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Internalization : Designing your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 5)

 

Strategy : Internalization

What is internalization and how does it look in the classroom?


"Transforming an individual physical or material activity into other mental and conceptual forms of that same external activity, to acquire new understandings." (ibo.org)


The first time I came across this explanation, I struggled to understand it. 

However, as I continued to read more about this strategy, I had a lot of 'aha' moments which helped consolidate my understanding of a few things.


The research behind this strategy (Gasperin,1989) addressed the following too:


  • How "internalization" is but an extension of Vygotsky's Social Constructivist theory

  • The reasoning behind a spiral curriculum and why it is so effective

  • How to help students become self-regulated learners

For those of you interested in the research,  refer to the sources cited below.


So coming back to the explanation of internalization...






Learning occurs at three levels:

  1. Material level

  2. Verbal level

  3. Mental level



Material level


Hands-on manipulation of material objects provide children with kinesthetic experiences where they can  experience and grapple with new concepts


In the classroom, when teaching Place Value for example, the students use Place Value

blocks to understand the difference between the value of a digit based on its position in a number.



During this stage, you can also use models, displays, drawings and diagrams.

Verbal level


At this level, slowly start to wean the students off  materials by providing them with problems to solve in small groups. The teacher walks around the classroom listening to students navigate problems/tasks by helping one another. Their conversations will give the teacher an insight into their developing ideas and misconceptions and help her correct them along the way.


This level has 2 stages of communication - the overt level of  and the covert level of communication.


  1. The overt level happens at the beginning where students articulate their thoughts to one another.

  2. The covert level occurs as a result of exposure to materials and small group tasks. Students begin to talk to themselves quietly-"speech minus sound" or as Gasparin calls it, the "audible image of the word."



This inner dialogue a students has within herself paves the way for the final stage of what we call "internalization"


As designers of lessons, this stage can be a lot of fun.  Let us say, you want students to understand that a memoir is not just a series of chronological events but a carefully crafted piece of writing designed to capture a significant idea/thought. You would identify a few short memoirs and ask students to sort them along a continuum ranging from "a list of events" to "carefully crafted". Eventually students can use their own memoirs to sort along this continuum. You can imagine the verbal communication involved at this stage which allows the students to begin to internalize the process. You could change the focus of the task using the same memoirs when looking for other aspects of  this genre such as how great memoirs hook the audience in their first paragraph. Though the task involves the same resources, the students are looking for something entirely different! 

As a designer of this lesson, your task at the start may have taken up some of your time, but it sure is worth it considering the different concepts you can cover using the same 'rich' and 'varied' resources you had curated at the start!


As students continue to participate in collaborative tasks, the teacher slowly withdraws support, allowing students to do more of the heavy lifting. The students are learning to be self-regulated learners.


Mental Level


At this level, the action and words involved in the previous levels, allow the students to internalize the process without having to play with materials or discuss a prompt with their peers. They have now understood the concept. This process clearly shows how students move from the material to the abstract. Remember, concepts are abstract, universal and transferable. 


In order to understand a concept, the student has to go through a process. There is NO shortcut to understanding!


Needless to say, you need to assess the students and a simple Exit Ticket will help you decide whether you need to go back to the material or verbal level or start another cycle (spiral curriculum) of understanding that builds on what you and your class have achieved.









Sources:






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