Category: Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

September 19, 2004

My most memorable lesson on schema theroy was taught by Dr. Peter Denner in 1980 (or thereabouts!) at Norhteastern University. I was a practicing (emphasis on “practice”) high school teacher at the time (at St. Scholastica Academy), and I had just returned to college to complete coursework and clinical requirments for teacher certification. Dr. Denner was a young professor out of Purdue, with lots of long-hair, energy, and motivational ways (mostly just excellent teaching). I needed some extra motivation, for I felt at the time, as some of my current students do now in regards to their own development, that the best way to perfect the craft of teaching was to take more English, not education, courses. But that’s another story, for another blog. This one has to do with schema theory, one of the great pillars of educational thinking in so many ways….

First, a little side-track on the wonders of this new technological age….

Let me tell the story of my reconnection with Dr. Denner. Here it is: Google.

For the past year or so, I’ve been thinking of culling lessons on key educational and English lessons. I thought: if my students and alumni had access to some kind of searchable, organizable database of important lessons, lesson plans, foundational principles of learning, English, and all related stuff…well, what a wonderful thing that would be…. Schema theory is such one lesson. It’s a paradigm-shifting lesson, out of which whole universes of pedagogical practice can grow. Healthy, correctly-pointing universes. Schema theory opens students to the processes of cognition in a sudden, easy, and robust way. Cognition—reading—understanding—as active, meaning making processes rather than passive, “recipient” processes: so much of high school language arts pedagogy can be built around these notions, particularly as they gain expression and application in reader response theory.

Whenever I had this “culling-into-a-database” thought—and the idea of using “schema theory” as the initiating lesson—my mind always shot back to that ed pysch course, my first teacher education course, taught by Dr. Denner. So, some weeks ago, when I was thinking of writing up my first schema story (in the form of a blog on the dog I met on my Baseball Vacation), I thought, “Hmm…I’ve got to get Denner’s schema story here first!” For Denner’s schema story was one of “those” moments in one’s education: the thing happens in class, and one is changed forever… Not always dramatically or in a life-altering way…. Sometimes it’s just some good learning….

I thought: Denner’s schema story had all the earmarks of “lore.” It was funny, compact, and crystal clear; it illustrated a fundamental epistemological mechanism with a kind of absoluteness. : “Hmmm…this has to be written up somewhere on the Internet.” So I turned to Google and did all kinds of searching—for ice cream, schemata, expectation, anecdotes—anything that could remotely identify and connect with the story. To no avail. Then: “I can’t find the story…maybe I can find the story-teller.” So I did a search on “schema theory” and “denner.” That search led me to a bibliography that referred to “Denner” as “Peter Denner.” That name didn’t quite seem right, though the subject of the article in the bibliography, “Semantic Organizers,” was definitely right up the ally of the Denner I remembered. (I think I thought his first name was “John,”—but I now think I was getting some cognitive interference from “John Denver”—but that’s another story…or is it the same one?). My next Google seach, “peter denner,” brought me immediately (feeling lucky?) to Dr. Denner’s CV and email address. And there it was: “1979-1982 Instructor, College of Education, Northeastern Illinois University.” But he left Chicago in 1982 for a position with the College of Education at Idaho State University, where he still works and teaches, now in a split capacity as professor of education and Assistant Dean of the College of Education.

So I had the email address. I thought: Why not?

Hello, Dr. Denner—I am a former student of yours, and I wonder if I might ask you a favor? First, a long-delayed thank you for your classes, your educational psychology course, in particular. It was 1980 or so, at Northeastern Illinois University. I was an uncertified high school teacher at the time, working at a Catholic school (St. Scholastica Academy). Yours was, I believe, the first course I took in my certification completion program. I did become certified as an English teacher, and eventually went back to graduate school, and now I’m a teacher educator myself, so I suppose I’ve become a type of colleague of yours. I’ve been at Saint Xavier University in Chicago the past eight years, serving as the English Education coordinator. Anyway, you shared a story in one of your classes that has stuck with me lo, these many years. It was just an example of schema theory. It was a narrative full of twists and turns, each one illustrating how much structure and meaning the audience of a story brought to the story-—sometimes to the peril of the intended message. One thing I emphasize in my methods courses is the power of examples—and I cherish and treasure and store away and re-use the really good ones. Your story illustrated so well the way our expectations run ahead of the data we receive through real-time experience. You’ve got to remember this one. It was so charming and humorous. I don’t remember a lot of it—but I do remember there was a shooting of a gun…follow by the “victim” wiping water from his/her face. There was also an ice-cream sale script being used (or abused)… Does any of this ring a bell? Is this example written up anywhere? Can you help? If not, don’t give it a thought. I’ve often thought the “idea” of the story is obvious enough, and with a little writing on my part, I could recreate a similar type narrative. But there’s something about the cherished stories of one’s formation—an implicit call to respect and preserve them just so. Anyway, I thought I’d ask. Thanks much! Your admiring student—Angelo P.S.: I found you through Google, and I enjoyed being able to read your CV, which thoroughly daunts me (at least insofar as my use of the word “colleague” above). You’ve been busy indeed, and no doubt to continued effect with your students and colleagues out west.

To make a long story short(er), I received a wonderful, inspiring response
from Dr. Denner, the relevant part of which is quote below:

I do recall the story I told, because in the early years I used it here also. These days, I mainly teach statistics, so I have not discussed schema theory for quite a while. The story I told was inspired by and adapted from an example of how schemata function in comprehension presented in one of the early (now classic) articles on schema theory. The reference is: Rummelhart, D.E. & Ortony, A. (1977). The representation of knowledge in memory. In R.C. Anderson, R.J. Spiro & W.E. Montague (Eds), Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. The essential lines of the story are there, but I modified them and elaborated on them for my own teaching purposes. On page 113, the lines are given as “Mary heard the ice cream man coming.” “She remembered her pocket money.” “She rushed into the house.” Later on page 115, when talking about unexpected outcomes, Rummelhart and Ortony (1977), give the example line of “She drew the revolver and shot him.”My version of the story went something like this: “Sally heard the ice-cream vendor.” Then, I would ask the class, “What did Sally hear?” The class would give answers such as a bell or music. I would stomp my feet and say, “She probably did not hear a sound like this, right?” The point I was making was how we use schemata to fill in default values that go beyond the information given (as Bruner said). Next, I offered the sentence, “Sally turned and ran back into the house.” I would then ask the class if that made any sense. The class would answer yes, because she needed to get her money or her purse. I would ask why? This exposed the implicit buy-sell schemata that was expected. I would also ask the class, “How old is Sally?” The consensus tended to be about ten years old. I next offered a third line and asked the class to interpret it. The third line was, “A short while later, Sally returned carrying her pocketbook.” Again, the class thought this made sense because of the implicit buy-sell schema. I would then ask if Sally wanted to buy ice-cream. I would also ask, “what kind?” This would illustrate that when the text does not specify, we are able to fill in the slots of the schema with high frequency default values (such as vanilla), or with our own preferences and thereby identify with the character by assuming that Sally would be like us. The next sentence I offered, was something like, “The ice cream vendor saw Sally reach into her pocketbook.” Then, I would ask, what was she reaching for? The next sentence was the twist. “She drew the gun and shot him.” At this point, we would talk about the schemata shift from buy-sell to shooting. We would talk about the slots in that schema and what was still missing (motive). I would ask again at this point how old Sally was. Usually, the consensus was much older now. We would speculate a bit about motive and then I would share the last line of the story. The last line of the story was, “And, the ice-cream vendor wiped the water from his face.” The class usually groaned. I then asked, “How old is Sally now?” We would then discuss how mystery writers try to get us to keep thinking inside the boxes of our schemata, while all the time leading us to an unexpected twist (although in retrospect there were clues along the way). Does this help? Feel free to use the story, although do give Rummelhart and Ortony (1977) credit for the examples (and me a little too for my adaptation and elaboration of them).