Feedback is crucial for fostering student growth and development, but cultural misunderstandings and miscommunication between teachers and students can result in ineffective feedback. Using cognitive apprenticeship as a framework for teaching and providing feedback can reveal the invisible thought processes inherent in many academic activities and allow students from diverse backgrounds to articulate their thought processes to their teachers.
What Is Cognitive Apprenticeship?
As in a traditional apprenticeship model, students learn new skills through a cognitive apprenticeship by watching an expert (their teacher) perform a mental task while sharing the thought processes required to complete that task. This guidance helps students develop higher-order skills in reading, writing, and math, where the methods for creating a high-quality product are not always evident in the final product (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989).
Cognitive apprenticeships
- Allow students to see and hear the thought processes required to complete a task.
- Provide a concrete context for abstract work that makes the work relevant to students' lives.
- Guide students in the process of applying these skills to diverse situations (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991).
The Problem of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Teachers, often unknowingly, harbor prejudices about the abilities of students of color. These prejudices get communicated in a feedback loop Good and Brophy describe as the self-fulfilling prophecy of low expectations (1994). Teachers may accept less rigorous work from students of color and only ask low-level questions, assuming that these students cannot answer difficult questions. Students can internalize these expectations and perform at the level expected of them.
As this feedback loop continues over time, students become stuck in a cycle in which their performance, self-concept, and teacher expectation continually decrease (Good & Brophy, 1994). Expressing high expectations of students of color through the use of cognitive apprenticeship helps teachers to disrupt this cycle. In order to be effective, however, teachers much offer this feedback from a culturally responsive perspective, one that bridges each student's conceptual frameworks with those of the school, teacher, and assignments.
Interpreting Through a Culturally Responsive Lens
Teachers' awareness of students' cultures can substantially affect their understanding of the values and intentions underlying students' actions. For example, our traditional school system favors single-answer questions, deductive reasoning, and didactic speech between one teacher and one student (Goodlad, 1984). Many nonwhite cultures communicate in much more inductive ways, preferring to examine the general view and engage in group dialogue to better understand a topic (Gay, 2000). If a student of color engages in conversation with his classmates before beginning an individual assignment, a teacher may reprimand him for being deviant, when in reality he is simply acting on a cultural belief that individual work is more successfully completed when placed within a social context (Gay, 2000).
Methods of cognitive apprenticeship, such as reciprocal teaching, modeling, coaching, think-alouds, and role-playing, focus on dialogue between groups of students and the teacher (Collins, Brown, & Holum, 1991). These approaches can create social contexts for learning that are aligned with both the home culture of students of color and the expectations for academic performance at school.
Children from communities of color often process information differently than children from white communities. For example, African American cultures place greater value on contextualizing information than white culture. This means that African American students may describe their emotional states or perspectives in situations where white teachers might consider an "objective," nonpersonalized viewpoint more appropriate (Gay, 2000). A culturally responsive methodology would welcome and allow for differences in expression without labeling these differences as deficient—rather as strengths of multiculturalism and diversity.
Knowing and appreciating the values and norms of a student's culture can allow a teacher to shift from a deficit mind-set to an asset-based mind-set. Although students may have different cultural norms for speech and writing than their teachers, their language skills are just as valid. This point is critical for structuring actionable feedback to help students improve. Engaging in cognitive apprenticeship allows teachers to celebrate the strengths of students' cultural perspectives while making less familiar thought processes more explicit. Cognitive apprenticeship also makes tasks relevant to students by bridging the gap between students' home cultures and the culture of school.
Providing Culturally Responsive Feedback
Cultural misunderstandings can also arise in the way teachers deliver feedback to a student. Working-class parents generally use many directives when providing instructions, but middle-class teachers often assert their authority through indirect language and questioning (Delpit, 2006). For example, a teacher who is providing instructions to students during small group discussion might ask, "Can you all wait to be called on by your group leader before sharing your perspectives?" A student who is more accustomed to being given direct feedback such as, "OK, each of you will begin sharing your story after you are called on by the group leader," might not realize that the teacher's question was expressing explicit directions on how students are to proceed with the exercise. Delpit suggests that many white, middle-class teachers provide indirect feedback, which confuses and isolates students who receive direct instructions and feedback from their working-class parents. This mismatch of communication styles can reinforce the cycle of low expectations, as students become increasingly frustrated with confusing expectations, and teachers become increasingly convinced that this misunderstanding results from student deficiencies, not cultural discrepancies around communication. Making thought processes explicit through a cognitive apprenticeship model can ensure greater clarity and common understanding between teachers and students. For example, a reaction journal in which teachers write targeted questions about students' writing and invite students to respond could provide more opportunities for students to feel empowered to explain their thought processes during writing.
Communication styles are culturally informed. The cognitive apprenticeship model helps teachers acknowledge and work with cultural influences so that all students receive useful feedback that builds on their strengths. In summary, teachers can employ the cognitive apprenticeship model to
- bridge cultural divides between the student and teacher that may serve as inhibitors to effective communication and feedback;
- provide students with actionable feedback that acknowledges and values the student's current cultural context and worldview; and
- acknowledge that effective feedback is based on continuous two-way communication between student and teacher and then foster an environment that welcomes student discussion, from their cultural context (e.g., perspective), on feedback received from teachers.