficult or challenging practices” (Overoye and Storm, 140; 2015).
The possible conflict that can arise from challenging students’ understanding paradigms further reinforces the need for course material to be relevant to students’ experiences. As students are posed with problems that they can relate to themselves and the world around them, they will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge, “because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question; the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed (Freire, 1968, p. 81).
Paulo Freire contended, “Even if the people's thinking is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in action that they can change. Producing and acting upon their own ideas—not consuming those of others—must constitute that process” (Freire, 108; 1968). With this statement, Freire reinforced the need for co-construction. Effective teaching results from inviting and coaxing students to challenge their own understanding paradigms with information that’s relevant to their lives.
Education is about relationships. Students need to feel that teachers value and include their perspectives. They need to feel like all their hard work will actually help them achieve their goals and develop their own sense of purpose. They need a “why” behind the “what”. The “why” must be built on their voices.
Concept-based Pedagogy Creates Lasting and Transferable Know
In the classrooms I teach, I can pair Shakespeare with Tupac. Audre Lorde with Game of Thrones. Bob Marley with Joseph Conrad. I can teach higher-order thinking with whatever texts, media, or art forms that capture students’ interests because I use a concept-based curricular approach.
I’ll repeat - The structure of curriculum and textbooks often divides topics/units into separate components indicating to students that each section stands on its own. There is no expectation that there is a carryover or connection between the topics. The units are taught separately, experienced separately, and assessed separately. Each is a silo of information, specific and non-transferable to other topics, disciplines, or situations.
If different facts and topics are connected by some commonality, we may be able to identify some bigger ideas that yield more enduring understanding.
A concept-based curricular design model is built to prepare students for the changing world because it is process-focused rather than content focused. It adds another dimension of understanding that enables students to consistently build upon their prior understandings.
The world is changing fast, and as knowledge continues to expand exponentially we must move to a higher level of abstraction (concepts) to focus and process the information so it can be efficiently accessed and utilized. Cognitive interplay between the factual and conceptual levels of knowledge and understanding stimulates higher-order thinking and leads to a deeper understanding of both the facts and concepts (Erikson and Lanning, 2007).
Concepts categorize and summarize the facts and topics into larger more abstract collections that can be transferred to other topics, disciplines, or situations. Concepts serve as a bridge with which students relate themselves to learning.
Topics and Facts
Topics and Facts are specific and don't transfer across time, cultures, or situations without being linked by unifying/overarching concepts.
Examples of topics: World War II, Renoir’s paintings, the human body, 17th-century Asian Culture, Cross-Laminated Timber Construction, and Modern Indigenous Poetry.
Facts are the specific pieces of knowledge that are framed by the topics.
Examples of facts: The Invasion of Poland began Sept 1st, 1939; Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters; There are 206 bones and 10 major systems in the human body.
Concepts
Concepts categorize facts and topics into more abstract and broad collections. They are mental constructs that frame a set of examples with common attributes. Macro-concepts are more abstract and can be transferred to other topics, disciplines, or situations. Microconcepts are less abstract and specific to a particular discipline. Concepts link topics and facilitate deeper and lasting engagement with facts. Concepts are usually limited to one or two words.
Generalizations
Generalizations are defined as two or more concepts stated as a sentence of relationship. They are understandings that transfer through time, across cultures, and across situations. Generalizations contain no proper nouns, past tense verbs, or pronouns that would associate the idea with a particular person or group. Generalizations are truths supported by factual examples, but they may include a qualifier (often, can, may) when the idea is important but does not hold in all instances. An example using a qualifier would be “Nations may use negotiation to resolve international conflict.” Overusing these qualifiers can weaken the strength of a set of understandings, however, so use them only as needed.
Example Generalization - “Organisms within an Ecosystem form interdependent relationships” (Concepts are bolded)
When we link topics & facts to create concepts, and link concepts to create generalizations, students see that understanding a forest ecosystem is like understanding any other ecosystem. If we learn about wetlands in grade 5 and forests in grade 6, a big conceptual idea connects their enduring understanding.
