Prior Knowledge: A Teacher's Best Friend

Sometimes when teaching I begin to feel like the Greek legend Sisyphus, pushing an enormously heavy boulder up the hill just to watch it roll back down. Students come into your classroom on the first day with all different need and abilities and we have the stressful job of making sure they reach a certain point by the end of the year. After doing some reading recently about the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, I was reminded of some concepts that can really benefit teachers who feel the same pressure as I do.


via GIPHY

Of the ideas I read about, the big idea I came away with is that students learn a tremendous amount through the process of accommodation. Our Students are constantly thinking about what they know and then changing it or modifying it to build new understanding. I know teaching 5th-grade math that I am constantly trying to have students connect strategies we have used before to help teach new content. Imagine trying to start from scratch each day without using any preexisting knowledge? That would be quite a nightmare. If you introduce lessons as novel ideas, you are setting yourself up for a tremendous amount of work. I know for a while I assumed that students would naturally make the connection between prior knowledge and new content but that just isn't the case. By accessing prior knowledge we can start higher up on the mountain and avoid being trapped like our friend Sisyphus.

One day I gathered my students on the rug for readers workshop. We were starting a non-fiction unit where we would be researching and raising awareness about a topic of the students choice. We began to scour through articles working on finding key facts and record the information in their reading journals. As I walked around the rug peeking in at student work I noticed that students had no way to structure their notes. They were just making long lists with no sort of organization at all. I stopped the students and asked if they had even practiced taking notes in school knowing darn well that my colleague next door who teachers science had done this work. A student raised her hand and said, "Well, we took notes during science." After a quick discussion about their work in science, I could see the light bulbs going off. Before you know it, students were making T-charts, using boxes and bullets and a number of other strategies. It became clear to me that the students connected these note-taking strategies to science but didn't make the connection to reading. By accessing this prior knowledge students were able to modify what they knew about note taking and utilize it during their research in reading.

Teaching is hard work, no matter what non-teachers say with their snarky summer off comments. I am constantly trying to improve my teaching and putting a focus on accessing prior knowledge has been very beneficial for me. I mentioned at the start of this blog that readers come in with different needs and abilities but I failed to mention that they all also have strengths. By building off of these strengths we can make a big difference.