What's the purpose of rehearsal (during lessons)?

Recently the idea of "rehearsal" has appeared in UK-based educational blogs. But there appears to be confusion. What's it for?

Here are some recent quotes:

"Making these connections requires rehearsal"

"Teacher: Explains, demonstrates, explains, reads, tells, explains. Then asks: ‘ok, everyone, now let’s check your understanding. Mentally rehearse that for yourself ..."

"...by ramping up the difficulty of questions from ‘checks for listening’ and ‘rehearsal’, we set students up to succeed in answering ‘checks for understanding"

"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. 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 phrases in Spanish back when I was still learning. Again, this was to develop fluency—not construct understanding or meaning.

Rehearsal is clearly useful in learning. I have students rehearse / recall / retrieve lots of technical vocabulary biology. I have students chant new vocabulary.

But... how would it lead to meaning making? Like a black box, an explanation seemingly goes in, and understanding comes out. Could this be influenced by old cognitivist views of the mind—an information gatherer whose purpose is to obtain a correct representation of reality?

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 here, comes from discerning how it could be different—a notion found in both systems theory (Ashby 1956; Bateson 1979) and variation theory (Marton 2015). For Ausubel—a cognitive psychologist who wasn't a fan of information processing theories (2000, xv)—meaning arises with connecting new information to prior knowledge. Does rehearsal do that? I'm doubtful.

Rehearsal suggests restating a given explanation, not exploring how it could be different, or exploring the concepts its ramifications. And, if restating explanations is intended to have students connect to prior knowledge—isn't that leaving it to chance? Isn't that a sort of discovery activity?

I think we should draw a firm distinction between rehearsal and other activities like self-explanation or peer-explanation. Rehearsal seems to involve restating a given explanation for fluency. Self-explanation (Fiorella and Mayer 2015), on the other hand, has been shown to be 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.

It's not just rereading or restating. Could it be then that self-explanation gives students—not just time to deliberate new ideas—but to explain them in different ways? 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). I can't see sense making in the restating of a given explanations.

Finally, there is the problem that organisms and their nervous systems are operationally closed. You can't plug into them like in the Matrix. Nervous systems can only listen to themselves. So meaning must be made individually of new ideas. Each person will not receive information ready packaged—there is no meaning in a sentence. They'll need to create information from the communication that is meaningful to themselves.

Therefore, maybe we should reserve the word "rehearsal" for when students are reciting, drilling, and restating. Lest we lose the important distinctions between activities for memorising a given idea, and those for building understanding and revealing understanding.

My books: Difference Maker | Biology Made Real, or my other posts.

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Christian Moore-Anderson

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.