In the Foreward to this OECD report the complexity of effective teaching and learning is stressed. The report, based on research from 150 schools in 40 different countries, also explains how “Focusing on 20 practices that support five key dimensions of high-quality teaching, this report draws from extensive research to delineate what we know – and what remains to be understood – about each.”
A 16 minute notebooklm summary and briefing document
One of the five key dimensions explored is Ensuring cognitive engagement
In Brief
•Cognitive engagement centres on learners putting forth a sufficient and sustained effort to persist in understanding a complex idea or solving challenging, unstructured problems.
•Student cognitive engagement is consistently positively associated with student achievement. It can also lead to greater student motivation, self-esteem and interest in learning.
•Teachers can foster cognitive engagement by:
Ensuring appropriate levels of challenge
meaningful context and real-world connections
facilitating first-hand experiences
working with multiple approaches and representations
metacognition.
•Across these different practices, the teaching complexity centres on setting up learning opportunities where all students feel challenged and curious, but which also cater for differences in prior knowledge or student interests. Teachers must navigate how to guide cognitive engagement by scaffolding or stretching student thinking, as well as when they want to use students as drivers of this engagement.
•To foster students’ cognitive engagement also demands teachers to be very cognitively engaged. Teachers need not just to notice but also to process and respond to students’ thinking in real-time; for example, not just checking whether students are considering multiple approaches to problems, but whether they are appropriately evaluating these different approaches.
I noticed that many of these approaches are very well embodied in the pedagogy of the Lets Think programmes. Concrete preparation, cognitive conflict and challenge, social construction discussions to evaluate and develop ideas based on first hand evidence and mental models, then continued metacognition and bridging to prior and subsequent learning.