Ah! Finally a book dealing with education that acknowledges that "factual knowledge is necessary."It seems at times that we are bombarded with the idea of only developing critical thinking strategies that we neglect to include content in our lesson plans. Willingham goes on to state that background knowledge is essential to future learning, and in fact without this backdrop, confusion will occur.
On page 33, Willingham provides a great example of chunking. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it. Later, (p.36) he states the four ways background knowledge is important to reading comprehension. Regardless of what we teach, reading comprehension is critical to the day's activity and/or the unit lesson. If the students do not understand what is asked of them, they will fail to learn how to solve the problem, no matter how creative they are or what technique they use.
Making connections to prior knowledge is what enables students to commit new information to long term memory with the ability to recall the information. Willingham goes on to say that this new knowledge then allows the student (or us) to gain insight at an ever-increasing faster rate. I visualized this as the cartoon snowball that grows quickly as it rolls down hill.
Willingham ends this section by stressing the importance reading at the appropriate level. This is a tall task for us as teachers and/or parents. Reading books, magazines, and newspapers are in direct competition versus Facebook, texting, and video games for the free time of today's youth. Our challenge is to make reading and learning as fulfilling as the short-lived fun of the competition.
This actually makes sense to me about how we need to build a strong base before we teach more intricate material or subject matter to our students. Background is important but at the same time introducing new background is just as confusing in the beginning as new information which is based on prior knowledge.
ReplyDeleteWillingham states, “Not only does background knowledge make you a better reader, but it also is necessary to be a good thinker. The processes we most hope to engender in our students – thinking critically and logically – are not possible without background knowledge.” This goes with all subjects, not only reading. I have always felt that background knowledge is vital to learning. Students need something to connect “new” things to. Math is a perfect example. Without knowing basic math facts, basic background, students spend too much struggling and not thinking or experiencing new connections. “Knowledge is more important, because it’s a prerequisite for imagination, or at least for the sort of imagination that leads to problem solving, decision making, and creativity(p46).”
ReplyDeleteWillingham's comments about background knowledge hit home for me as a
ReplyDeleteKindergarten teacher. My students come with such different backgrounds in
what they have been exposed to, especially concerning books. Some are very
familiar with books and some don't know where the front cover is. It is
challenging but so important to, first of all, grow that knowledge through
much exposure, and second, to give them many opportunities with appropriate
leveled text late on! It can be done.
Another memory that kept popping into my mind while reading this is that of
my father's experience at the age of 7. He loved telling us about going to
this traveling circus in Iowa near his farm. It was 1925. He had never even
heard of an elephant before and when he saw the traveling elephant he
remembers making everyone laugh at his comment. "That's sure like no cow or
horse I've ever seen!" He literally had no background knowledge to picture
an elephant!
This section was very important to me and I was forced to read a couple sections more than once. Introducting students to new content is a balance of new content and their long term memory. I am forced to critically think about how much working memory that I expect from my students and how much effort and time I give them to move new vocabluary and processes from working memory to long term memory. I might be expecting too much of a high school student. I am watching myself with greater reflection on each lesson that I teach. I am also more observant of the nonverbal clues to student connection to the lesson.
ReplyDelete