Developing a Shared Mental Model: Making a Case for Holistic, Narrative Competencies of Professional Growth

• In Event: Teaching Professional Practice: A Cross-Program Examination of Innovation

Abstract

In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of scholarship on human cognition, teaching, and learning to assert that programmatic assessments could be productively reimagined as tools for supporting both novice learning and professional educator learning and collaboration.

To begin, cognitive psychology provides insight into the processes of the individual mind, including memory and take up of new ideas. Contemporary understanding of neuropsychology suggests that human cognition operates with stories and schema. Narratives and mental models are more easily grasped and conveyed than representations in other forms. In part, mental models help individuals know what to expect (Jonker et al, 2010), and in part individuals condense experiences into “story-sized chunk[s]” that make the experiences memorable (Schank, 1990). Gestalten theory also underscores the power of narrative descriptions that may be grasped quickly and recalled. Gestalten theory postulates that conceptions of the whole are constructed before the individual parts (e.g., King & Wertheimer, 2005) and that the human mind situates the components of a given experience as part of a system of dynamic relationships.

Expanding on cognitive theories, sociocultural theories point to the importance of contextually sensitive practice and suggest that ways with words, practices, and identities shape and are shaped by the social and cultural communities in which one participates (Gee, 1990; Scribner & Cole, 1981). Sociocultural theorists understand learning as a complex process of apprenticing into a given community’s ways of knowing, being, and doing (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Such apprenticeship involves coming to know the shared knowledge of the community, to be sure, but it also involves practices related to ways with words in the community, ways of building new knowledge, and ways of relating to others.

Sociocultural theories also suggest the power of using carefully constructed, language-based tools for supporting teaching and learning. Because texts are shared representations that render experiences, processes, or phenomena permanent across space and time, they can serve to solidify and unify understandings across a group of people. When texts are used as tools for particular purposes, they can also support the ongoing learning and development of those who use it, propelling them from one level of consciousness to the next. Vygotsky (1978) represented the increased learning from tool use as a spiral, positing that as an individual uses a tool, s/he becomes more proficient in its use, which propels new ways of learning and understanding.

When taken together, these bodies of scholarship suggest that holistic, narrative images of novice practitioners that provide users with “gist,” or with memorable, compact descriptions of what success looks like at various points of development, would support users’ uptake of a shared vision of professional practice. Such images could be used as tools to promote new opportunities for reflection and learning, even as they could be used as benchmarks for documenting professional growth. And, the shared, community-based nature of the tool use would serve to unify and focus understandings and efforts of the group.

Author

• Elizabeth Birr Moje, University of Michigan