Category: Activator

Activating Prior Knowledge - Helping students do it independently!

1/21/2014

Activating prior knowledge is a common educational phrase. Almost any teacher will tell you the importance of getting students to make connections to their background knowledge before they learn about a new topic or read a new story.

Recently I searched for ideas on how to activate prior knowledge. Everything I found included the teacher doing the activating of the students - an external event, rather than students learning how to activate their own brains. We need our students to be able to do this independently! During standardized assessments, teachers are not able to prompt students with questions, KWL charts, and other hints about the topic. During most authentic learning situations, I don't have someone saying to me "What do you Know about this topic?"

So how does one activate one's own knowledge? What do you do when faced with a topic you know little about? I reflected on my own experience and then developed a tool to help my students. The Prior Knowledge Spinner provides 6 questions to stimulate metacognition, particularly as it relates to prior knowledge. I provided students with the topic, then had them spin and answer the questions.

I also created a second version with visual prompts to help our English Learners or other students who needed some additional support.

Our goal is to have students use the spinners frequently enough that the questions become embedded in their metacognitive processes. This will include a transition phase when we fade out the actual spinners and encourage a visualization.

Interested in these tools? Email me a request at anne@ideasforeducators.com and I will be happy to send them to you.

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Scaffolded Vocabulary Instruction

9/16/2013

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Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a vocabulary webinar by Maria Elena Arguelles. She proposed a simple scaffolding for introducing new vocabulary to students and I decided to use it this week, while adding a few of my own engagement strategies.

(The photo above, taken by Paul Baron, is of flexible bamboo scaffolding - reminding me that flexibility is key in a mixed-ability classroom!)

The word for the day, taken from Sprenger's list of critical common core verbs, was "organize." (See post from 8/29 for more info.) Here are the steps we took:

Activator:

I searched through my prop bag looking for something and finally just dumped the contents out so students could see how unorganized it was. This grabbed their attention and helped them make connections.

I introduced the word, the definition, and some synonyms.
I used the word correctly in a few sentences, having students respond with thumbs up/down.
I interspersed sentences that used the word incorrectly, having students respond with thumbs up/down.
I provided a sentence stem for students to complete with a partner - "I will organize ______________ so that ____________________________. We shared these as a whole group.
I had students individually complete the sentence stem.
On the following day, students worked individually with Educreations on the iPad to write a sentence, illustrate and record themselves. My co-teacher and I used their recordings as a formative assessment.

I liked this structure - it was simple, straightforward and provided the support needed by many of our students. Of course, because vocabulary acquisition is an ongoing process, we will be implementing a variety of other vocabulary activities during the semester to reinforce this instruction.

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Ideas for Engagement

2/26/2013

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For the last few years I have been collaborating with a Nebraska school district to improve their co-teaching practices. Through a series of workshops, observations and job-embedded modeling, teachers have engaged in analysis and reflection. I am excited to see so many teachers embracing new ideas for engagement and hands-on learning!

Last week I visited co-taught classrooms at two different middle schools, both teaching author’s purpose using the RIPE acronym (Reflect, Inform, Persuade, Entertain.)

In one class, the co-teachers used a novel approach to activate student thinking. They began class by putting on banana necklaces! Students immediately wondered what was happening, and started making predictions. What a creative, novel way to activate learning! (For more ideas about novelty, download a Novelty Schedule on this website's downloadables page.)

In the other class, the co-teachers chose to use “cootie catchers” (also known as fortune tellers) to increase their students’ motivation. The teachers made the largest cootie catcher I have ever seen and used it as a model. What I loved about this was that it was impossible for one person to manipulate – it had to be collaborative. Students then made smaller versions and paired up to practice their knowledge of the four author purposes. Watch this video clip from the BER video Making Inclusion More Successful.

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Letter Bag

11/29/2012

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On a whirlwind tour of classrooms in Smyrna, Delaware this week, I saw a teacher use a simple strategy for engaging students. The teacher had 10 paper lunch bags, one for each small group to share. Inside the bags she had placed 26 cards, each with one letter of the alphabet. The lesson objective was to identify and discuss the impact of the narrative elements in a story. Students were listening to the teacher read, and reading along in their own books. Every so often, the teacher stopped, directed the students to pull a letter out of their “letter bag,” and then make a connection between the letter and a narrative element. For example, one group pulled an “O” and discussed how the setting of the story was “outdoors.” Another group pulled an “E” and wondered what the “exciting” climax would be.

This is the type of strategy I love for 3 reasons:

1.     Highly engaging – it was multi-modality and had an element of unpredictability that students immediately loved
2.     Highly applicable – the same strategy could be used to encourage connections to any content discussion, as an activator, or even as a summarizing moment, K-12!
3.     Low prep – such a quick thing to put together

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Prior Knowledge Time Machine

9/25/2012

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BACKGROUND

The beginning of a new topic usually includes “activating prior knowledge.” When we ask students “What do you know about this topic?” we often see the struggling students sit quietly and be non-responsive. This week I spent significant think-time analyzing what it means to independently activate prior knowledge. As an adult, I don’t have a teacher leading me with prompting questions – I have to activate my prior knowledge independently. We need to teach students this same skill! This is critical for adult success, but also for times when students have to take tests without any teacher assistance.

How do I activate my own prior knowledge? I think back in time, searching various periods in my life where I might have learned something about the topic. I also search various places where I may have been exposed to the content. This often happens at a subconscious level. Making this process obvious and concrete can help struggling students learn this skill.

JUMP to the STRATEGY

Yesterday, I arrived in class with a Prior Knowledge Time Machine, including a control panel with knobs for Time and Place. Each student also received a small version of the Time Machine. You will see from the photos how easy this was to create - just cardboard and bottle caps.

Using “think-aloud,” I modeled for students what I might do if confronted with a topic I knew just a little about. We traveled together back in time (last year, when I was in college, elementary school) and to a variety of places where I might have gathered knowledge on the topic (school, home, museums, vacation.) Students then had the opportunity to practice with a non-academic topic such as soccer, before applying the strategy to our new unit on expository writing.

Students were engaged and making connections! Our plan is to phase out the concrete materials after a few months, but keep the motions (“turn your time knob”, “turn your place knob”) and then transition to just a verbal cue (“Use your time machine” “What can you do to activate your prior knowledge?”) before we get to spring testing season.

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Props and Predictions

2/23/2012

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Today I had the wonderful opportunity to co-teach English with Mary. Students are in the middle of reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. To start class with a novel hook, I showed them an orange and asked them to predict what an orange might have to do with the play. We were greeted by some puzzled expressions at first, but then students began to buzz with each other about possibilities. I tossed the orange around the room and we listened to their ideas.

“If you stab an orange, juice will spurt out, like when they stabbed Caesar and he bled out.”

“You can peel back the skin of the orange, kind of like they were trying to peel back the layers of power in Rome.”

“In The Godfather, an orange always meant someone was going to die. In JC there are predictions of someone dying.”

“If you go deeper than the skin you see something different. This is like the characters, one thing on the surface, but different deep down.”

Neuroscientist Judy Willis (yes, I am a fan!) tells us that novelty grabs attention and helps information to get past the RAS (Reticular Activating System.) Once information makes it past the RAS, the brain begins to make predictions. We can direct this impulse to support our content objectives! Students were engaged and thinking in creative, connected ways. So grab a food item from your kitchen or pantry and give it a try!

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Activating Prior Knowledge - Helping students do it independently!

Scaffolded Vocabulary Instruction

Ideas for Engagement

Letter Bag

Prior Knowledge Time Machine

Props and Predictions

Anne M. Beninghof

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