Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 229: Building Background Knowledge

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Ep 229: Building Background Knowledge · New Teacher Talk

Welcome back to New Teacher Talk.
We are so happy you are here.
I'm Beth Wilkins.
And I'm Anna Quinzio-Zafran.
Today,
we're talking about something every teacher wrestles with.
How do you help students access new content when they don't
have the background knowledge to make sense of it yet?
I love this topic so much,
and our guest has spent her career thinking through exactly
that.
Ginny, we are so glad to have you here.
Let's dig into building background knowledge.
As new teachers,
most of you are familiar with Scarborough's Reading Rope,
a visual model that shows that we must explicitly teach
skills within both language comprehension and word
recognition to develop skilled readers.
But do you know which language comprehension skill is the
very first strand of the rope?
In my opinion, it's a skill that is often overlooked.
I'm talking about background knowledge.
My name is Dr.
Ginny Shank, and I'm an assistant professor of reading.
Prior to moving into higher education,
I served as an elementary classroom teacher and a reading
specialist.
And today,
I'm gonna talk about the importance of building background
knowledge, especially for students who are behind.
Now, while I specialize in reading and literacy,
the concept of background knowledge is important across all
levels and all subject areas.
So you'll leave today with three strategies that you can
use when introducing a new concept or a new text in your
classroom right away this week.
If you would like additional resources,
please see the links to articles from two of my favorite
sites, Newsela and Reading Rockets.
So what is background knowledge?
Well, there is a research base for this,
and we go all the way back to Piaget and his stages of
cognitive development,
and out of that developed what we call schema theory.
And what that means is when we take in new information,
we learn it best if we can attach it to a category of
knowledge.
And so these categories are called schema,
and a schema contains a group.
It's almost like a chain of linked memories, concepts,
or words.
So when we take in new information,
we can understand it better,
store it in our long-term memory,
and retrieve it faster if we can attach it to something we
already know, something we already have.
And so I think of it a little bit like my closet and my
space-saving hangers.
I don't know if you have these, but I love clothes,
and I have too many clothes,
and so I have to use those space-saving hangers where I can
group multiple things on one hanger.
And so this is a great picture of schema theory because as
I get new clothes,
sometimes I have to rearrange the clothes that are already
on one of these hangers so that I can add new.
And sometimes I just have to give up and put in a whole new
hanger.
And this is what happens with students.
As new information is presented,
sometimes they develop a whole new schema,
and sometimes what they already knew gets changed or
modified.
And just like my closet, there is such a thing as too much.
We can overload our students' working memory when we
present too much new information at one time.
And so we want to have a balance of presenting small
amounts of information in such a way that they can attach
it to what they already know.
And why does this matter?
Well,
if a student in your class can't relate in any way to the
new topic that you're teaching with any of their prior
knowledge, they're going to struggle to learn it.
Let me give you a real example from my practice.
I was working with a small group of third graders,
and we were reading a text about the mail system.
And on one of the pages,
we were talking about how when you want to mail a letter,
you put it in the mailbox and raise the flag.
Well,
I was looking at my students' faces and realizing that they
did not know what we were talking about,
and this wasn't a decoding or reading comprehension issue.
They simply did not understand.
So as I started asking questions,
I realized that this group of students all lived in a
historic downtown district in which they had mailboxes
beside their front door, mail slots in their front doors,
or they lived in apartment complexes with boxes that had
keys.
So none of them had a mailbox at the end of their driveway
with a flag.
So of course, I had to get on Google Earth,
show them my street,
and show them what a mailbox like that looked like.
My point in sharing that story is that we have to really
consider when we're assessing students that we're truly
assessing them on the skills we're teaching and not
requiring background knowledge that we haven't explicitly
shared.
This can be a big issue,
especially for students who are behind.
So taking the time to consider background knowledge and to
build it really benefits them.
It strengthens vocabulary development,
it improves their comprehension,
and we know from the research base that it's also gonna
improve their retention of that information for longer.
So let's get into our three strategies.
Strategy number one: create an experience.
I think this is so important for all ages.
And so my secondary teachers,
don't be afraid to do some of these things.
The students will still love it.
They will remember things longer,
and just don't take yourself too seriously.
Be willing to get a little bit out of the box to build
their background knowledge.
One way to do that is with demonstration So we do this all
the time in science where we conduct a demonstration first
so that we can get our students interested and engaged,
but it also helps us to discuss some vocabulary and get
them going before they learn the content or the rationale
behind why the demonstration worked.
It can also be a very basic demonstration.
Uh, when I was teaching some first graders,
we were reading a book about a picnic,
and I realized that none of them had been on a picnic.
They had only seen picnics on TV.
And so immediately I planned a picnic and brought in a
picnic basket, and we sat on a blanket.
And so they were able to experience it so that they could
then understand the text.
Another example, I, I was reading a book about the Titanic,
and a lot of the students didn't understand why so many
people died when they went into the water.
And so borrowing from the Titanic Museum,
my partner teacher and I cooled water down to the
temperature of the ocean that night and had students stick
their hands in it to see who could hold their hand in the
water the longest to get the idea of how cold it was and
why they developed hypothermia so quickly.
Bring in a guest speaker.
Guest speakers are great because they can sometimes give
firsthand accounts of a historical event.
They can talk about their career as it relates to your
topic.
There's so many things, and it makes it real for students,
and then that element of surprise.
You know, when I was going back to the Titanic,
I can remember having another teacher come across the hall,
bang on the door and say, "Iceberg,
right ahead." Even though these things can be silly,
even your high school students,
they might roll their eyes and laugh,
but they'll remember it.
And so my number one strategy for building background
knowledge is create an experience that students will
remember through a demonstration, guest speaker,
or element of surprise.
Second strategy,
access students' prior knowledge and allow them to learn
from each other.
This is great for class discussions.
In early elementary,
you can just start talking about something.
As, as students share their experiences,
it helps the students who maybe haven't had that experience
to learn.
Most of you will be familiar with the KWL chart.
This is great for our upper elementary and middle school
students who can read and write,
and they can participate in listing out the things they
already know about a topic,
then formulating questions on what they'd like to learn,
and then revisiting after a text or concept has been
taught, what did we learn?
Can we answer the questions we generated?
That's a great way to start developing schema.
For secondary, anticipation guides are great.
Having students answer a few true and false questions
before you teach a concept gives you as the teacher a sense
of what they already know and gets them thinking so that
they can begin to build that background knowledge before
instruction.
A final idea in this category is quick writes.
Again, I think this is great for upper elementary,
middle school, or high school,
just having students take three minutes to write everything
they think they know about a topic or an author or a text,
and getting them to get their thoughts down.
It's a great way to get those neurons firing,
get them to access the knowledge they already have.
This would be ungraded.
This is not something where you're looking at spelling and
grammar.
You're just looking at what they already know.
And again,
a great exit ticket that you could look at to see where
your students are.
A final strategy is pre-teaching.
One way to do this is with visuals.
You know, I hate to date myself,
but when I started teaching, we didn't have the internet.
And now because of that, you can take virtual field trips.
You can so easily find a picture of anything that you're
talking about, a video clip, a photo.
Use multimedia to help students develop a better idea of
what they're going to be learning.
You can also bring in text set.
Get to be good friends with your school librarian.
Let them know what you're getting ready to teach,
and they will be happy to help you gather a meaningful text
set so that you can bring in lots of books and materials
that students could peruse to help them build their
knowledge about a topic.
For younger students,
you can do an interactive read-aloud where maybe you're
using a picture book to introduce a topic and you're having
good discussion and asking questions as you read.
And then lastly, let's think about vocabulary.
I'm not talking about just putting a list of words on the
whiteboard or a PowerPoint and sharing what they mean.
I'm talking about making it a little more interactive.
One strategy that I love is called possible sentences,
and it's very similar to story impressions.
So possible sentences is often for nonfiction text or a
science, math, history type of concept.
Story impressions is very often in our language arts or
more narrative fictional text area.
And so this works for upper elementary, middle school,
secondary.
The idea is that you give them words from the text,
vocabulary words, important phrases,
and you don't give any context.
You just give them the list of words and ask them to use as
many words as they can in a sentence or paragraph.
They're trying to predict what they think they're going to
be learning or reading about.
And sometimes the result is funny,
but most of the time it really gets them thinking,
and usually someone is pretty close,
and it also gets them excited about what they're going to
learn.
And so I love giving vocabulary to students in this way
ahead of time and letting them struggle with it,
grapple with it, try to write, look it up,
because then they're more engaged and interested in finding
out what those words and phrases mean and how they work
together in what you're getting ready to teach.
So we talked about how these things benefit students who
struggle.
Creating an experience, accessing prior knowledge,
pre-teaching.
But I also want to conclude with the idea that this
actually benefits all students.
These type of strategies and building background knowledge
fuels critical thinking, which is good for all students.
As I mentioned as I went through some ideas,
this also boosts engagement and confidence.
And I think most importantly,
building background knowledge supports equity in your
classroom.
Students come in with different experiences in their
background, and as you build background knowledge,
you are giving everyone a chance to really understand the
new information that you're teaching.
Imagine that you are getting ready to teach about Martin
Luther King Jr.,
and most of your students are already gonna be very
familiar.
They're already gonna have a schema around him and the
civil rights movement.
But suppose I have an ELL student who's just come from
Morocco, and they have no idea who this person is.
So by taking that moment to build background knowledge,
not only will you get your other students excited and help
them access what they already know,
but you're providing a scaffold to give everyone a chance
to learn and understand what you're teaching.
And I think that's so important.
Don't forget about the resources that I included from
Newsela and Reading Rockets.
Be sure to follow New Teacher Talk on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also,
find and follow us on Instagram and BlueSky at NewTeacherTalk.
Keep growing your own background knowledge by engaging in
new learning and adding strategies like these to your
toolbox.
We're in this together, and we're here to support you.
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