I was reading through a special issue of Research & Creative Theory on the Scholarship of Teaching, and found a nice feature on a teacher named Claude Cookman called Looking for Insight into Teaching. In this essay, Cookman's application of cognitive theory in self-analysis papers is outlined. It gave me some ideas about how I might structure some work in my composition classes, by teaching the differences between declarative knowledge ("knowing that"), procedural knowledge ("knowing how"), and conditional knowledge ("knowing why/when"). I already do this to some degree. When students are early in the research process, I usually use a method I call "question storming" in class (getting them to brainstorm as many questions as they can come up with that begin with the words "what?" "how?" or "why?"). But perhaps I can get them to use the same categories as Cookman to sort through the types of questions they're raising, to determine whether they have enough "conditional" knowledge to start formulating an argument.

This journal also has a nice overview of The Scholarship of Teaching by Eileen Bender and Donald Gray.

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