Kathryn Rich Presentation

         For those of you following this blog, then you (probably) know that last night I posted my first of many field experience reflections, which you can read here. In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  due to the pandemic, I have not been able to complete any in person and/or synchronous observation hours. In place of that, my professor has kindly allowed me, and anyone else in the class, to use the presentations of various guests as field experience. I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in the presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

            The second guest speaker is Kathryn Rich, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University studying Educational Psychology and the impact of technology/Educational Technology in teaching and learning. Our class read an article that Rich coauthored entitled “Applying Levels of Abstraction to Mathematics World Problems,” which was why we were invited to see Rich present in my professor’s other class. Similar to the article title, Rich’s presentation focused on the ways in which the computational thinking concept of abstraction (and its varying levels) can help students not only learn math, but also more effectively problem solve in any discipline.

For any reader who might be looking at that sentence and thinking, what the heck is computational thinking and abstraction? Computer science has five main concepts that help students understand and work within the discipline: abstraction, decomposition, algorithmic thinking, and pattern recognition. However, as Rich and others (e.g. my professor) aptly demonstrate, these concepts can be more broadly applied in ways that facilitate student learning. One way to think about abstraction, and the levels of it, is that it allows you to explicitly move from a holistic and often concrete understanding, to a specific and often abstract understanding. I liked using the metaphor of a human body: I can look at it as a whole and know the names for body parts (e.g. arms and legs), but I only understand how they all work together, as well as how they work individually, if I look past/under the skin. The metaphor Rich utilized in her presentation, which I also found helpful is that abstraction is a two-way street. Rather than thinking about concrete vs. abstract as a one-way process where progression is to have the student stop thinking concretely and start thinking abstractly, it is a two-way process where the student moves fluidly between concrete and abstract thinking based on which is more useful in the given moment.

Rich really eloquently applied this concept to math instruction while also allowing for the viewers (e.g. me) to extrapolate from that how I could use it in my own classroom. Some points from the presentation that particularly struck me were as follows:

• Lots of tasks that we ask kids [students] to do involves working at multiple levels of abstraction and each level has its own [instructional and educational] value
• It’s not the what it’s the how of teaching 
•  John Dewey’s map metaphor: sometimes we hand tools to kids without realizing that parts of the tools have hidden meaning and teacher need to make that explicit for students—e.g. making your own thought processes explicit for students
• What is and is not abstract to people is highly contextual and individualized.

Rich’s presentation furthered what I had already thought after just reading the article: the concept of abstraction could easily and smoothly be applied to English and ELA curriculum because the discipline is all about going between layers of abstraction. When you analyze literature, in my experience, teachers often focus on close readings which means that the reader takes one passage from the text and analyzes that based on various literary elements, such as theme. However, if you are crafting an argument about the characters or the text itself, you cannot persuasively argue your case by using only one passage from the text. Instead, you need to be able to think about how specific scenes throughout the book prove your point as well as how the narrative as a whole can be seen to corroborate what you are trying to say. This is an excellent example of fluidly moving from one level of abstraction to another, and, as Rich states, it is important to make that more explicit for students so that they can have a better chance at learning the concept behind the content. As is probably obvious, I have always thought that the skills you learn in English are skills that you need and/or can use in other parts of your life. Yet those skills are only transferable once you are made aware that that’s what you are learning. Rich’s concept of abstraction and making it more explicit in the classroom can achieve that goal and help my students see the benefits of English class even if they don’t like literary analysis itself.

          Moreover, writing is also a skill that is inherently about moving between levels of abstraction. When I researched how to teach the writing process I learned that advanced composition (e.g. writing essays rather than just a sentence or two) can never be a fully automated process no matter how much you practice because you are always constantly moving between planning what you want to write, composing what you are writing, and revising/editing said writing. While research indicates that advanced composition necessitates high levels of attention and space in the working memory, it also underscored the idea that if you understand the task of writing then simply composing a sentence takes both less time and less mental energy thereby leaving more cognitive energy for advanced composition skills. In this way, the advocated for strategies to teach writing in the research, in my mind, already assumed that the teacher thinks about writing as recursive and thus as a process similar to moving between the levels of abstraction. Lastly, I believe that explicitly teaching students about the different levels of writing could help them in another important part of the writing process: reflection. Reflection utilizes the skill of meta-cognition to help students process, think about, and improve both their writing and (potentially) their writing strategies. Due to this, if students can recognize and better conceptualize how they write, they can (potentially) more easily move from knowledge-telling, which is writing that simply regurgitates facts, to knowledge-transforming, which is writing that contains the writer’s own inferences and conclusions.

Overall, I found Rich’s presentation very, enriching, heh, and I enjoyed being able to interact with one of the authors to an article that I found insightful. As always, thank you for reading!