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Identifying Critical Content

In the context of teaching students brand new information, identifying critical content is one strategy you can’t live without. As you become more skilled in this strategy, you will see remarkable changes in your students’ abilities to process and understand new content because they are able to identify which content is critical and understand how learned content scaffolds in complexity. A classroom of scholars identifies critical content within standards, but also studies, recognizes, and celebrates as knowledge grows increasingly more sophisticated. Whether that standard is part of the CCSS or your district or state standards, your students will benefit from your expertise at identifying and conveying critical content to them. Take a moment to picture what you are preparing your students for: success in their future careers. In the workplace, information in constant competition for mental real estate will bombard your students. The skill of distinguishing critical information from that which is not critical is essential to a successful career. This instructional strategy reaches beyond helping students know what is critical in your classroom; it prepares them for a lifetime of being able to identify critical information.

The first step to helping your students know what is important is identify a lesson, or part of a lesson, as involving important content to which students should pay particular attention. This strategy is integral to helping your students understand new knowledge, make connections to prior learning, and ultimately retain new content. When implementing instructional strategies, teachers should identify and plan for the interdependence and cumulative effect among them. For example, once a teacher has identified the critical content, the next step is to preview the content with students, chunk that critical content, and ask students to process that content. After students have processed the content, teachers will ask questions that require students to make inferences, or elaborate, about content to further extend understanding. A teacher wanting to monitor whether students have internalized the critical content may ask them to record, represent, and reflect on this knowledge. The instructional strategies don’t work in isolation, but a teacher with a broad instructional repertoire will skillfully blend the strategies in order to get overarching desired results. Although this guide will focus on Identifying Critical Content, it will also highlight the natural connections between this and other strategies, such as previewing and recording and representing.

There are many strategies that you can employ to intentionally teach content to students. The important attribute of identifying critical content is the role it plays when teaching something for the first time. Whenever you prepare to teach brand new knowledge, concepts, or skills that are likely to be unfamiliar to all or almost all of your students, communicate to them why the new learning is important; how it connects to their prior learning or experiences; and when the new knowledge will be necessary or beneficial.

The Effective Implementation of Identifying Critical Content

Not all students are as savvy as teachers about what to do with important information. You must directly inform and specifically teach them. What are the ways you expect students to react to their awareness that critical information is forthcoming? What actions should they immediately take, such as writing new vocabulary in a journal or dictionary? Are there specific note-taking routines that were taught at the beginning of the school year and have been practiced to accuracy and automaticity? Do you expect students to give hand signals or write answers on small whiteboards to indicate their understanding of critical content? You cannot expect students to take action on important information unless you have stated and modeled your expectations and then followed up with consistent monitoring of their understanding of that information.

Effective communication of critical content requires adjustments in the way you present information to students. To make these adjustments, assemble a toolbox of ways to cue or prompt your students that you are about to introduce skills or knowledge of critical value and importance. Later in this guide you will find many ways to communicate the importance of critical content. As you read about the techniques, think about how to further develop those that are already your favorites, as well as how to become more skilled in employing different techniques to target subgroups of students that you may not currently be reaching.

The following behaviors are associated with identifying critical content:

• highlighting critical information that portrays a clear progression of information related to standards or goals

• identifying differences between critical and noncritical content

• continuously calling students’ attention to critical content

• integrating cross curricular connections to critical content

As you learn to implement this strategy, think about how to avoid some common mistakes. These roadblocks can take your teaching and students’ learning off course:

• You can fail to identify the critical content from a chapter, unit, or set of materials to read before you begin teaching.

• You can identify the critical content but then fail to communicate its importance to your students in effective and memorable ways that work best for the content or students.

• You can fail to communicate to students the kind of action or response their attention requires for certain types of important content.

Failing to Correctly Identify Critical Content

Whether you are an elementary or secondary teacher, you can easily become more focused on subject matter you have taught for decades and overlook the teaching of a critically important skill that gives purpose to the knowledge. Your failure to identify the specific learning target or national standard for students may signal that you need a more comprehensive understanding of the standards and how they relate to your curriculum. Consider your purpose. Are you primarily using your class time to teach a skill or important information? Before the bell rings and you stand before your students, you must determine the important knowledge and skills you want to teach based on standards.

Failing to Communicate the Importance of Critical Content in Effective Ways

Have you ever taken a class or listened to a lecture and at the end thought, “I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn or get out of this.” If so, that may have been because the teacher or lecturer did not communicate the importance of critical content such that you were able to determine the key points. Not everything in a lesson is of equal importance. Some of our students inherently understand that, and some don’t. Some of our students get bogged down in the minutiae of our lessons. Signaling to students what is critical in the content is key to implementing an effective lesson.

Failing to Communicate the Type of Action Needed

After you have identified critical content and communicated its importance, do not neglect to give students opportunities to do something with this information. For example, if someone were to convince you of a certain key bit of information that is critical to your health, you are more inclined to figure out a way to remember that information. You might make a note of it or ask for additional information to clarify what is the most critical content. It is necessary to teach this skill to your students. Help them realize that hearing the critical content is only the first step; they need to do something with it for it to be effective.

Monitoring for the Desired Result

Effective implementation means more than just applying the strategy—it also includes checking for evidence of the desired result of the specific strategy during implementation. In other words, effective implementation of a strategy includes monitoring for the desired result of that strategy in real time. Presenting a lively lesson that engages students is not enough. The questions that need to be answered are: Did your students know what content was important, and did they learn or master the information taught? The most elaborately planned lessons have no meaning unless they focus on the critical content outlined in standards and are monitored by the teacher for the desired results of the implemented strategies.

There are multiple ways teachers can monitor whether students know the content that is important and can distinguish between important and less significant information. Below are some examples that can help you tell if your students are able to identify critical content from a specific lesson:

1. Students can identify the critical information addressed in class.

2. Students can explain the difference between critical and noncritical content.

3. Students can describe the level of importance of the critical information addressed in class.

4. Formative data from the lesson show that students attend to the critical content (e.g., questioning, artifacts).

5. Students can explain the progression of critical content in the lesson.

Each technique discussed in this guide also has examples of monitoring specific to that technique.

Scaffolding and Extending Instruction to Meet Students’ Needs

As you monitor for the desired result of each technique, you will probably realize that some students are not able to identify the critical content and others are easily able to demonstrate the desired result of the strategy. With this knowledge, it becomes necessary to adapt for the needs of your students. You must plan ahead of time for those students who may need you to scaffold or extend instruction to meet their needs.

There are four different categories of support you can provide for students who need scaffolding: 1) support that teachers (including instructional aides or other paraprofessionals) or peers provide; 2) support that teachers provide by manipulating the difficulty level of content that is being taught (for example, providing an easier reading level that contains the same content); 3) breaking down the content into smaller chunks to make it more manageable; and 4) giving students organizers or think sheets to clarify and guide their thinking through a task one step at a time (Dickson, Collins, Simmons, & Kame’enui, 1998).

Within each technique that is described in subsequent chapters, there are illustrative examples of ways to scaffold and extend instruction to meet the needs of your students. Scaffolding provides support that targets cognitive complexity and student autonomy to reach rigor. Extending moves students who have already demonstrated the desired result to a higher level of understanding. These examples are provided as suggestions and should be adapted to target the specific needs of your students. Use the scaffolding examples to spark ideas as you plan to meet the needs of your English language learners, students who receive special education or lack support, or simply the student who was absent the day before. The extension activities can help you plan for students in your gifted and talented program or those with a keen interest in the subject matter you are teaching who have already learned the fundamentals.

Teacher Self-Reflection

As you work on your expertise in teaching students to identify critical content, reflecting on what works and doesn’t work can help you become more successful in the implementation of this strategy. Use the following set of reflection questions to guide you. The questions begin with reflecting about how to begin the implementation process and move to progressively more complex ways of helping students identify critical content.

1. How can you begin to incorporate some aspect of this strategy in your instruction?

2. How can you signal to students which content is critical versus noncritical?

3. How could you monitor the extent to which students attend to critical content?

4. What are some ways you can adapt and create new techniques for identifying critical information that addresses unique student needs and situations?

5. What are you learning about your students as you adapt and create new techniques?

Instructional Techniques to Help Students Identify Critical Content

There are many ways to help your students effectively interact with new knowledge and ultimately master the learning targets or standards of the grade level or content area. The ways you choose to put your students on high alert regarding critical content that is about to unfold during a specific lesson or unit will depend on your grade, content, and the makeup of your class. These various ways or options are called instructional techniques. In the following pages, you will find descriptions of how to implement the following techniques:

1. Verbally cue critical content.

2. Use explicit instruction to convey critical content.

3. Use dramatic instruction to convey critical content.

4. Provide advance organizers to cue critical content.

5. Visually cue critical content.

6. Use storytelling to cue critical content.

7. Use what students already know to cue critical content.

All of the techniques are similarly organized and include the following components:

• a brief introduction to the technique

• ways to effectively implement the technique

• common mistakes to avoid as you implement the technique

• examples and nonexamples from elementary and secondary classrooms using selected learning targets or standards from various documents

• ways to monitor for the desired result

• ways to scaffold and extend instruction to meet the needs of students