Schema Building And Curriculum Planning In English

Schema Building And Curriculum Planning In English

There is much debate in education regarding the role of cognitive science and how its principles can be harnessed into effective pedagogy. This is often quite contentious and polarising – particularly with it comes to the application of cognitive science to the discipline of English. Donal Hale explores this thorny issue and how English teaching might be enhanced by the principles revealed by cognitive science research.

Perhaps it’s the reference to science that puts off many an English teacher from fully embracing this in their practice, or perhaps something else. I can only speculate on that. However, I can say that aspects of cognitive science have been revolutionary in my teaching practice in recent years.

One aspect in particular has been revelatory in shaping my approach to curriculum design: schema-building.

What is schema-building?

Let’s break this down into simplistic terms.

A schema is the basic unit of cognition used in learning new information.

In order for a student to retain and understand new information, they need to connect it to information that they already knew. This is called building a schema.

Tom Sherrington (2020) comments on the importance of building a schema as foundational to a teacher’s practice:

‘More and more I feel that it’s really helpful and important for teachers to think in terms of the concept of schema-building: that every student is piecing together ideas, information, experiences and concepts to form a coherent web that constitutes their understanding and fluency with the material in hand.’

(https://teacherhead.com/2020/10/04/teaching-for-understanding-schema-building-and-generative-learning)

A well-designed curriculum should be driven by the concept of schema-building, and it is every teacher’s responsibility to ensure students are piecing together ideas and concepts to form a coherent web of the core knowledge that underpins their particular subject.

Below are several approaches to schema-building in an English curriculum I will outline below:

1. Core concepts

An English curriculum can be designed and sequenced using a range of core concepts students continually examine through a range of literary texts. Concepts may be built around, for instance, universal themes from literature, such as:

To help build schema, or form a coherent web of core concepts, the teacher should be able to confidently track how a core concept is taught and re-visited through their curriculum, like so:

2. Disciplinary knowledge

Disciplinary knowledge is perhaps best described as the action taken within a particular subject to gain knowledge. For example, mastery of English requires students acquiring knowledge of metaphor (the ways in which we use language to create meaning).

Again, the concept of schema-building is important to signpost to teachers in your department here. Students should build upon prior knowledge, revisit and develop their understanding of metaphor through the curriculum, and how this is taught to do this needs to made explicit too.

Here is an example of how I have mapped out the teaching of metaphor across four units of work, bridging Year 7 and 8, as a starting point that could be developed further into later years.

3. Explicit vocabulary instruction.

Another way to build schema is by considering how language itself works and connections between words through very clear explicit vocabulary instruction.

One such approach could drawn from Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered (2016) by considering ‘a deep-dive into the meaning and nuances of a word in a lesson, with many opportunities for student practice’.

In any series of lessons that aim to build schema on a grammatical level, I would recommend exploring etymology, common word families, roots and affixes (morphology), as according to Lemov:

‘Teaching students about roots and, prefixes and affixes is another important way to quickly increase the quantity of student vocabulary. Once students have a handle on a relatively small number of roots and affixes, they have significantly boosted their ability to accurately infer meanings of new words, as well as to deeply understand words. Knowing roots and affixes also helps students to grow attentive to a word’s etymology and build a breadth of word knowledge.’ (Lemov, 2016)

Below is an example of how teachers might approach such instruction to help students define the word: ‘wondrously’:

In this example, ‘wondrously’ is broken down by its root word (‘wondrous’) and its suffix (‘ly’) to show students how language is formed at a grammatical level.

Next, students can consider its usage in a text of study (in this case the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, in the line:

‘Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear’​

Students are tasked with examining its usage in the poem in relation, before attempting to use the word in a sentence of their own to display their understanding of how the word works.

Finally, students take the acquired knowledge of how suffixes work and consider other examples of words which use it to shape a word’s meaning. They might do this through the use of a ‘word web’, which looks like this:

Create a word web:

wondrously strangely
beautifully
impressively

_________ly

_________ly

Students make the connections between ‘wondrously’ and other words with the ‘ly’ suffix to help build their schema regarding how language works.

Final thoughts

There are countless ways to help students build schema in the discipline of English. I have outlined three examples, which might be of interest. You might have other methods to achieve a similar aim – and that’s great. The point is: schema-building in English is essential to deepen students understanding of the subject and to ensure they learn in a truly meaningful way.