Cognitive Organizing in Classrooms

A prevailing view of education holds that the aims of schooling are dual: we wish our children to develop academic competence, while also forming a strong sense of self against the background of life and society. This duality of aims makes work difficult for those who study and seek to improve education, for it implies that our wisdom must span disciplines as well as subareas within disciplines. We must abstract, for example, from sociology and psychology in planning and interpreting our observations, and from theories and research in personality as well as in learning and motivation. It seems educational research has at last become the study of individuals in classrooms and schools with all the trappings and implications such an endeavor entails (cf. Solomon and Kendall 1979). In this article I offer one contemporary perspective on individuals in classrooms to suggest a means for fostering students' self-views as well as their scholastic achievement. There follows a density of information I have attempted to disperse and categorize with examples. For some readers the journey through this article may be analogous to the process it describes. First, I would make the point that the foundation of my perspective is observations of individuals in classrooms. Investigators of teaching have produced observations of hundreds of elementary classrooms throughout the continental U.S. (cf. Jackson 1968; Brophy and Evertson 1974; Doyle 1979; Berliner 1979). Second, one incontrovertible conclusion from these studies is that classrooms contain more stimuli, cues, and sources of information than just those associated with academic content. Multiple distractions, social comparisons, and nonacademic commentary are all part of the continuous information exchange in classrooms. Third, the multiplicity of information to which students in classrooms are exposed may alternatively contradict one or the other of the dual aims of