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.