What students do when they first enter the classroom matters. Here's why.

Homeostasis: Noun. the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes. 

Got it? Good, because now I’d like you to compare and contrast how homeostasis works in your own body to how it works in plants. And no, you can’t use Google. 

If you’re feeling a bit upset over the unfairness of the task outlined above, you’re certainly not being unreasonable. There are several important aspects of pedagogy missing from it, one of which is that you were not given the opportunity to activate your prior knowledge on the concept of homeostasis before diving headlong into its complications. 

Activating prior knowledge is the first important step in teaching a new concept to students, and yet it is often overlooked.

Essentially, it is uncovering what students already know about a topic in order to find a familiar entry point from which to build upon. It is the first step in building the schema upon which all the lessons to follow will depend. Without it, your students may struggle to attach meaning to the new words, phrases, and concepts that are crucial to content mastery.

One of the best ways to activate prior knowledge is through the use of a “Do Now”, a warm up activity or task that students engage in immediately upon entering the classroom. 

Do Nows can serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to review older material, discuss answers to a quiz, or to just get students settled into their seats and ready for the day’s lesson.

However, Do Nows are especially useful in activating prior knowledge because of their position at the very beginning of a lesson. They can be used to bring that vital concept mapping front and center into the students’ minds, such that they are now more open and ready to receive new information.

An example of a prior knowledge-activating Do Now is a semantic web, such as the one that you see below:

A semantic web, also known as a semantic map, is an excellent way to afford students the opportunity to bring their prior knowledge on a given topic into focus, priming them for your lesson.

So let's return to that task at the beginning of this article.

Instead of just defining the term “homeostasis” for students and then demanding a complex activity, what if we first ask them to develop a semantic web around the key concept of equality.

In the center of the web, students would write the word “equal” or “equality”.

Then, they would fill the bubbles around this word with symbols, words, pictures, phrases, events, people, etc. that they were already familiar with and that they associate with equality. 

If you were a student, you’d realize that you already know quite a lot about this important concept before you ever engaged in rigorous academic tasks. This would build your confidence to explore, thus lowering your stress level and making your more open to receive additional information. 

Let’s take a look at all the benefits.

First of all, this activity would make the key concept of homeostasis, the maintenance of equality, accessible to all students in that they would be generating all these associations on their own, unaided by academic articles or rigorous, stressful tasks. 

Second, a semantic web would build schema around the concept. This means that students are constructing a framework for organizing and receiving new information. Later in the learning process, when the rigor increases, this framework can serve them well, as they build connections to the web. 

Third, this activity is concise. It takes place at the beginning of class and is directly related to the concept that you want them to master.

Lastly, a semantic web sparks thinking. Though students may not realize it because they’re just drawing on their own personal experience, they are engaging in higher order thinking. Their synapses are firing, they’re making connections. 

Activating Prior Knowledge is as easy as learning the ABC’s

If we put the four characteristics outlined above together we’ve essentially got a very easy system for remembering how Do Nows can be utilized to activate prior knowledge:

• A is for accessibility

• B is for building schema

• C is for concise

• S is for sparks thinking

While listing these characteristics in this way may seem like a strange acrostic poem, it is a great way to remember the vital components common in all quality Do Now activities. 

As it turns out, a semantic web is just one among many that can be used to this end. 

Agree/Disagree, structured conversations, and card sorts are other examples that you can use to activate prior knowledge in your students, and thus give them a strong base from which to explore complex topics.

Once you’ve got this down, the next step would be to expand upon what students already know by building background knowledge. 

Activating Prior Knowledge for YOUR Students

Do you want to learn more about how to use Do Nows to activate prior knowledge of your students in your content area?

We currently offer a specialized professional development course that is guaranteed to make you a Do Now expert, thus maximizing student achievement in the classroom.

To learn more about this unique professional development experience, go to our Services page and click on our Making Complexity Accessible to Multi-lingual Learners workshop. This workshop is offered both online and in person.

The Importance of Building Schema

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.

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