Better Activating Schema
During Saturday's Meth class, I had a revelation: The first P in the PPP was more important than I'd thought. I'd always done it as, for most of my teaching career, it'd been an enforced part of the schools' lesson structure. Any deviation would be punished!
However, it was only this week that I found out it's part of a natural process that humans do regardless of L1 or L2 (a la, the Star Wars Poster bit) and therefore needs to be a more significant part of my classes. I couldn't just blast straight in with "What do you think of C3P0?"
So, I've already started making changes to my lessons for this week. They include a lot more work in the beginning to activate the schema.
One example is a lesson on an author who is writing a book on the "History of Humanity". The focus of the article is about what he's chosen to leave out and how he made those decisions.
In order to better activate the schema, I've included a more thorough Presentation which asks them to think about some important Korean/world events that have happened in their life time, why did they chose these events, and what were the criteria they used to choose them.
Through this exercise, hopefully this will more actively trigger their 'history' schema and strip away anything that won't be much use for this class. Also, it may create a more meaningful link to the material - ie, this man is doing what you just did but on a much bigger scale. I'll be paying extra attention to whether this improves the flow of the class and the speed at which the student(s) can recall and use relevant vocab.
Yes! I agree, I had totally underestimated the power of schema! It makes so much sense - engage the students before presenting the language and construction of meaning is much easier.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started teaching I couldn't understand why one of my co-teachers always used to tell the students exactly what would happen in class; I thought that telling them we would be writing would disengage them! Now I can see that this is a way of letting them know what to focus on.
Now I'm trying to think about how I can activate my 3rd graders' schemata when presenting them with their reading material in the morning... "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me". Focusing on the construction of adjective + noun structures. Maybe I'll have to reflect on that tomorrow evening!