Rebecca Stobaugh's book, 50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement: Creating a Thinking Culture in the Classroom, addresses increasing the cognitive load for student's in the classroom. She begins her book with a description of Bloom's revised taxonomy (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, create). Her descriptions do involve some fuzziness; for example, compare and contrast is seen in understand, apply and analyze levels. That said, they do provide an organizing format for her text.
For years I have contented that it is essential to have knowledge at each level. You cannot think at higher levels if you do not know what you are thinking about. She agrees when she says, "Although this [remember] is a low-level thinking process, memorizing information is important for higher -level thinking" (p. 12). Having spent the last year working in NY toward their gateway tests (regents exams) in history, I can attest to this. The state moved to completely stimulus based assessments. Student read a passage/chart/map, etc and answer questions about it. The problem is that if you go into the test without a hefty amount of background information, you will not be able to be successful on the test. For example, June's first stimulus on the Global test shows a 1750 map of Eurasia and Africa indicating the location of major European trading stations. The first question: What was a contributing factor to the historical development shown on this map? means that students need to know what was going on at that time period and why. Memorization is clearly essential to answering the question. If we cannot have students understand the background, they are merely guessing on the question.
One thing that the author repeats throughout the book is that students should be the center of the instruction. In a student centered program, students ask questions. In fact, she quotes Ostroff, "Whoever asks the questions holds the power" (p. 27). I think this is an interesting idea. If we want students to be the directors of their education, they need the power and thus must ask the questions. The problem that emerges is that although we might want students to take on this level of responsibility, many are not ready to do so. We saw this extensively during the pandemic lock down periods where for many students, remote learning was non-learning. How do we capture their interests and have them take charge of learning material and skills that we need them to learn? This is at odds with our current educational structure.
Throughout the book the author includes the given 50 strategies with a general description of a task, steps to complete the strategy and additional examples. The chapters on analyzing and evaluating include the most strategies. The Create chapter includes mostly brainstorming strategies. A cardstock insert in the center of the book includes questions organized by thinking level. It is perforated and can be removed from the book.
One type of strategy that appears at both the understand and analyze level is, in essence a word sort. Students group terms/images/ideas into categories. To take it to the higher level, students must create the categories themselves. What she fails to really focus on is that word sorts require a knowledge of the terms, at least on a surface level. Students cannot look up 20 terms and them form meaningful categories with them. Discussion around why they are grouped as they are is where the engagement comes in. Having used sorts before, I know that they can be powerful tools to enhance learning. The challenge of time remains a constant concern. Higher level work takes more time so more things need to be eliminated from the curriculum. We seem uncomfortable with doing this so teachers remain enmeshed in the age old controversy- what to cut and what to emphasize.
While some great ideas are presented and a valuable guide, this book requires teachers to put great thought into the implementation.
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