ARTICLES
The Meta Lesson Plan (continued)
the lynch pin that engages the student mind with the learning
resource. So a classroom engaged in learning is one in which
students are wholly focused on the requirements of the learning
resource, are not distracted or distracting other students and are
generally a group of well-behaved young people. Thus, student
behaviour that evidences attention to the learning resource is
used as the proxy measure of engagement with the learning
resource and therefore learning.
students use talk during classroom learning: 1) Talk is the common
currency by which students exchange information and construct
knowledge about their world; 2) Students pay great attention to
the content of talk; 3) Students remember talk more easily than
the learning at hand and; 4) Students often make predictions
about what their peers should next do based on this talk. These
observations alluded to the existence of a relationship between
attention, teenage socialness and dialogue, specifically, that the
extent to which these variables interacted seemed to reflect the
extent to which students were engaged with classroom learning.
In short, people just think differently and talk is the means by
which that diversity socially expresses and cognitively develops
itself. So, by using talk as that resource to extend the classes
ZPD, cognitive development may also be extended.
These behavioural markers of student engagement result in a
teacher conception of the student mind as something that simply
requires behavioural guidance in order for learning to occur. Such
guidance ranges from requests to pay attention to what’s going
on, to stop talking and annoying the class, to moving disruptive
students to another seating position and giving warnings about
imminent consequences, to issuin