This is William, the Chief Technical Officer for All In Learning. Our family adopted 3 Samoan sisters 6+ years ago. It has been very interesting watching them grow up intermingled with our biological children. One of the differences has been their general difficulty in understanding deep structure concepts. I don’t know if this is because of them being uprooted from their culture, or their having to learn a new language at a very early age or maybe them not being read to much during their early years… Regardless it is something they are working through.
The following is a great example of our girls and deep structure vs surface structure.
A few days ago, we were all watching an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. The show was about a young man learning to take responsibility for his own actions (the moral of the story). The young man’s dad was a very powerful politician in the state of North Carolina and had bailed him out of every poor decision he had ever made. He gets in an accident in Mayberry and is arrested by Sheriff Taylor for hit-and-run. While arrested he goes fishing with Andy and Opie, has Sunday dinner with them etc… While with the Taylor’s, Andy makes Opie pay for a window he breaks while playing baseball. The young man thinks Andy is being too hard on Opie but Andy tells him, “Opie has to learn to pay for broken windows and stand on his own two feet”.
At the end of the episode, the politician’s lawyer coerces the person the young man hit in order to get the young man out of jail. The young man decides to stay in jail and finish his sentence saying “tell my Dad I broke a window and have to stand on my own two feet”.
My Samoan girls did not understand his statement because the young man didn’t break a window. They didn’t get the deep structure concept of taking responsibility. They only saw the surface structure of the examples of breaking a window and wrecking a car.
The understanding of deep structure is what we are all after. Taking responsibility is an abstract concept while paying for broken windows and cars are concrete examples of this abstract concept. Exposing our kids to as many concrete examples and helping them understand the underlying abstract concepts is one of the primary goals of the classroom and must be done over and over for them to begin looking for the abstract concepts being taught.
One Comment
That is a very good analogy. So might I assume that deep structure concepts are those intangible learning by-products that occur when a student is able to grasp the primary deep structure concepts of critical decision making and application and synthesis activities (within the Bloom’s realm).
So If I can consider Higher order thinking skills as a deeper structure, I would hope that a student would be able to utilize this skillset regardless of the course or curriculum.
My comment is based on the fact that I am a Technology director trying to rethink our professional development offerings, and wanting my trainers to dig deeper and use instructional technology as more of a tool set rather than a topic.
I don’t necessarily want our training to stop at showing teachers how to incorporate digital cameras in their materials,for example, but rather I would want the end result to be for a student to recognize the need for digital photographs themselves and use that skill as an everyday tool.
I probably got too far off base on this one. let me know what you think.