What’s the purpose of “rehearsal” during lessons?
Recently, the classroom activity “rehearsal” has appeared in UK-based educational blogs. But there appears to be confusion. What’s it for?
Here are some recent quotes:
… questions involve lots of rehearsal and give pupils a chance to grapple with or generate new ideas. The goal is to build understanding to the point where it is secure. (original emphasis).
Here’s the confusion: Is rehearsal a mechanism for building understanding and making meaning? Or, is it for memorising, and becoming familiar with new vocabulary?
What does a thesaurus give us for “rehearsal”:
- Noun: as in preparation for performance
- Synonyms: drill, practice session, reading, recital
Could these activities be useful in the classroom? Yes, of course.
Could they lead to understanding and meaning making? I have my doubts.
I have spent endless hours rehearsing songs on my guitar. That was to build automaticity. But understanding the song (its meaning to me) didn’t come from rehearsal. Actually, a lot of times, that arose when I left a song for a while and came back to it to see it in a new way.
I also used to rehearse specific Spanish phrases back when I was still learning. Again, this was to develop fluency and automaticity; the phrases’ meanings came from the difference they made in conversation.
Rehearsal is clearly useful in learning. I have students practice remembering technical terms, and I have them chant new vocabulary. Having students practice is a basic move in teaching.
But… would it lead to making meaning?
Consider, instead, this quote (Spencer-Brown 1979, 96):
“Following may thus be associated particularly with doctrine, and doctrine demands an adherence to a particular way of saying or doing something. Understanding has to do with the fact that what ever is said or done can always be said or done a different way…”
Meaning comes from discerning how it could be different or how it could vary. This is found in both systems theory (Ashby 1956; Bateson 1979) and variation theory (Marton 2015).
Rehearsal suggests restating a given explanation, not exploring how it could be different. Nor exploring a concept’s consequences for our experience of the world.
Equally, Ausubel, a well-known cognitive psychologist whose work focused on meaning making, didn’t like information-processing theories that discuss storage, retrieval, and rehearsal (2000, xv). For him, meaning arises from perceiving a relation between new information and prior knowledge. Does rehearsal do that? I’m doubtful.
If restating explanations is intended to have students perceive relations with prior knowledge, isn’t that leaving it to chance? Isn’t that a sort of discovery activity?
I think we should distinguish between rehearsal and other activities that involve sense-making, like, for example, self-explanation or sense-making exploration.
Rehearsal seems to involve restating a given explanation for fluency. Self-explanation (Fiorella and Mayer 2015), on the other hand, is useful for understanding conceptual knowledge and diagrams. It gives students the chance to formulate explanations in their own words, not rehearsing someone else’s words.
Could it be that self-explanation gives students not just time to deliberate new ideas but also to explain them in different ways? And then sensing the difference those explanations make. This, of course, could be expanded to “peer-explanation”, in which one person in a pair must explain to another in their own coherent way.
For Fiorella and Mayer, “meaningful learning is a generative activity in which the learner actively seeks to make sense of the presented material” (2015, 1). In Teaching Meaning, I define sense-making as a process of exploration whose products are new meanings. I can’t see this happening with the restating of a given explanation.
Therefore, maybe we should reserve the word “rehearsal” for when students are reciting, drilling, and restating. Lest we lose an important distinction: Between activities for memorising and those we use for bringing forth new meanings and revealing understanding. Learn more about teaching with these ideas in my books:
References
Ashby, W.R. 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. New York: Wiley.
Ausubel, D.P. 2000. The Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge: A Cognitive View. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton.
Fiorella, L., and Mayer, R. 2015. Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight learning strategies that promote understanding. UK: Cambridge University Press.
Marton, F. 2015. Necessary Conditions of Learning. London: Routledge.
Moore-Anderson, C. 2023. Biology Made Real: Ways of teaching that inspire meaning making. Independently published.
Spencer-Brown, G. 1979. Laws of Form. 2nd ed. USA: E.R Dutton.