Cognitive Autobiography, Part 5

Dr. Cynthia Herbert continues her cognitive autobiography, one shared in many aspects by the both of the authors of New World Kids.Learning About Learning Educational Foundation operated in San Antonio,Texas, first under the auspices of Trinity University and then as an independent research and development institute in between the early 1970s and late 1980s. After its closure, the founders and directors pursued independent careers in the arts, education and design.

For a six-year period, I co-directed LAL's Laboratory School, chosen as a national model in learning through the arts by the National Endowment and lauded by cognitive psychologist evaluators for its metacognitive, learner-appropriate approach. This opportunity allowed us to attempt to answer some of our questions about thinking and learning through working with K-10 students in an all-day, all-year school program. (The program, however, engendered more questions than it answered!) Visitors often remarked that the students must be "gifted and talented," when, in truth, we chose children from a wide-range of academic histories, as well as from different social/economic backgrounds

We were able to meet the restrictions placed on the program (Learning About Learning's research school): Students were released from local school districts and so had to show a year or greater advancement on standardized tests in order for the program to continue each year. We signed contracts with parents to provide tutoring, if, after leaving the Lab School and returning to public school, students fell behind their public school peers.

More importantly, to us, we were able to think about thinking—with students—across the curriculum. Teachers included individuals who had been with LAL, or the programs that preceded it, for ten years or more. Besides retaining most of the characteristics of the afterschool program at Baylor and Trinity, the Lab School added the following:

"Me" as a course of study.
School began, for all ages, with an investigation of one's own cognitive, social, emotional, and creative identity. Through routine reflective experiences, this course continued and was interwoven into other courses throughout the entire school year.

Expert thinking as a continuing theme.
Without knowing all the answers, we explored, with the students, connections and contrasts between one's own way of thinking and the way experts in various fields gave form to ideas and solved problems. We asked many, many questions. We invited botanists and other experts to school to help us understand new viewpoints. We traveled to settings in the community that would give us a better understanding—especially of thinking in social studies.

We put on the viewpoints, as we understood them, as one would put on a pair of glasses to provide a new way of looking at the world. For example in math, we asked questions (and tried out answers) about the following:

• What does a mathematician notice in the everyday world that someone else might miss?
• How do mathematicians like to play?
• What materials and symbol systems are useful to mathematicians? Why?
• What kinds of thinking habits or scripts—such as estimating or rounding—do they use routinely?
• Do mathematicians think differently than I do? Are there any branches of mathematics that I can relate to more easily?

Open-ended tasks.
Many experiences and problems given to students were the same for all students, but open-ended so that they allowed individual diversity to surface. For example in math, we might give the following task: "The answer is 2. What is the problem? Use math ideas you have been studying lately to help you create a problem. Represent the problem in pictures, words, numbers, and at least one other medium."

Group and individual special projects.

Other experiences and problems were tailored to the individual characteristics of a child's thinking. For example in math:

• D, who loved moving through space and lived near the School, was asked to find and characterize all the routes he could between school and home.

• R, who hated math, but thought like a surrealist artist, was asked to read Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and other writers who dealt with logic/illogic. Afterward she expressed her own understanding by writing and illustrating an original book containing pages like, "Do I wear my glasses...or do my glasses wear me?"

• C and K, who loved interpersonal intrigue and drama, were asked to determine how many "put-downs" occurred during the school day and then to plot the numbers across each hour. (They discovered put-downs usually "peak" right before lunch!)

Portfolios and presentations.
Teachers struggled daily to characterize each student's characteristic ways of thinking and learning and sought materials, people, and experiences that would allow them to most easily find ideas and give them form. Each student, alone and in groups, developed multimedia presentations to demonstrate their learning and kept portfolios of written and visual work. We brought in other minds to look at this work and help give helpful feedback to us and to our students.