You Just Get Me

Using Cognitive Mapping to Create Shared Context

When we were high school math teachers, there were lots of great things about it: kids who made us laugh and challenged us on the daily, fellow hard working colleagues, and getting to learn from both students and teachers every day.

Still, we often faced one big issue that we think many other teachers deal with: sometimes, it just felt like the students didn’t “get” us.

We would try teaching a concept, and the students didn’t “get it.” We’d try again, with a different approach — a different kind of word problem, a different way of talking through the concept. Sometimes it would work, but sometimes the disconnect between us and them remained. We struggled to figure out what was going on. We wanted so desperately to give this knowledge to our students. Why was it so hard?

Finally, something hit us like a ton of bricks: our students didn’t understand the words coming out of our mouths . Literally. When we used vocabulary words like “factoring” or “prime number,” we assumed our students already understood those terms the way we did, but they didn’t. So when we tried to build on their ability to factor an equation, we hadn’t addressed the real problem: they didn’t know what “factoring” was to begin with.

Once we saw this issue, the doors opened to a whole new way of approaching our classrooms. We saw that we needed to move away from the idea of that teachers “give” students knowledge or terms. Instead, we wanted to work together and connect concepts, share ideas and, in the end, build knowledge as a classroom community.

We began researching metacognition and considering how it could be used with our students. What if we asked them to try and define words before we gave them definitions? What if we saw what connections happened without us, then worked together to strengthen those bonds and the bridges between those concepts as a group?

And with that, Comprendio was born.

Well, sort of. We started realizing that we could create a way of learning that wasn’t focused on “giving” our students knowledge. That was too transactional. Instead, we would learn to understand each other. We would create a map of shared context about academic subjects, strengthening our class culture. Once we had that shared context, the class had the capacity to be much more collaborative, since our students felt empowered to create the context with us.

Now, we’re starting to see beyond using this for solely academic concepts. Yes, we think having a classroom culture with shared context will work wonders for factoring equations. We think it could be bigger though.

What if we began using something like Comprendio to map larger concepts, like “English Grammar” within a grade level? Or the culture of a school? Problem solving within a business? Better yet, what if we asked students to map connections they see within the community, and shared that with teachers?

Using something like Comprendio could enable not only just students and teachers to “get” each other, but for large groups across cultures and backgrounds to start building connections in ways that could grow into something awesome.

The possibilities are endless, and we’re excited to jump in.