From Building Context to Using Context

I spent a lot of time building context, or prior knowledge, for my students; due in part to the undeniable fact that I was attempting to teach way too much information. Obscure knowledge that I thought was important because I knew it, but I also understood my content – far above what any of my students understood. But I was the teacher right? Why shouldn’t I impart as much of my knowledge upon my eager and attentive students? Indeed. I just forget one very simple and enduring fact: my students had yet to achieve an understanding of my content. Why was I spending time loading their heads with prior knowledge about things that they would never retain?

I’m not saying that building prior knowledge isn’t important; I’m saying we have to know what specific enduring understandings we want students to retain before we decide what prior knowledge they need. And instead of hearing “I don’t know anything” because we’re focused on obscure knowledge, we might hear “I think I know something about that.” Great! Now we just have to uncover what and which students know and do not know that key concept or essential skill I've intended for them to retain.

The easiest method to do this is to use anticipatory activities such as anticipation guides that lists a statement and requires students to decide if they agree with it or disagree with it. For example:

T/F Maps always are designed with North on top and South on the bottom.

T/F East is where the sun sets.

T/F The United States is located in the Eastern Hemisphere.

T/F The Spring and Fall Equinox provide the same amount of day and night.

This allows teachers a very quick formative assessment to determine how much time to spend on which topic(s). Another activity to help student begin using their schema, or what they know, are story impressions.

This involves a teacher generated list of clue words or important phrases from a section of text. Students, knowing where the unit is going, take the words or phrases and write their impression of how they think the words will fit together. Students are utilizing what they’ve already learned during the unit and are predicting what they will learn next. For example:

Context
Understood
Cautious
Knowledge
Enduring
Connections
Anticipation Guides
Powerful strategies
Prior learning

Students who use the above words and phrases can then develop their own paragraph using what they’ve already learned. Then, after a brief discussion and comparison with others, the student can examine the actual text to see how close he or she came; thus bridging that gap between the known and new.

Building context is important, but our real task as a teacher is to provide methods for linking what students have already learned in their life to what they will understand after your class. We have to be cautious with our methods however. If we assume that all of our knowledge about a subject is important we will have a very difficult time saying that our students have understood. Therefore, deciding what will be the enduring skills and knowledge makes it easier for students to tap into their schema to make the necessary connections to improve their understanding. Anticipation guides that begin to build that bridge between the known and new are powerful strategies that will allow students use prior learning instead of feeling frustrated at not knowing anything.

From KWL to KWUnderstand

How do I know how much students know?  Whenever I ask, especially teenagers, it’s “I don’t know anything,” and “I especially don’t want to learn anything.”  

A decade ago when I first heard of the KWL activity, I thought it was the greatest.  What a great activity designed to activate prior knowledge, motivate students to read, and to review with a connection to prior knowledge.  It had all the ingredients for a well-designed activity.  Unfortunately I was young, inexperienced, and quickly became a non-believer of the KWL activity.  I even changed it to be a KEL with the “E” standing for “what do you expect to know?”  I had a slightly better experience with this, but it still wasn’t the answer for making students activate all of their prior knowledge and motivate them to read, let alone learn.  Even today I have heard teachers literally groan when you mention “KWL”. 

I won’t spend this entry poo-pooing what is actually a well-intentioned activity.  Instead, I wanted to share some of my personal experiences as a reading specialist regarding what works.  The difficulty with strategies, like KWL, is that we lack an understanding of its construction and its intended use.  I became frustrated with KWL because I would often ask students what they knew about the topic, solicit some responses for what they wanted to know, but I would not always return to what was learned.  Even more heinous was that I didn’t always know what I wanted to understand!  Again, forgive me for being young, inexperienced, and naïve. 

In the years since my first year teacher survival mode, I’ve come to understand that a single reading activity makes not understanding.  Instead it is a series of activities and deciding which will work best for my students that I have in front of me today: 

1. What do I want my students to understand?	2. How will I know if students have acquired understanding?	3. Who are my students?  What needs do they have?	4. What materials do I anticipate that students will need?
5. How much do my students already know?	6. Pretest, Anticipation Guides, Entrance Slips, Questions	7. Gather materials: text book passages, articles, internet, film clips, etc.	8. P 3x’s before reading or viewing materials – Preview, Predict, set a Purpose
9. Actively read or view materials: question the text, visualize, connect	10. Review: make inferences, synthesize, reciprocally teach	11. Post-test, exit slips, questions	12. Did students understand?  What will I do if they didn’t?

In other words, we must know where we would like to students to end up and who our students are before we even select the appropriate strategy.  So, if using KWL, I must be very careful when I model the W column.  I may very well receive varied responses in the “what do you know” column, but I need to direct my students to preview the materials I’ve selected in such a way that it becomes very clear what they will want to learn.  The final column then becomes a way for me to verify if I’ve done my job well.  Did my students learn what I wanted them to learn?  Thinking this way works for any reading strategy you decide to use.  In the end, it’s not about the type of strategy used, it’s about what you intend students to understand or be able to do.   

Choosing the Right Strategy

I devoted a considerable amount of time discussing the importance of building context, prior knowledge, or schema for students prior to reading for understanding. Now I'll devote some time discussing how to choose the right strategy for students.

Dough Buehl (2001) suggests three general rules when wanting to choose a strategy for students:

1. What is to be learned is more important than which strategy.
2. The focus should be on what students are thinking, not the steps being followed.
3. Adapt the strategies to match student needs and teachers' goals.

Strategies that build context therefore, help direct students' attention to the major ideas and introduce how the information is structured in a text. In other words, where do I want my students to be looking for information and how will they know when they have found it?

Strategies are often broken down into three categories:

• building context when a student knows little about the topic to be learned
• activating what a student already knows when he/she knows some things about the topic
• organizing additional knowledge gained when a student knows a lot about the topic

Building Context:

Predicting & Confirming Activity (PACA) based on Beyer's (1971) inquiry model, uses predictions to set a purpose for reading. It allows students to do what good readers do naturally, which is to make educated predictions based on a little bit of information, set a purpose for wanting to know more, and revising their predictions as they continue through the text.

Example

A language teacher is planning a lesson on the Renaissance. She would like to use a reading passage in the native language that discusses the influence of the Renaissance on modern society. The article includes references to several key paintings that after an exit poll in her class the day before, she knows her students have very little knowledge about. The teacher introduces her lesson the next day with a brief discussion about the Renaissance and displays several of the key paintings mentioned in the reading on her LCD display.

Step 1: The teacher asks a question: "How might paintings like these be interpreted by us today?"

Step 2: The teacher initiates the lesson: Dividing the class up, the teacher groups her students into small discussion groups. She provides them with a list of vocabulary words from the article that are associated with influence of the paintings on our society today. "Based on the words from the reading, how might you think other people feel about these paintings?"

Step 3: Students meet to write predictions: After a brief discussion by they groups, the teacher poses the question again. This time responses from students include which words they used to make the prediction. She can use her tablet, or overhead projector to display these.

Step 4: The teacher presents new information: This could be reintroducing the pictures and providing additional information or showing a video to help build background knowledge.

Step 5: Students and teacher revise or modify predictions: Together, on the basis of new information, students revise or modify their original hypothesis.

Step 6: Students read the selection using the predictions as a purpose for reading: Students read the selection and can be reminded of their predictions as they read if they are written down or displayed.

Step 7: The teacher works with the students to revise their predictions based on the new information acquired from reading: The teacher works with the students to use the new information to revise the previous predictions.

The point of this strategy is to give students practice with the abstract concept that knowledge is tentative and can be revised when new information is introduced.

I'll add more strategies on future dates. Stay posted!

The Context of Prior Knowledge

Take a moment and read the following paragraph:

Two experiments investigated visual processing asymmetries in normal and dyslexic readers, with unilateral tachistoscopic presentations. The experiments employed randomized or blocked presentations of verbal and nonverbal materials to determine whether previously reported differences between dyslexics and normals were due to structural hemispheric differences or to strategical processing differences. The results indicate that if dyslexics are unable to predict the nature of the stimulus, they behave as normal readers. Their atypical laterality emerges only when they can adopt a strategy in anticipation of a specific type of stimulus (Underwood & Boot, 1986, p. 219, reprinted from Readence, Moore and Rickelman, 2000).

Great! Now retell it what you just read in your own words without looking at it again. You may have had everything going for you including motivation, ability to decode the words, and perhaps enough prior knowledge to at least recognize the word "dyslexic". Chances are though that you may not have known what processing asymmetries, unilateral tachistoscopic presentations, or randomized or blocked presentations meant unless you already knew what it meant. In other words, your comprehension was compromised because of a lack of knowledge.

As a content teacher, I want to plan accordingly then when examining a text I want my students to read. Now prior to looking at the text I have already established the learning outcomes, written the assessments, know why this particular text will help my students build the knowledge or skills they need to be successful. Having an awareness what the text offers and what my students already know helps me to determine what I need to provide. In other words, I look for the gap between what is known and what is needed to be learned and decide how best to bridge, or scaffold, that gap for my students.

My students will often tell me, "but I don't know anything!" Students know this not to be a true statement as do teachers. We are exposed on a daily basis with a barrage of new information. What we retain long term and how we recover that knowledge is what I'm after. There are enduring understandings I want my students to remember forever. There are also skills and tidbits of knowledge that I need them to hold on to until I can get them to recall them to build new knowledge. So what students are really telling us is, "I don't know how to access what I already know !"

Activating prior knowledge is key to learning new information. Read the following paragraph:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange items into different groups. Of course one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first, the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another fact of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then, one can never tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. They they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life (Bransford & Johnson, 1972, p. 722, reprinted from Readence, Moore and Rickelman, 2000).

Any idea what this paragraph is about? Doesn't make much sense does it? What if you were to go back and read it again with the knowledge that it is about washing clothes? Imagine how your students feel. Completely capable of reading the words and the sentences but unable to understand because of not activating their prior knowledge.

Building Context

Prior knowledge, the ability to make predictions, and having a purpose are the key ingredients to building context for students. I sometimes joke with my students and tell them “I want you to ‘p’ at least three times before you actually read!” By now I have almost everyone’s attention and few “Eww! He just said I should pee before I read,” faces staring back at me. I go on to explain to my students that what mean to say is that you should preview, predict, and set a purpose all before reading a single sentence.

The most important ingredient to this equation is setting a purpose – especially with secondary students. I’d be rich if I had a dime every time I heard a student ask, “why are we reading this?” Frustrated, I would quickly tell a student that it is going to be on a quiz or test, or that it is a classic and it is important that they read it. Unfortunately, I would often look at the clock and wouldn't take the necessary time to allow students to set their own purpose. I had to stop and ask some important questions.

Why should they read? What will they gain from the time it will take to complete this task? Is the time and effort the student invests really worth it? I knew I had to select a text for students because it is important. I want my students to understand big ideas and delve deep into a topic. Therefore if I expected my students to set a purpose for their assigned reading, I had better chosen a text for a purpose.

When a student has a reason to read, they will be engaged with the text. They will take notes, underline, highlight, and use post-its – if they were modeled for the student. But all the strategies I can demonstrate to students for interacting with the text won’t mean anything if the student has no reason to read. Purposes for reading will vary greatly depending on the structure of the unit. Wanting students to read a text “to appreciate it,” will not go over well especially with teenagers. It may be my ultimate long-term goal, but there needs to be something more concrete in the short-term.

To make the purpose more concrete, it pays to have the reading contained within a unit that is working towards a specific goal is the first step. Establishing what I want my students to understand and framing it in terms of an essential question also helps. This gives an overall purpose for the entire unit and allows students to see what they are working towards. It gives them a reason to work at something because they want to understand.

For example, in my secondary English, I may be working toward the goal of having students analyze the development of form (e.g., short stories, essays, speeches, poetry, plays, novels) and purpose in American literature and literature of other countries. After “unpacking” this standard, I realize that I want my students to understand that there a several types of literary forms and that each has traits that can be recognized when analyzed. To practice this, I would like my students to compare two literary forms while examining them for specific patterns that I previously taught. Students will be expected to name the form of each text and to support it with specific evidence from each text. Wow! Now my students have a reason to read the text.

Now that I have identified the reason my students will read the text, I can help build the context for my students. After offering the texts to my students, I can engage each student’s schema (prior knowledge) by asking him or her to preview each text – looking for patterns that will provide clues to the form. While students are doing this, they are activating their prior knowledge and predicting. I may reinforce this by asking my students to share either in a journal or with a partner what they think and why. Finally, the texts can be read and analyzed all because my students have “p-ed” three times before reading.