Does the prior knowledge that your school and classroom rituals deliver empower students?

Does the prior knowledge that your school and classroom rituals deliver empower students?

Are they delivering the dispositions you want or are they sneaking other counter- productive ones, in under the radar that sooner or later will interfere with learning and disempower?

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A crucial aspect of this is the prior knowledge and the dispositions being learned by each student as they interact with school and classroom rituals. In many cases, the dispositions so engendered, are even more important to the long term learning process than the prior knowledge needed to succeed seamlessly in the curriculum areas.

Macro – the school as a whole

Scenario one.

The pupils are lined up outside the door. The teacher stands on guard duty. The behaviour is perfect. There is no noise, no scuffling, they just wait. The perfect class. The teacher gives the signal. They enter the classroom and sit on the floor. As they do so, widespread subdued chatter breaks out. As the teacher gets ready to introduce me she claps her hands. Obediently the pupils clap their hands too and silence returns.

This is the designated way, school wide, for classes to assemble and re-enter their classrooms after morning interval and the lunch time break.

Note the rituals: the lining up and the hand clapping. At no stage is the behaviour owned by the students. There is total teacher control – total teacher management – total teacher ownership. The students wait to be told what to do. They have become conditioned to waiting for the teacher to give the answer.

They have been robbed of the opportunity to become efficacious self-managers.

This is the sort of teacher that led Charles Handy, the futurist, to write, “When I went to school I did not learn anything much which I now remember, except the hidden message that every major problem in life had already been solved. The answers were in the teacher’s head or in her text book but not in mine…..That hidden message from my school I eventually realized was not only crippling, it was wrong.”

So the prior knowledge that he was learning about the power of the teacher would likely lead to a disposition to not strive for the answer himself but to wait for the teacher to provide it.

Sadly then, the students subjected to this sort of school wide ritual have implanted as their prior knowledge that they need someone, in this case the teacher, to manage their behaviour. The developing disposition from such regimentation is that each student is incapable of self-managing not in just this one instance but across the board. Moreover, within the brain the dendrites are grown and reinforced at each repetition of the practice. Thus yesterday’s past knowledge is reinforced and strengthened as is the disposition that has developed from it.

Scenario two.

The students quietly enter the classroom. Conversation is muted as they move to their desks, cease talking, take out a fiction book and begin to read. Unobtrusively the teacher sits at her desk working on one of the myriad tasks she has to complete. On another day she may not even be in the room. After a few minutes she asks the students to close their books once they have read the next paragraph and get ready for the lesson.

Note the rituals here too: the informal moving into the classroom and the absence

of top down teacher control. There is total student control: total student ownership. They determine their own actions. The disposition being developed is that of self-managing.

Here the dispositions being formed in the brain are those of self-management: can do and efficacious.

Micro – the individual student in the classroom

Prior knowledge will differ from student to student on a regular basis. Thus the disposition associated with that prior knowledge will range from having no disposition or fluffy unsubstantial dispositions, to having strong well defined and understood dispositions. Developing strong dispositions cannot be left to the lottery of chance. The prior knowledge needed to develop the strong dispositions needed for success in school and later in life must be taught. One way of doing this is to construct a progressive chart in the form of a rubric against which progress can be measured.

The rubric shown below is for a class developing dispositions needed for successful classroom learning. Their listening skills are non-apparent or deficient – their work ethic is non-apparent or deficient and their interaction with others is inappropriate or deficient.

Screen Shot 2014-09-26 at 9.38.46 am

First the stages are goals. Thus, the first stage (beginning) must not be a negative such as “Has yet to learn to look at the speaker,” because that is not a goal. Each stage is the prior knowledge needed to progress to the next stage. The overall disposition to be realised is a successful listener. Each level indicates achievement that will enhance that disposition. It is a carefully laid out path of continual improvement.

Along the way there are various stages of self-actualisation. As more and more sophisticated levels of prior knowledge are acquired more and more of the student’s potential becomes available or actualised thus providing a more and more sophisticated level of prior knowledge and from them more and more sophisticated dispositions from which to launch into deeper learning.

Raising to the Consciousness Level – Thinking about their thinking

All the above is of little use if it remains submerged in the students sub conscious unavailable and useless. To avoid this, students must raise the ever-increasing prior knowledge and the ever-developing dispositions to the consciousness level. This requires structured and frequent metacognitive reflection on the part of each individual student.

Keeping a diary and recording each week, maybe in the last period on Friday, or more frequently when something significant happens, is effective but not always sufficient.

Variety is something the brain is attuned to, so by having variation from time to time will be significant intrinsic motivation for many thus giving impetus to the procedure. Just as importantly variety also creates, maintains and strengthens multiple pathways in the brain thus creating more trigger points and from that, deeper knowledge.

An easy variation is to have students write a letter to themselves detailing what they did to achieve the goal and/or what their hypothesis is for achieving the next goal. This provides for what is referred to as curriculum overlap in that it also provides for authentic practice in basic writing skills such as paragraphing.

Further variety can come from collaborative groups discussing their progress on the rubric and then reporting back to the whole class. Where the range of student achievement is wide, have them grouped according to where they are on the rubric and report only to the teacher. This is an opportune time to place the Japanese proverb on the wall “None of us are as smart as all of us.” Draw attention in the feedback session to how many things another group included that your group had not thought of.

Do not overlook the use of role play. More senses are involved and therefore there are even more contact points for retrieving the information from the brain at a future date. This will all be further enhanced if there is a requirement to add in some humour. An added advantage here is that humour is going to release the chemical dopamine into the brain. Dopamine induces feelings of pleasure and thus rewards the learning process.

When undertaking this reflection, the starting point for students is to plan ahead, to hypothesise and predict what strategies and procedures they are going to use to achieve the next step on the rubric. This is a crucial aspect of becoming a successful self- manager. The teacher must restrain from suggesting a path and therefore stealing the learning from the students. From then on it is a work in progress where the student is required to pay attention, not just to the strategies and procedures that were used successfully, but also to what strategies and procedures they had to improvise when failure loomed.

The teacher’s role throughout is as coach or mentor, conducting an appropriate collegial dialogue with each student.

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Alan Cooper


Alan Cooper is an educational consultant based in New Zealand. As a principal, he was known for his leadership role in thinking skills, including Habits of Mind, learning styles and multiple intelligences, information technology, and the development of the school as a learning community. Alan can be reached at: 82napawine@gmail.com