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CHAPTER 3

Get to Know Your Dance Partners

Dance instructors determine how proficient their dancers are prior to placing them in a dance class. They want to find out if their students know the dance vocabulary, the steps, whether they’ve danced a particular style, and if they’ve partnered before. While teachers can’t control who is in their classroom, we can and should find out as much as we can about our students so we can choreograph an effective lesson.

This chapter will focus on knowing your students—learning about students academically, socially, and emotionally by way of preassessment. This information helps you plan the most effective instruction. The remainder of the chapter presents preassessment strategies that you can use to expose students to the content as well as prime their brains to activate and build on prior knowledge.

It might seem as if you should design content-driven lessons rather than student-driven lessons. After all, you are required to teach standards and students are supposed to master content. The most effective teachers we know are “students of their students” (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 4) who design lessons that are both content driven and student driven. They differentiate for a variety of readiness levels as well as for learning preferences (which is simply how students learn best).

To know students, teachers must answer the following questions.

• How can you learn about students?

• Why are preassessing, activating prior knowledge, pre-exposing, and priming worthwhile?

• What strategies can you use?

How Can You Learn About Students?

Teachers can get to know their students through observation, direct questions, or the kinds of assessments and inventories offered online. Search online for the inventories or surveys that fit your grade level. The multiple-intelligence survey provided at Surf Aquarium (www.surfaquarium.com/MI/inventory.htm) is one we like.

Students learn many ways, so table 3.1 (page 22) has considerations for different modalities. Ask these questions during student-teacher conferences or provide them in written format to students or parents.

The more you know about your students, the easier it is to plan your instruction. For example, if you realize a student struggles with bright lights, you may choose to use lamps rather than the overhead fluorescent lights. If there are lots of student athletes in your classroom, you might have students read sports articles and biographies, use trading cards to locate hometowns on maps, or debate about whether location determines success in certain sports.

Table 3.1: Factors in a Student Learning Preference

Learning Preference	Description (Teachers will ask the following questions for each factor.)	Information Aspect
Learning modality	Do they learn best visually aurally kinesthetically or a combination of these? Do they like noise or quiet? Do they work best alone or in a group? Do they prefer lots of light or a darker area? Are they affected by room temperature?	Academic, emotional
Cognitive style	Do they think in more concrete or abstract manners? Do they start their thinking process more part-to-whole or whole-to-part? Do they prefer a collaborative or competitive situation? Are they more inductive or deductive in their reasoning?	Academic, social
Intelligence preferences	How is their brain wired for learning? Are they verbal linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical rhythmic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, or naturalists according to Howard Gardner’s (1993) multiple intelligences?	Academic
Culture and gender	Does their culture or gender affect the way they learn, what they value, or how they interact with one another?	Social, emotional
Interests	What do they like to do outside the classroom? Can you use their interests to help them see the relevance in the lesson?	Social

Source: Gardner, 1993.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this table.

Why Are Preassessing, Activating Prior Knowledge, Pre-Exposing, and Priming Worthwhile?

Preassessing, activating prior knowledge, pre-exposing, and priming enhance memory, increasing how well students learn content. They are important teaching tactics that occur at different times with different intentions.

Preassessing

Not only do you want to find out about how students best learn, but where they are with the content standards before planning the lesson. Preassessments can be formal, with a teacher-made test or quiz, or even by administering the post-test, or informal, by adding a warm-up or exit ticket question. Preassessing students’ content knowledge allows you, the teacher, to determine what to teach, who to teach, and how to teach in a way that best promotes learning. We typically ask the following questions while reviewing preassessment results. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to access a reproducible version of them.)

• What do my students already know about these standards? Can I eliminate or combine learning targets?

• What major concepts are missing from their background knowledge? How might I build them within this unit? Do I need to create additional lessons? Should I prime their brain with these missing concepts before I even start teaching the unit? If so, how will I do this?

• What learning targets might I need to spend more or less time teaching?

• Will I teach these learning targets and standards to the whole group or a small group? If it is small-group instruction, what will the rest of the students do while I’m instructing?

• What misconceptions do they have about this unit or learning target? How can I address these misconceptions early?

These questions lead teachers to the following kinds of decisions.

• If the students already know the content, then there is no need to instruct the skill. We might integrate that skill or knowledge into other lessons.

• If some of the students know the content and others don’t, we may create different assignments adjusted to their background knowledge. (We call this differentiation tiered assignments.) This allows us to provide instruction and practice for students who need it and deeper, more rigorous work for students who would benefit from a deeper understanding of the content. Tiered assignments are explained in chapter 7 (page 171).

• If none of the students know the content, then we provide whole-group instruction.

Activating Prior Knowledge

We often get the question, How are preassessments different from activating prior knowledge activities? They both activate students’ background knowledge on the topic at hand. They both get students focused on the current lesson. They both give you, the teachers, valuable information about where your students are with the learning targets. One difference is when you give the activity. It is a preassessment if you give it one to seven days before teaching the lesson. It gives you plenty of time to plan with the preassessment results in mind. If you use an activity to see what they know a couple of minutes before you teach it, that is considered activating prior knowledge. You don’t have much time to change your instruction, but it helps students make meaning and connections. Also, this powerful process promotes connections in the brain and improved memory.

Preassessments give the teacher a big advantage since there is time to change how he or she will teach the unit or lesson. Activating prior knowledge gives the students a big advantage since the neural networks are ready to make connections with the new learning. They are both excellent ways to prepare students for upcoming information, which can enhance the learning process, for both the teacher’s planning and the students’ learning (Shing & Brod, 2016).

Pre-Exposing

Pre-exposing students to content, or pre-exposure, is teaching bits of content and skills in advance—days, weeks, months, or even years before accountability. This tool, worth taking advantage of, is also known as building background knowledge, spiral curricula, or purposeful scaffolding. Some classroom examples follow.

• Attending on-site or mini field trips before the unit

• Visiting virtual museums before the lesson

• Preteaching vocabulary words and elaborating on them

• Providing realia or artifacts connected with the content

• Showing pictures or viewing video clips related to the topic

Providing students with rich instruction focused on the content they are reading, or are about to read, increases the likelihood that students’ comprehension will improve (Graves, 2006). Preteaching vocabulary supports comprehension, particularly for students who struggle academically (Fisher, Frey, & Pumpian, 2012).

Priming

Priming happens minutes—even seconds—before exposure to a learning event. Research shows that cognitive priming is worth the time (Wexler et al., 2016). The Wexler et al. (2016) study shows that a five-minute game just before mathematics or reading boosts comprehension on those curricular games, and that “doing three 20-minute brain training sessions per week for four months increased gains on school-administered math and reading achievement tests compared to control classes tested at the same times without intervening brain training.” Classroom priming examples follow.

• Sharing and discussing the daily learning target

• Using vocabulary words while speaking or discussing the learning

• Standing by a poster that reads brain alert when telling them something important

• Creating a standard web, or thinking map, showing all the learning targets, concepts, and products that they will encounter in the unit and referring to it every time you teach one of the targets.

Getting to know students this way to more effectively plan and instruct is not more work or a waste of time. All the techniques are easy to use.

What Strategies Can You Use?

Some common types of preassessments fall into two categories: (1) already designed and (2) teacher designed. Already-designed preassessments follow.

• Unit pretests or unit summative tests

• Benchmark tests

• Chapter questions

• Reading inventories

• Interest inventories

• Surveys for learning preferences and multiple intelligences

Teacher-designed preassessments follow.

• Student-led conferences

• K-W-L charts

• Entrance or exit tickets

• Essay, short answer, and journal responses

• Running records and anecdotal notes

• Anticipation guides

• Knowledge framing

We’re sure that you are familiar with many of the preassessments here. Most teachers have given students an interest inventory or multiple-intelligence survey; conducted conferences with students to determine their learning strengths and growth areas; and given students Donna M. Ogle’s (1986) K-W-L chart to complete (what I know; what I want to know; and what I learned). You’ve surely given students essay questions, short-answer questions, and journal responses to learn what they know about an upcoming standard; used running records taken during guided reading to plan the following day’s instruction; and added a question about an upcoming learning target to your daily exit ticket.

The strategies in this chapter offer even more choices. Like the others listed here, you’re not limited to using them during preassessment only. These strategies work for most formative assessments. Unit tests and chapter questions are often given after teaching—but think how much better you could plan and differentiate your lesson if you gave them before teaching. In fact, you could give many of the assessments in this chapter at different points in the lesson, but we’ll be examining them as preassessments that help you learn more about your students.

On the following pages, we will describe in more detail the teacher-designed preassessment strategies that you may not be as familiar with.

Create-a-Cloze

Create-a-cloze is a preassessment strategy for individual students. During create-a-cloze, students fill in the blanks with key terms. This will help you see what vocabulary and key concepts your students already know, and then you can omit them from your lesson.

Directions

Create or download a passage about the topic your students will be studying. Delete key words within this passage and create a separate list of these words so students have terms to choose from while trying to figure out which word goes in the blank.

Example

See figure 3.1 for an example of a create-a-cloze.

Suggestions for Differentiation

The following suggestions can help you differentiate this strategy.

• Bumping it up: Do not provide a word bank. Students must come up with the appropriate words on their own. Delete more challenging words from the passage.

• Breaking it down: Divide the text into paragraphs with a word bank for each paragraph. Present fewer blanks. Give students the first letter of the appropriate word.