Re: words

Gordon Wells (gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Wed, 11 Oct 1995 09:02:00 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 11 Oct 1995 SMAGOR who-is-at aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu wrote, quoting Lisa
Delpit:
How many times do we insist that children talk
> through some problem they have already solved? We think we
> are 'checking for understanding,' but could we merely be
> helping children to learn to ignore context? Could we be
> asking them to ignore knowledge they've acquired through a
> variety of nonverbal sources and to limit their understanding
> of the world to the word?" (p. 99)

Doesn't it depend on _why_ we ask them to "talk through the problem"?
Explaining how the solution was reached to someone else who has not yet
understood can be beneficial for both parties. And explaining doesn't
have to be done exclusively in words. Diagrams, gestures and
demonstrations, etc. can all play a part, if the purpose is genuinely to
help someone else understand. Sometimes, too, inviting several people
who have constructed different solutions, or routes to the same
solution, to explain what they have done enables everyone to see
possibilities that they had not seen before and encourages them to adopt
a "meta" stance to the relationship between problem and solution - which,
I take it, we would all agree is desirable?

Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.