Mentor materials
The importance of prior learning
Intended outcomes
The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:
Learn that:
- Prior knowledge plays an important role in how pupils learn; committing some key facts to their long-term memory is likely to help pupils learn more complex ideas
Learn how to avoid overloading working memory by:
- Taking into account pupils’ prior knowledge when planning how much new information to introduce
Learn how to build on pupils’ prior knowledge, by:
- Linking what pupils already know to what is being taught (e.g. explaining how new content builds on what is already known)
Activities
Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)
Ask the ECT to share their reflections after teaching the lesson that they planned in the last topic.
- What did they notice?
- What worked well?
- Would they use this approach again?
Activating key ideas for the topic (15 minutes)
Explain to the ECT that the purpose of today’s topic is to explore the importance of prior knowledge for new learning. If you were about to start a lesson on animals of Africa, and share the fact that “aardvarks actually belong to the same clade of animals as elephants, called afrotheres”.
Some points to note with the ECT:
- The new information above might be incomprehensible if the ECT is not able to decipher what ‘clade’ means (it’s a group that share the same ancestral lineage) so they might have been neither interested nor uninterested. The ECT may have not known the word but have had enough prior experience of statements such as X belong to the same Y (club/family/group/ religion) to make an educated guess.
- Similarly, if the ECT has no prior knowledge about what an aardvark looks or behaves like in comparison to an elephant, the new information is harder to understand because they have no prior knowledge to link it to.
- The mentor used a word to describe the group that both elephants and aardvarks belong to, which few people would immediately recognise. Can the ECT recall it? Can the mentor? Immediately forgetting new words or information like “afrotheres” happens because you are unlikely to connect it to any prior knowledge existing in your brain (or schema) unless you pay deliberate attention to processing it.
Pose the question: Why is prior knowledge so important when teaching new content?
Notes for mentor:
All of the above will be true for pupils as well. Prior knowledge plays a really important role in learning for a few reasons:
- Any new material we learn (such as the definition of the word clade) connects to existing knowledge we have in our long-term memory. When you introduce a new idea or concept to pupils if it can be connected to their prior knowledge, they will have a much better chance of both understanding and remembering it.
- As pupils move through school, they will encounter more complex and difficult ideas and concepts. They will more easily be able to grasp these if they have secure prior knowledge. By making explicit links to the prior knowledge needed for a complex idea, pupils will be more successful.
Pose the question: How can teachers take into account prior knowledge when teaching new content?
Prompts:
- When planning to introduce new content, the teacher should think about what prior knowledge it links to and that their pupils already have so they plan for it.
- The teacher could explicitly link new content to prior knowledge (e.g. by verbally making the link, showing an example, or using an activity which draws on the prior knowledge before teaching the new content).
Introducing new content (30 minutes)
Ask the ECT to share an upcoming topic or lesson that they will be teaching. Plan together to:
- Decide how much new information to introduce based on prior knowledge
- Plan an explanation that links the new content to previously learnt material.
Use Handout 2.2 to plan together.
1. Deciding how much information to introduce.
Complete the section ‘Prior Knowledge Context’ for this lesson, summarising the content to be covered. Some things to consider:
- Is this the first time that pupils will encounter the material in this lesson?
- How confident is the teacher that pupils have this prior knowledge? Do they have any evidence to support their assumption? (e.g. a test, classwork, homework)
- Are there any possible misconceptions pupils may have in this area?
Pose the question: What content do you want to cover in this lesson? Explain in detail to me.
- In the second column break down all of the content that pupils will encounter in the lesson, including vocabulary.
Pose the question: Which of this is new content?
- Identify new content by ticking box
Pose the question: What prior knowledge can be linked to each piece of content?
- Go through the content items in sequence, asking what prior knowledge they will link each new stage of the lesson to.
- This could be previous lessons, previous information from the same lesson (e.g. linking step 2 back to step 1), core concepts in the subject, concepts from other subjects, their own experiences etc.
Pose the question: Based on the prior knowledge context, should you include all of this content?
- Help the ECT to narrow down the content in the lesson. They may not need to cut anything but help them to weigh up whether there is too much new content for pupils to cope with.
- Hint: Think about:
- The age of the pupils (younger pupils will cope with less new content because they have less prior knowledge)
- The difficulty of the new content (How complex is the content? Is it abstract or concrete? Abstract ideas will be more difficult therefore you should introduce less content)
- How confident is the teacher in the prior knowledge? (Did they teach it themselves? Do they have strong evidence that pupils have secure prior knowledge? If not, choose less new content and spend longer on the prior knowledge needed).
2. Plan an explanation that links the new content to previously learnt material.
For the lesson, identify a new piece of content that they will be introducing. Together, script an explanation for how they will directly link the new content to previously learnt material.
Example:
“Today we are going to be expanding single brackets. Expanding single brackets is very similar to calculating the area of a rectangle. Do you remember the week before half term when we spent time working out the area of lots of rectangles? (Pause for pupils to comment) Can anyone remember the formula we used? (Pupils respond with length x width) Brilliant, that is exactly the same as what we will be doing for expanding a single bracket but this time the length is the variable outside the bracket and the width is the variables inside the bracket. Let’s look an example together…”
Planning for action
Ask the ECT to practise the explanation they have just scripted.
Ask the ECT to confirm when they will teach the lesson they have discussed.
In the next topic you will be looking at uncovering misconceptions. If the mentor is not from the same phase or subject area you may want to invite another colleague who has this expertise to support the ECT to the next topic. Agree with the ECT who you will invite now. Alternatively, the ECT could speak to this colleague in advance of the next topic to ask for common misconceptions linked to a topic they will be teaching soon. They should bring this with them to the next topic.