Didn't You Learn this Last Year?

When I was in elementary school, my teacher had us do an individual activity to teach us a new math concept. One part of the activity required doing two digit multiplication. We were not given any materials to be able to write out or process these questions; they had to be done in our heads. Without completing this step, it was not possible to continue the activity. I asked the teacher for help, and they prompted me with a two digit multiplication question. When I started taking time to think it out, the teacher got the entire classes’ attention and said “if you don’t have your times tables memorized by now, that’s a problem.” As you can imagine, I spent the entire activity feeling discouraged, and unable to progress to the next point. As a result, I did not learn the new concept being introduced. To this day, I am not even sure what the main goal of the activity was. 

As students progress to a new grade, they are expected to have learned all curriculum expectations from the grade prior. While it would make our lives much easier if this were true, this is simply not an assumption we can make as teachers. We cannot know for sure how much/how well their previous teacher covered information or what may or may not have ‘stuck’ with each student. Diving into a new topic on the basis that students should already have the background knowledge is a recipe for confusion. 

I recognize that assessing the classes’ starting place can seem like yet another task that teachers must complete during their already busy days. Because we already have so much on our plates, having to individually pre-assess prior knowledge on new topics can feel like a tedious extra task. This is a misconception. When we take time to assess students’ prior knowledge, we alleviate the workload for ourselves and our students later on. Sure, we could simply deliver a lesson and assume students remember things they learned in the grade prior. However, when many students inevitably glean nothing from this lesson, we will be left having to restructure and redo it later on. Understanding students’ starting place allows us to deliver a meaningful lesson the first time, and then we can devote our time to deepening student knowledge on the topic rather than starting again from scratch. 

Thank you,

AnnaM@OTU