Here’s some great advice: To free up your crew, store the spinnaker in the leeward pouch so the helmsman can hoist it alone. When the helmsman does hoist, you should bear away to a run or broad reach.

Now please do the following tasks with this advice:

1. Explain what it means in your own words.

2. Evaluate the quality of the advice. Is it worth following? Why or why not?

You have 5 minutes to complete both tasks and cannot use any outside resources to help you.

What's that you say? You think this is unfair? C’mon, you’re only working with two sentences! How hard can it be!?

I’m joking of course. Unless you are an experienced sailor, you would almost certainly be unable to do either of those tasks. 

The reason is that you do not yet have the frame of reference in which to situate and make sense of the complex ideas in that advice. 

This frame of reference is known as schema, and it is essential in the process of learning new information. 

In the above example, your lack of schema is what prevents you from being able to do the two tasks asked of you: Explain the meaning of the text and then evaluate it. 

You have nothing familiar to compare the new information to, and therefore can’t make heads or tails of it, much less do anything with it that requires higher order thinking.

You might struggle to think of an example wherein such unfair tasks are assigned, but the reality is that many students encounter exactly this type of situation in their classroom on a daily basis.

These unfortunate experiences are especially common among multilingual learners (MLLs), who are not only struggling to understand the deeper meaning of the content, but also trying to navigate linguistic and cultural differences between their home lives and their school lives.

MLLs, and all learners really, need to build schema in order to comprehend the new information that is presented in texts, and certainly before the teacher asks them to do anything requiring higher order thinking skills. 

So how can a teacher build schema for her students?

Step One: Activate Prior Knowledge

The first step is to activate the prior knowledge that students already have. This gives students an entry point into the content of the lesson.

For example, in the above scenario, the average reader doesn’t have the knowledge of sailing needed to understand the advice being given. So she needs an entry point, something to bridge what they already know to the new and unfamiliar topic of technical sailing. 

But what is something that anyone would have direct knowledge of, regardless of their cultural or linguistic background?

The wind.

A familiar concept, wind is not something that you need to read about. It is already known to you through direct experience. 

So let's say that instead of first giving you the piece of sailing advice and asking you to complete academic tasks based on it, I just gave you a paper airplane. 

I could then ask you to throw this airplane towards an electric fan at various angles, noting how the wind altered the path of the plane. 

In this activity, you wouldn’t need much language to understand the basic concepts of aerodynamic lift that are essential to knowing sailing techniques. 

In a way, you already know them, and are using this knowledge in your play with the airplane.

Step Two: Connect Prior Knowledge to Complex Topics

Fully confident in your understanding of wind, you would now be ready for a bridge to the new, unfamiliar concepts of sailing necessary for understanding the technique advice. 

Step two is to build that bridge, to make that connection between the known and unknown.

To do this, I would visually replace the paper airplane with a sailboat, and ask you to make predictions about how this sailboat might behave as it approached the wind from different angles. I could even ask you to give advice to a hypothetical sailor on what he should and should not do in order to reach a certain destination. 

Though you lack the nuanced technical vocabulary of sailing, you could do this through activating what you already know about wind and how it affects objects that use it to move. 

With your prior knowledge now activated and connected to the topic at hand, at this point you’d be ready to receive some of the technical vocabulary needed to understand and evaluate the sailing advice. “Bear away”, “run”, and “broad reach” are all terms that merely describe the sail’s position relative to the wind direction. In essence, they’re just fancy names for things that you already know about through your experimentation with the paper airplane.

After a brief vocabulary introduction, you’d be fully prepared to tackle those two original tasks with little difficulty. 

Building Schema in YOUR Classroom

The above example highlights why it's so important for teachers in all content areas to build schema before diving into the complex topics of their subject. Establishing that framework ensures a more equitable access to the learning experience, regardless of your students’ cultural or linguistic background. 

This makes building schema a powerful tool in closing the achievement gap, especially among Multilingual Learners (MLLs). 

When thinking about building schema in your classroom, here are some questions that you should ask yourself:

• What do students already know about the topic?

• What activity would connect the central concept and/or target content to something already familiar to students?

• What additional background knowledge will support them in building schema around the central concept/target content?

• What activity would bridge from the activating prior knowledge activity to the target content?

Asking yourself these questions can help guide you in the creation of high-quality schema building activities that are sure to benefit your students’ ability to engage in your rigorous content. 

Next Steps:

Do you want to learn more about how to build schema in your content area through activating and connecting the prior knowledge of your students? 

We currently offer a specialized professional development workshop that is guaranteed to make you an expert on building schema in your classroom, thus maximizing the learning experience of your students. 

Go to the Services Page and click on the Building Schema workshop to learn more about this unique professional development experience.