Using Theory to Select Pedagogy (It's really not that boring, though.)

This summer, one of the teachers said that the kids just weren't getting the grammar rules, particularly about verb tense. At the time, we were about to study the cognitive learning theories in the Abydos Writing Institute. Piaget weighed heavily on my mind. How could I answer her concern in terms of cognitive theory applications? Whether you agree totally with Piaget or not (I don't), there are some practical considerations that can guide our pedagogy, particularly when students are not responding to our current approaches.

From ages 7-11, students are usually in the concrete operational stage. Internalizing grammar rules is pretty abstract. There needs to be some kind of scaffold to help students understand. (Reminds me of Vygotsky's ZPD, but that's another theorist for another day, even if he is my favorite.) Students at the concrete operational stage need concrete activities and scaffolds to help them get to the abstract concepts and use of things like grammar. Piaget would say that students would need to be at a formal operations stage (which usually happens - if at all - after age 11 and into adulthood) to apply the rules of grammar to speech and writing. But our standards, curriculum, and assessment don't often follow developmentally appropriate progressions. Once again, the choices of the teacher allow the student to accomplish what he could not do without expert teacher judgment.

The teacher makes decisions on how to help students use language in abstract ways by constructing scaffolds - bridges - with their pedagogy.

Here's what we came up with as an answer. We needed to make the verb tense choices very concrete - into manipulatives. We created a word sort of sentence teams: I walk. He walks. I ride. He rides. I rode. He rode. She runs. I run. Some of them were simple. Others were in authentic sentences for more advanced students and further practice: In the morning, I walk in the breezeway near the wisteria arbor. In the afternoon, he walks home, stepping across the train tracks just outside of town.

Next, we had students sort the sentences into categories, analyzing the characteristics of how the verbs were used. We asked students to label the categories. (Students didn't necessarily call them what we or the grammarians would, but they used the language they had to explain.)

Then we asked students to create/infer a rule that would explain how subject-verb agreement works in English.

After writing down their statement, students checked their understandings by comparing to grammar guides like Diana Hacker or the Purdue Owl.

Next, student groups discussed and compared and made revisions to their categories and explanations. All of the student groups posted their statements on a class chart.

Finally, as a class, we compared to the "official" version and chose two or three to include on our class grammar guide we kept on our class wiki.