Address the Prior Knowledge Problem

If you are a teacher who works with students at any level of remedial instruction, you are familiar with this thought: “Oh my God. Where do I start?” Am I talking only to SPED teachers? No. Am I talking only to Credit Recovery teachers? No. I am talking to any teacher working in a classroom where the majority performs significantly below grade level. The “Oh my God” not only relates to the initial shock you get after the first pre and posttests; it also covers the feeling you have when you sit down to plan your instruction.

After all, what words can you use that they already know to explain convergence in plate tectonics? How many different layman’s terms can you conjure up to produce just the right image in the minds of your pupils?

When you find yourself at this crossroads and in the middle of the “Oh my God” struggle, you are presented with the opportunity to make a choice, to pick the response that would lead to a win-win for all stakeholders. You’ve probably heard some instructors respond in one of these five ways:

A) “The kids come to me three years behind. I can’t get them on grade level this year anyway. I’ll just mention it and keep moving.”

B) “Well, there are a few bright kids in the class. I can do groups and let the bright kids explain the concept again to the other children.”

C) “I’ll put some notes/explanations in the PowerPoint and let the kids take notes. If they study it, they’ll get it eventually. “

D) “I’ll assign the reading for homework, and either they can enrich themselves or not; it’s their problem.”

E) “They have the Internet. They use their cell phones for everything else. If they can Facebook, they can get the background on the concept if they need it.”

I present to you this: ALL of these, A-E, are wrong attitudes for instructors. Don’t get upset just yet; consider these truths:

A) As a teacher, your job is to improve pupils’ social and academic lives. You are expected to move students, to guide them into and through levels of personal success for improvement. That’s sort of the calling card of the profession. If you don’t like doing that, you might—possibly—be in the wrong career.

B) Who moves the “bright kids” while they are reteaching content to the remediating students? By placing instruction in their hands, you are requiring children to use their personal power to translate instruction to the others. Don’t the “bright kids” have a right to keep growing as the majority does? Aren’t we supposed to provide all children with enriching educational experiences? Should the “bright kids” be forced to mull about in a unit they have obviously mastered while the others catch up?

C) If the children do not possess the language or the understanding required to imagine, discuss, analyze and evaluate the conditions of your concept in the classroom, will notes on a PowerPoint slide help? If notes can help, doesn’t the kind of notes provided matter? Isn’t this akin to giving an average ten-year-old a collegiate dictionary and asking him to look up the word “gentry?” After he gets the “notes,” he probably will still have no applicable understanding of the concept “gentrification.”

D) Expecting remedial students to independently choose passages to read for enrichment is almost like asking them if they want a root canal for breakfast. The explanation here is similar to the one in C. If language and understanding are the problem, the average student does not possess the resilience required to choose, decode, study and fully process the grade-level support literature on his own.

E) The Internet is not a teacher; it’s a huge electronic library. You and I use it to learn because we are familiar with library rules (in the brick and mortar and online environments).  We know where to go to get the information we need. Most children are as Net literate as they are library literate; they are using the Internet for social interactions. Expecting children to gain mastery by using supporting Internet sources, then, is like asking them to use their lunchtime to discuss quantum physics.

I propose that we not think in any of these ways because in all of these attitudes, students lose. As the teachers, the coaches, we’re supposed to help kids win.

Let’s go back to the “Oh my God” moment, and let’s take a different turn. Before you let any other question crop up in your mind, ask yourself: What building blocks/avenues do my students need to get to my desired academic destination?

You’ve seen pictures of the neural pathways of the brain. (If you haven’t, use the Internet.) Our thoughts and understandings build on each other in a beautiful web of electric connectivity. Small concepts branch into larger, more complex ones in all sorts of directions. Here’s an example of one such direction: food to fruit to apple to Granny Smith to apple pie, etc. If one part of the thinking web, say the word “apple,” is somehow distorted in the mind—or if that part of the connection for some reason NEVER EXISTED in the mind—the whole understanding (and its resulting communication) is affected.

Imagine a two-year-old jumping up and down, pointing to an apple and screaming, “I want that; I want that!” You cannot say, “Use your words” if the word “apple” has never been spoken in a situation where the word and the object were demonstrated as inextricably linked.

As a remediating teacher, you have to repair the cognitive pathways by backtracking the connections and filling in the holes. So, ask yourself again, “What building blocks/avenues do my students need to get to my desired academic destination?” What MIGHT they be missing that MIGHT prevent them from getting it?

Some building blocks are repeat offenders on the NEVER EXISTED list. I want to talk about three that could change your teaching and your students forever: vocabulary, convention and function.

If you’ve been around the block a bit, you already know that there are levels of vocabulary. (If you don’t, use the Internet.) Some kinds of vocabulary—the academic words like describe, analyze, compare and contrast—apply in all subjects; but some kinds of vocabulary—like antebellum, figurative language, Pythagorean theorem and buoyancy—are subject specific. You might be mortified to know that BOTH of these types of vocabulary MIGHT be FAR ABOVE what your students are currently able to handle! Before students are able to express ideas at either of these vocabulary levels, you will have to model a number of discussions on a number of topics while demonstrating the connections between these words and the desired thinking process.

The thinking process (the way new words/terms transform, how they are normally used and the understandings those terms communicate within a subject) is conventional. For a remedial student, these three heavy-hitting connections are likely missing. That means that in your planning, you must anticipate a need to start at the vocabulary level and actually walk through, with the children, the conventions, applications and understandings linked to those words.

Lastly, students need a connection to the real-world functions of our concepts. The question “How am I going to use this” should always be answered before it is asked. As adults, we don’t waste our time studying things we don’t think will benefit us in the long run. After a certain age, children feel the same way; and quite frankly, children need to know the practical function of concepts in their everyday world in order to truly understand them.

Here’s what you do after the “Oh my God:”

A) Breathe. Remember that you are working with young minds that need your tutelage, and keep in mind that they can tell when you’re afraid to teach them.

B) Establish your end product. Ask yourself, “What can a child DO or what can they CREATE to show me that they’ve really gotten this concept?” That ending performance task will be the first thing you talk about; not the last. This gives the children a focus and moves them toward functional understanding.

C) Pre-plan conversations and brief, timed activities that will allow you to drop each cognitive block into place. When you first begin to do this, it will take you HOURS to figure out the baby steps to the big ideas. With some practice, you’ll be able to get from “authoritarianism” to “isms” to “ideologies/ideas” to “human practices” to “things people sometimes do” to “make a judgment” in no time. Note: the vocabulary, the convention and the function are important and all three MUST be a part of delivery. Plan to deliver and discuss INTERACTIVELY all of those three in the classroom setting.

D) Ask the children lots of questions, and call every child, every day. Class time may seem to interfere with this practice, but structure your lessons to allow for a bit of teacher to pupil to group time for every student. Encourage children to just answer from their thoughts; that is how you will find the missing information you must teach. That is also how you will find misinformation that you will need to reteach.

E) Have students read, write and speak in your class every day. Chunk the reading; or in other words, go for quality paragraphs instead of skimmed chapters. Expect them to read CLOSELY for specific information. Remedial students need to be guided through the process of investigating texts for particulars.

F) Assign home tasks that allow students to use their class writings and remnants of class conversations to review the concepts. Yes, I’m saying assign homework. Quality is better than quantity. One excellent reflection question is better than assigning twenty questions that will come back incorrect.

G) Assess regularly in various ways. Conversations, pop quizzes, regular quizzes, homework questions, quickwrites, post-it answers, assess, assess, assess. You are looking to make sure that cognition will not be interrupted because of missing cognitive blocks. It’s just like checking a new train track; you must be looking for breaks in the track.

H) Expect growth as a group. Always let your children know where they should be at the end of a set time. This practice is not cruel; it is necessary. Children must learn to set personal goals and work hard until they meet them. Then, once they meet those goals, your students will feel a real sense of achievement.

Again I say, you don’t have to believe me right away. Just TRY these method for one unit. Come back and tell me what happened.

I bet you’ll be surprised at what your children can do when you’ve repaired the breaches and allowed new concepts to assume their natural connective places in children’s neural networks.

Big Brains and Bobbleheads to You,

Ms. Moss