Traditionally, when teachers teach these kinds of patterns, they tend to present them in one way for the entire class. But the overt and subtle differences in how students best recognize patterns suggest that more varied means of presentation can reach more students. Being aware of the distributed nature of recognition processes and the combination of top-down and bottom-up processing can help teachers understand individual learners better and shape instruction and assessment accordingly.
In the examples that follow, we illustrate classroom applications of these concepts and introduce you to some of the students and teachers we will use as examples throughout the book.
Meet Mr. Costa . . . and Sophia
In a suburban middle school outside of Philadelphia, Mr. Costa's 7th grade English students show widely varying talents and difficulties. He is working with the technology specialist to develop flexible approaches to accommodate these learner differences. One student in particular he finds both challenging and inspiring.
Sophia, a soprano in the school's top singing group, is legally blind but has significant residual vision. She cannot sight-read music, but she has such a good ear that she is able to learn her parts quickly. The rest of the group depends on her as one of its most talented and consistent members.
Although Sophia reads Braille well, she prefers to use a desktop magnifier to read printed text. This technology worked well for her in the self-contained classrooms of elementary school, but it is proving awkward in middle school, where she must move the magnifier from class to class. Furthermore, the magnifier does not allow Sophia to skim and scan text; as a result, she is having a tough time staying on top of the increasing volume of reading assignments.
Mr. Costa understands that Sophia's visual acuity is only one small part of her recognition capacity. Equally important is her good ear for music; this ability to differentiate patterns in sound also enables her to understand and use language effectively.
In the middle school environment, barriers for Sophia include:
- Heavy emphasis on printed text.
- Increasing use of other visual materials.
- The need to move from class to class, which makes the magnifier technology awkward or impossible to use.
Instead of regarding these barriers as Sophia's problem, Mr. Costa and Sophia's other teachers seek new ways to present content that will make learning more accessible to her, and in the process, offer new options for others in the class. Their approach relies on making text and images available in digital form and via a network, which will allow supports such as text-to-speech translation, voice recognition, and on-screen text and image enlargement to be readily available in classrooms throughout the school.
Meet Ms. Sablan . . . and Paula
Ms. Sablan, an experienced 3rd grade teacher, has a particularly diverse class this year, increasing the challenge she feels to help all her students develop strong literacy skills before they move on to 4th grade.
Paula is a particular concern. Despite excellent single-word decoding and spelling, Paula's reading comprehension is poor. She has difficulty grasping meaning from connected text, and her limited fluency suggests that she has trouble using context to predict words and ideas as she reads. Paula also tends to miss many of the subtle cues carried by tone of voice and other vocal nuances; she interprets spoken language very literally and misses the intended humor in the things her classmates say. As a result, many of Paula's peers see her as rather odd. Fortunately, Paula is able to connect with some of her classmates through a shared love of bike riding, and she has found opportunities to join in with others by participating in the school's weekend cycling club.
Considering Paula's recognition strengths and weaknesses, we can see she is highly skilled at bottom-up processing-synthesizing parts, such as the letters and sounds that make up words. But she has trouble with top-down processing-connecting what she is learning to other knowledge and understanding content and context of both written text and spoken language.
Ms. Sablan knows that efficient recognition involves both top-down and bottom-up processing, and she wants to help Paula build her ability to use context and prior knowledge when reading. She decides to reduce Paula's focus on word decoding and instead help Paula to develop explicit strategies for understanding the content of what she reads..
Recognition represents one way of "knowing" the world: building factual knowledge and relating new information we encounter to what we already know. Traditional curricula focus primarily on recognition, at times overlooking the other kinds of "knowing" served by strategic and affective networks. And yet these networks are no less important to effective learning.
