How do we know what we know and what we don’t know? Can we put our knowledge in context? Can we connect it to other things we know? Can we express how our knowledge influences or alters our worldview? How do our views and ideas change and develop? How do we determine when our ideas or views are wrong? How do our ideas changes? These are challenging questions to answer, and I believe require internal reflection. Knowing is complicated.
One reason I started writing in this blog format again, is that I want a more concrete record of my past thoughts and ideas to disabuse myself of feelings of self-importance, accuracy, and consistency. It can be easy to imagine we thought one way when in fact we thought of another, or to imagine consistency in our thoughts, ideas, and understandings when in fact not only do we forget a great of things, but also we can be incredibly inconsistent. It can also be very easy to assume we know things we do not, to imagine remembering things that we’ve actually forgotten, or conversely, to integrate new information into our existing schema in a way that reduces new information to things we already knew.
Take, for example, the 1918 flu pandemic. I’m pretty sure I learned vaguely about “the Spanish flu” in my AP US History class in High School. I have no basis on which to make that claim, other than a vague memory, and certainly knew next to nothing about it. My sense of its historical impact was very limited. I doubt I ever learned much about it, until last year when people began to draw historical parallels between the COVID pandemic. Curious about these parallels being drawn, I picked up a couple of books (Pandemic 1918 & Pale Rider) and educated myself. This new knowledge – about the 1918 pandemic’s global impact and significance as the most globally devastating pandemic in history – is now a part of my schema, and it’s hard for me to distinguish between what I knew before March 2020 and what I know now. If I’d made an effort to write about what I already knew, and then wrote about my learning from those books, I’d have a greater sense of my growth and the evolution of my ideas about pandemics in general.
I find this to often be true with students, who don’t realize how much they have learned and internalized over a unit or a year, to the point where they sometimes assume they already knew all the things they learned. It is for that reason I have students reflect on units of study throughout the school year, and look back over work over the course of a school year at its end. Reflection allows us to identify areas in which we have grown and areas in which we have been deficient, and perhaps most importantly it allows us to reconsider, analyze, integrate, and learn from our past views.
Historically, teachers have preferred cumulative exams as tools of review, and as final assessments of student knowledge. The thinking in support of such exams goes something like this: reviewing and preparing for an exam involves extra time spent studying and learning (or re-learning) important material, and so the exam is truly a demonstration of cumulative gains. There’s some truth to that, but also research suggests that cramming for exams – as many students approach exams – may allow them to be successful on the exam, but doesn’t necessarily mean that a student will recall on a longer-term time scale.
A project with real-world application, paired with a cumulative reflection, and perhaps another piece of content and skills-focused writing (if judged important) is my preferred tool of end-of-term assessment. In addition to allowing for more student agency, projects are more realistic to what students will be asked to do when they are out of school. A cumulative reflection allows students to review all their learning, and reflect on how effective they were as a learner. Together, they also create a written record for a student to review in the future to reflect on their thinking. Is this knowing? Perhaps it’s historically situated knowing: knowing in a particular moment and situation is no guarantee for future knowledge, but it’s a spot to start.