Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 5: Knowledge organizers
Lesson preparation

Few schools have had as profound an impact on the education sector as London's Michaela Community School. Founded at a moment when schools were often encouraged to eschew facts and knowledge in favor of transferable “thinking skills,” tiny Michaela dissented, and set about to build a school with a true knowledge curriculum. At first, they were a lonely dissenting voice, but they were unapologetic and unwavering, and several years later their results, combined with a larger researched-based return to the recognition of the crucial role knowledge plays in thinking, have caused the world to sit up and take notice.

One of the key tools in Michaela's work was developed by then—English teacher Joe Kirby. The idea was a Knowledge Organizer, a one-page document that outlines the most important knowledge students need to understand to engage a unit of study. It presents that information in a format designed to make it easy to encode in memory. The idea was straightforward: Students shouldn't have to guess what it is important to remember. Make it clear to them what's most important to know; put it in one place so it's easy for them to study. Over time the idea has caught on. In thousands of schools, each unit begins with a one-page summary of critical background knowledge that allows students to think more deeply about the unit and that forms the framework of their knowledge about the topic after the unit is completed.

The version I recommend may place slightly more emphasis than Joe's on knowledge that students should know at the beginning of the unit to fill in knowledge gaps that might prevent them from understanding the unit, but either way it's both a short-term strategy—it makes students learn from and enjoy the unit more—and a long-term strategy—it systematically gives students a wide-ranging knowledge of critical facts. Either way you frame it, given how much we now know about the profound importance of background knowledge in higher-order thinking, the idea is powerful.

As Joe envisioned them, Knowledge Organizers should be one-page documents (or, occasionally, one page with two sides, if it's heavy with things like maps). The organization—the categories—are often nearly as important as the knowledge. Categories like key terms, important figures, and a timeline of important events communicate what sorts of things are important to know when exploring a topic.

If you set out to design a Knowledge Organizer for Number the Stars, the book Christine is reading, for example, you might include a timeline of key events in World War II. You might also want to include key historical figures and terms: It’s hard to make sense of the book if you don't know what an occupation is or what the Star of David symbolizes. When you do, the scenes where Annemarie's little sister speaks boldly and dismissively to a Nazi soldier or where Annemarie grips her friend's Star of David necklace suddenly make sense. Now students can analyze them. If they don't understand those things—and it's a big assumption that all students do—it's going to be hard to read the book well.

Reflect back on the earlier exercise in which I asked you to speculate on why the sky might appear green. Imagine how much more substantively you'd have been able to engage in that activity if you knew a body of rules and principles describing the physics of visible light and why colors appear as they do. Your reflections probably would have been much more rigorous.

To demonstrate the various ways a Knowledge Organizer might work, here are two fairly different ones that my team developed for two books in our Reading Reconsidered Curriculum. The first is for Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's verse memoir of her girlhood in South Carolina and New York during the Civil Rights era.

Brown Girl Dreaming Knowledge Organizer

Reading and making sense of several hundred pages of verse as rich as Woodson's will require some technical terminology so the organizer starts with terms like refrain, stanza, and poetic license. Now students will be armed with a range of terms to discuss Woodson's craft. And they can communicate their ideas to each other because everyone in the room will know the term when a peer uses it. Just as important is historical context, and in this case a two-sided timeline helps students both understand important events in the Civil Rights movement and also understand when they happened relative to events in the Woodson narrative.

Compare by contrast the Knowledge Organizer for Pam Muñoz Ryan's novel Esperanza Rising. It includes two timelines. There's one to help students understand Mexico, where the first half of the novel takes place and where the civil unrest post-revolution sets the plot in motion. There's a second one outlining the history of California, where the second half of the novel takes place, and describing key social events of the era: the Great Depression; the Okie Migration; the Dust Bowl. This demonstrates the double power of a Knowledge Organizer. Students will understand the book more—and enjoy it more and bring more insight to it—by knowing these things as they read it, and they will end the unit with knowledge of those events that they will carry forward. Both novels are now truly historical fiction as opposed to stories set in past times that the students reading can scarcely understand.

One takeaway from these examples might be about theme and variation. These Knowledge Organizers for two middle-grade novels with mid-twentieth-century settings are both similar and different. There are consistent principles but no formula.

You're probably wondering about adapting Knowledge Organizers to other grades and subjects. To help, here's a reflection by chemistry teacher Sadie McCleary on designing and using Knowledge Organizers and an example of one of her Knowledge Organizers. After that I'll share some examples of Knowledge Organizers for much younger students.

Sadie McCleary's Reflections on Knowledge Organizers

I almost always include vocabulary terms in my Knowledge Organizers. These are the foundational terms students should know in order to increase the rigor of the questioning possible by the teacher and increase the quality of student responses. Note that these are not the only terms/concepts students will learn this unit! They will continue to build on these and complicate their ideas. These are simply a starting place.

Studying is a skill! Remember to teach students to study with Knowledge Organizers. This needs to be modeled and students need to practice—even simple vocabulary drills.

· Take two minutes several times in the first unit to show students how to fold their KO to hide the definitions and self-quiz. Follow this up with several minutes of students doing their own silent self-quizzing and an oral drill or recall quiz.

· Partner quizzing: Provide opportunities for students to quiz one another for one to three minutes in class. Explicitly name for students that this should be replicated at home with a family member or friend. Model partner quizzing for students, and set clear times for when partners should switch who is quizzing whom. If time allows, follow up partner quizzing with an oral drill or recall quiz. You can grade these sometimes but you don't need to. Research on frequent low-stakes assessment shows how effective this is without grades.

I often ask students to annotate diagrams, definitions, or other information in their Knowledge Organizers during lessons. This adds to their understanding of the core concepts and makes the organizer into a living document. It also draws their attention. If we're getting out our organizers to add a note, it must be something very important.

You can build the organizer into the fabric of your class. Reference it frequently. If a student is stuck, ask them to check their organizer first, often before they raise their hand in class. You can make it part of their desk setup: at the beginning of class every students should have out homework, notebook, Knowledge Organizer, and pencil.

An Example of One of Sadie's Knowledge Organizers

Primary-Level Knowledge Organizers

Note that Knowledge Organizers need not be as complex as the examples included here. Just because it shouldn't be more than one page doesn't mean it has to take up the whole page. A Knowledge Organizer could be perfectly good if it consisted of a single box with key literary terms or people to know, say, as a starting point, and if starting with less helps make it easy for you to get started and try them out, all the better.

How Knowledge Organizers are used is just as important as how they are designed. They are intended to be used frequently for retrieval practice and self-quizzing, if not every day, then a least several times a week. Constant quizzing and review encodes the content in long-term memory. At Michaela, when I visited, homework every night was simply to review and quiz yourself on the Knowledge Organizers from each of your classes. It was so simple and direct. The homework was always the same, so it was easy to do. Parents quizzed children while they cooked dinner. (They often focused on just one portion of the organizer rather than trying to learn the whole thing at once.) That's why one thing you'll notice about these Knowledge Organizers is that they are designed with limited verbiage so that students can learn the answers by heart, and with two columns to facilitate easy self-quizzing by covering up one side.

Knowledge Organizers are sometimes confused with study guides, which are documents that summarize a unit of study after it is completed—often to aid in preparation for a test. That's not what a Knowledge Organizer does. It goes out at the beginning of a unit to ensure all students have the knowledge that will help them engage in each lesson fully.

Knowledge Organizers appear in the lesson preparation chapter because designing them is useful for the teacher as well. Thinking through what students will need to know to be successful in your unit has the benefit of causing you to think deeply about what they need to know and often do a bit of research. In writing a Knowledge Organizer you'll come to know ten times more than what you put into the organizer. In other words, it's a habit that builds your own content knowledge, and knowledge matters for teachers, too.