Cognitive Autobiography, Part 4

By Dr. Cynthia Herbert

This is an ongoing publication from our colleague and teaching partner Cynthia Herbert, PhD. Susan Marcus and Susie Monday share much of this history with Cindy, and we are grateful for her willingness to share it on this blog. Dr. Herbert has a new website at  The essay explains much of the shared history that we have used as the basis for our book New World Kids, The Parent's Guide to Creative Thinking.

From Dr. Herbert:

Early adulthood
From 1968 to 1986, Jearnine Wagner organized and directed the non-profit, Learning About Learning Educational Foundation (LAL), affiliated with Trinity University. I returned to work with her as "Vice President for Academic Programs." Susan Russell (Marcus), Julia Jarrell and Susie Monday also worked on my level in different, but often overlapping, arenas. We began to work more with the public schools and families, as well as continuing afterschool opportunities. We had several concerns at this time:

Social/emotional applications.
We knew that many students in the original program had been able to reach sophisticated levels of self-understanding in terms of thinking and creating, as well as produce amazing forms. Many, however, including myself, had struggled with the problems of a dysfunctional family, peer pressures, economic differences, low self-esteem, and so on. What bridges could be built so that young people who had shown such brilliance in thinking about thinking would be able to transfer their creating and problem solving skills to these other areas as well?

Academic applications.
In the context of the program, most students were able to shine. However, many could not use their skills and talents to be successful in core subjects such as language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Again, what bridges or scaffolding would be needed to help them conquer academic disciplines?

Professional development for adults.
Coming from the arts—and an unusual arts program at that—made it difficult to help other teachers. We spoke about "elements of form" and thought about thinking—habits foreign to most public schools. How could we help the classroom teacher and the parent develop new strategies for helping young people develop individual potential if we lacked a common language?

Models of curriculum and instruction.
When we began working with schools, textbooks, lecture, and busywork were the mainstays of curriculum and instruction. Innovations often were short-lived in this context—many times because they failed to take into account the need for modeling and follow-through and/or they seemed to advocate letting the inmates (children) run the asylum. How could our learner-centered, media rich, metacognitive programs of active learning escape the fate of being a fad?

Learning About Learning.
We literally did need to learn more about learning. We knew a good deal about creativity, the creative process, creative work, and metacognition (although the latter word was not part of our collective vocabulary)—but we did not know how that knowledge related to either scientific or classroom-based research on learning. What did we need to learn about learning? How could we build a bridge between what we had learned and what science and educational practice had discovered?

We began to work on integrated programs through a variety of venues—seeking to answer some of our questions and solve some of the anticipated problems. Programs included work with groups and individuals both locally and internationally. Topics ranged from opera to economics, from "me" to "my world," from invention to celebration, and of course included, "thinking about thinking."

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.

Comments

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