The Importance of Prior Knowledge

The Blue Walloo

Over the next few days, we will explore the controversy regarding allocating additional funding to The Blue Walloo. Stakeholders supporting the move have expressed concerns that failure to do so will provide incentive to further defund similar programs. Those opposed state that such funding sets precedents that are difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

Please state and defend your position regarding the funding of The Blue Walloo. You must include supporting evidence and a concise conclusion.

What is wrong with this exercise?

Do you know what The Blue Walloo is? Did you make a guess--and if so, what did you guess?

It could be a night club, an oceanographic exploration, an endangered bird, a novel, a painting, a secret service operation, a cultural event…

What if I gave you the following words to define--would this make the exercise accessible?

blue

controversy

funding

precedents

stakeholders

opponents

concerns

walloo

allocating

programs

Now, try substituting the phrase “The Blue Walloo” with one of the following:

Brexit

Polar bears

The Children’s Festival

The Food Bank

The Museum

The Norther Gateway Pipeline

OK2BME

Foreign Aid to Nigeria

The Humane Society

Municipal snow removal

The Heritage Front

House of Friendship Shelter

ION LRT

International Space Exploration

Arms trade with Columbia

Reception House

The Public Library

Employment Insurance

Medical research

Local hockey team

Local Symphony Orchestra

Safe Injection Site

Automotive Industry

Cyber surveillance

Now try a different one of those. How does the meaning change?

How can we use this exercise to inform our approach to teaching students what they need to know  when learning and improving their reading comprehension?

If you are from outside of southwestern Ontario, you may have found some of the last examples equally mystifying as “The Blue Walloo”.

Students come to us with a wide variety of prior experiences. We have students who have lived in different countries, and different cultures within our own country. Some students are learning English as an additional language. The diversity in cultural and socio-economic backgrounds means that the prior knowledge and vocabulary they understand cannot be assumed. We need to actively build those into our teaching so that there is an accessible context from which students can reflect, build connections, make predictions and evaluate the validity of statements.

Cross-Curricular Considerations

This applies not only to language as a distinct subject area, but all academic areas. Relevant vocabulary needs to be introduced and prior knowledge developed in order to ensure that students are able to access the subject matter.

For example, word problems in math need to use examples that students can understand and relate with. One way of ensuring this is to enlist students to create and share their own word problems.

For content areas such as social studies and science, sharing introductory materials in a variety of reading levels for students to access, keeping an active glossary that is built upon as a class, and reviewing, summarizing and sharing in small and large groups collaboratively can help to provide the necessary prerequisites for content fluency. There are many great sites that can be used to this end, just a few of which include:

National Geographic Kids

Brittanica School Online

PebbleGo

Capstone Interactive Library

Newsela

CNN10

Culturegrams

Kids Info Bits (Gale)

Epic Books

BookFlix

Can Points of View

This is not by any stretch an exhaustive list, but should help provide a starting point. If you teach or attend school in Ontario, the Library Learning Commons site will have links to most of the above resources.