254. Troubleshooting: Student Background Knowledge

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In this solo episode, host Lindsay dives into a crucial challenge many educators face: engaging students who lack critical background knowledge about a time period, historical event, or people you are discussing in class. She troubleshoots this issue by providing simple frameworks to bridge the gap and engage students in what they already know.. 

Highlighting her passion for teaching social studies, Lindsay offers actionable strategies that expand the concept of “background knowledge” and empower students to make connections between their lived experiences and new learning content. 

​Why? 
Addressing the background knowledge gap is important because it impacts a lot of different pieces of learning, particularly in the social studies context. Effective inquiry-based pedagogy, synthesizing information, and student-led discourse can all be limited without “background knowledge” around the topic area. 

This can make it challenging for educators to teach—yes. And, it also presents an opportunity to expand the idea of “background knowledge” to help students pull from personal experience and media exposure; this validates diverse forms of knowledge and cues students to link new content with their personal lives.

What?
Educators who want to address a background knowledge gap in their social studies or other classroom settings can implement these action steps:  

Step 1: Expand Your Idea of Background Knowledge
This is an important mindset shift to start with. Instead of narrowly looking at background knowledge as only key dates, events, or people, you can broaden the understanding to include personal experiences, media consumption, and cultural narratives.

Step 2: Implement Cognitive Routines
Lindsay walks us through some of Loretta Hammond’s “learn-to-learn” skills as a key starting point. First is to figure out what we already know—to “scan the hard drive” and look for existing knowledge (ask: "have we seen this before?"). Then, it’s “chew and remix” — think about how it connects to what we already know. Teachers can help students make sense of new information by connecting it to what they already know. 

Step 3: Use Frameworks
Apply educational frameworks to your context. For example, Funds of Knowledge is a foundational exercise that helps students connect information with what they know. You would ask students if what they’re learning connects to things like their family traditions, experiences of people you know, or things familiar in the home environment. 
Lindsay dives deeper into this framework and the Cultural Wealth Model, which is an asset-based understanding that all children bring something valuable to the table. 

Step 4: Level-up Analytical Skills
After laying the foundation of connecting to what students already know and drawing on frameworks that explore their background knowledge, then educators can level up their thinking and analytical skills. This can be done by generating questions, student-led discourse, writing an evidence-based paragraph, or other options.

Step 5: Create Connection Cues
Co-create a slide or something on physical paper that has all the connection clues and ideas you discussed in the class. The visual aid will help students remember things and independently make connections to curriculum content.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing these resources with you: 

• Funds of Knowledge
• Cultural Wealth Mode
• Generating Questions Resource Bank

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​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:​

​And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 254 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.
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TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: Welcome to another episode of the Time for teachership podcast. This is episode 2 54, and today we're talking about student background knowledge, particularly troubleshooting the concept of students having no or limited background knowledge. So I'm really passionate about this. I've talked about this before, um, but just want to.
Kind of get into some examples of what you can offer students when the knowledge about a particular time period or group of people or individual historical event or person appear to be lacking. So let's get into it. For context, the struggle for a quote, lack of background knowledge is ever present in particularly my social studies, um, coaching.
And I first wanna validate it is it is a very challenging thing when we go in to teach something and we expect or anticipate students have prior knowledge of particular events, vocabulary. People in a historical time period that we're teaching, and then we realize they don't have that and then we need to adjust.
So validating the hard there and also a gentle push. We can expand our concept of what background knowledge is and cue students to connect to concepts or themes or personal lived experiences, other forms of media in which they have. Seen similar things, experienced, uh, different events that maybe people in history have experienced in different ways, of course.
And I think that Loretta Hammond's work in the learn to learn skills that she has put out in her 2025 book. As well as the cognitive routines she talks about in that book can help inform perhaps like a reusable slide or anchor chart, some sort of cue that students can use as tools in their own learning.
They can use both inside the classroom and outside of the classroom so that teachers aren't always doing the scripted kind of heavy lifting for students, making those connections for them, filling the background knowledge gaps, but that students can access. Background knowledge that might be relevant and identify where the sticking points or areas for further inquiry are this struggle.
I wanna name impacts a lot of different. Pieces of social studies, pedagogy, particularly inquiry based pedagogy, question generation. Anytime we're analyzing or synthesizing all the learning that's happening, we're in student led discourse and conversations about how to answer an essential question for a unit by putting all of these various learnings together, like that lack of background knowledge, and I'm using air quotes there.
Is important. So let me front load one more kind of thing that's on my brain and then let's get to some frameworks that can support connections to existing background knowledge. And that's Loretta Hammond's Learn to Learn Skills, specifically Her Skills two and three. She lists five of them. So two and three.
Kinda after you figure out what you know, the prompt or the question or the thing is that. That we need to engage with. We scan the hard drive. She says, right, this is step two of learn to learn progression. Have we seen it before? Have we seen something similar? What's the opposite from what we're seeing?
Right? So we're, we're scanning our hard drive. We're noticing if there's anything that looks familiar. Then in the next stage, number three, chew and remix. How is this connected to what I already know? Right? This is happening in a child's brain or in an adult's brain, really a learner's brain. Is there anything confusing?
How can I make sense of this, right? That's the key piece that sticks out to me is the sense making. How do I make sense of this and how to make sense of it in terms of connecting to what I already know. And so specifically here, we could think about the four cognitive routines. Which one could I use here?
And she lists those out. D. S RRP are the kind of four initials of that. So distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives. And we'll get into these a little further in the episode. But these are in my brain as I am thinking about this challenge of a quote, lack of background knowledge. So here's what we might be able to offer some students.
Frameworks such as Funds of Knowledge, which comes from Mall, Amman, Neff, and Gonzalez, uh, 1992. It's used a lot in Headstart programs, so a link to some, some things here in the show notes, but Funds of Knowledge is one that we could definitely use. And so kind of an adapted version of this, I would say, is inviting students.
Whenever we are introducing a topic or a prompt for discussion or, or consideration prompting students, does this make you think of your kind of, do imagine a, a slide with like a dot, dot dot, right? And then a list of things, ideally with a visual and then a short kind of name. So one could be home language, right?
Does it make you think of something, um, that maybe there's a, a word or a term or. Some experience that has kind of peppered with your home language, that connects to this term you're now seeing and whatever the language of instruction is, is there a family value or tradition that this could connect to?
So in whatever you're engaging with content-wise, does this connect to something that you, as a family believe in, or discuss or have experience with in terms of a, a tradition that you, you live out right? Does it connect to any experience, activity, um, identity set of your friends or your family members?
Are there any jobs that your family members or family friends do that connect to what we're learning about? Right? So just thinking about the things that kids know, even young kids, right? This is being used in Head Start. We're talking preschool, pre-K. Young kids are familiar with language used at home with what they do with their families and friends and who those family and friends are, the, the jobs they have, the identities they hold.
Right. And finally, for funds of knowledge, anything related to chores or caretaking. So again, students have rich lives outside of school. What are those things that they're engaged? In at home might be chores, might be, uh, just interaction with siblings or other young children or older siblings. Um, any kind of like meal prep that they do, right?
There's so many things that they're bringing to the table. So if we are learning about ancient civilizations, hunter and hunting and gathering right? Oh, well, I prep, you know, I prepare lunch for myself. I can make a sandwich with access to, you know, my, my cupboard and my fridge at home, right? And that's pretty easy to go to the fridge versus like going and getting a meal from like, nature, right?
So like there's something in there that we can connect to. And so again, we don't necessarily need to name the connections for kids. We wanna think about what's the thing we can give them that acts as a tool for them to make that connection and that the tool can then go with them to another classroom or content area, or beyond the school environment to support learning and sensemaking more broadly.
Now that is the funds of knowledge framework. I do wanna offer one other framework, which is the cultural wealth model from Yo O published in 2005. And again, we'll link to like a summary of this, but. I have changed a little bit the language in slides that I've used with students, particularly young students, although I certainly think secondary schoolers could engage with the, the language of, uh, yoo's original like language in her forms of cultural capital.
So here's, here's what basically the, the premise is, right, is like all forms of cultural capital, like are, are present. In children, and we need an asset based understanding of kind of bridging school to home connections and thinking about the things that. Children bring to the table, right? There's so many assets that we overlook or devalue because of the culture that we live in that is steeped in white supremacy or white dominance.
And we think about how do we value what students are bringing to the table? That sometimes you'll, you'll see in the language here, I actually confront or directly resist, um, that oppressive society and what society purports to value. With this own, like this strength, right? So here, let me just read her things.
The six forms of cultural capital, according to yoo, are aspirational, linguistic, familial. Social navigational and resistance. And so here's what this might translate to for like a prompt to cue students to connect to some social studies content in perhaps like third grade appropriate language. So you might say, does this make you think of your, again, think of like a dot, dot dot, and then a list with like an image and a short title for each cultural capital aspect.
Does snake you think of your hopes and dreams? Your language, which could be interpreted in anything, right? Like, uh, language, it could be English, but just the way that I kind of code switch between different audiences. It could be home language as a distinctly different language. Um, you know, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, whatever is home language.
Just spoke at home. Um. Could it be related to your family and community, your friends? So again, some, some strong overlap here with funds of knowledge. Um, and then I think the two, uh, aside from hopes and dreams at the top, but the two last pieces of her cultural wealth model I think are, are the, um, distinguishing factors here as well.
And I think it lends itself more to like social studies content, um, that is, has a more critical lens, which is always what I gravitate to. But one that yo so-called navigational, I would name kind of like, or term figuring out rules and organizations and have a little picture of like an institution, like a school or something.
Um, and I would explain this to students. 'cause when you're introducing this, you might need to explain a little bit some things don't need cues at all. Right? Like friends and family. We got it. We understand. Um, but figuring out rules and organizations or navigational capital, right? Thinking about how you have to.
Figure out how to go into, you know, whatever it is. Maybe it's a religious organization in the community, maybe it's school, maybe it's, um, somewhere that for older kids that you work or where your parents work, right? You have to figure out how to navigate and what like the unspoken and unspoken rules are in those systems to be able to get by.
Right. And to maybe succeed and thrive, maybe to just not get in trouble, right? Like there's, there's so much navigating that kids do. Um, and so you have figured out the rules, both things that were told to you Yes. But even harder and perhaps more importantly, things that weren't told to you explicitly.
That is an asset. And so how do you see this happening? When we look at historical societies and communities and people having to navigate the both unspoken, unspoken rules, the fair and unfair rules, right? There's a lot there that students can draw on their own experience to connect to social studies content.
And then the, uh, term that you also uses is resistance. You can totally use resistance. I think, I don't know exactly what grade that, that might be unfamiliar language for, but for young, young kids, you might just say like, you know, naming and fighting against unfair things. I think that's, you would be able to use that with a, right.
So like when you recognize something is unfair. And you say that's not fair, right? Or you fight against it or whatever language you wanna use. But that's a concept that certainly like two and three year olds are grappling with. So it is a concept that many, many students are going to, um, latch onto and be able to draw connections to social studies or historical content or current event content with.
So again, I think these all prompt things that students have access to, they have this cultural capital, um, as part of their lived experience. They can connect, but they need the prompting to be like, that's a valid, right? Like that is a valuable connection. You are figuring out rules in your local church, you navigating where your dad works and being present in that space where you're never even told what the rules are, but you kind of.
Figure it out on your own, like that is what other people are doing in history, and you could see the implications as we read about historical content or current event content. Where is that happening now in other settings? Right. I, I think that's something that, again, our role is queuing and validating as opposed to filling.
Like an empty vessel, right? Like the banking model from Ferry is like we're, we're not necessarily needing to fill the background knowledge. Yes, we're gonna teach them, you know, terms that are relevant. Yes, we're gonna teach 'em about things that have happened, but I would argue that one of the most important things about social studies and really analysis in any capacity is like.
Can you understand the big enduring conceptual themes that extend from setting to setting from time, point to time, point across history? And those require some practice like to do that well. Those require students to access and connect with their own lived experiences and background knowledge connected across time periods, compare and contrast, right?
All these big skills. And so I encourage us to, um, use whatever framework works for you. I'll also just quickly share that not knowing any of these frameworks. When I was a teacher, I just use a simplified slide just thinking about what connections I make. So I like to like unearth or like uncover my own processes sometimes to figure out like, how did I get there?
And then maybe this will help kids, right? And then, and then go from there, but use that as a starting point. And so I just would put up a slide. Does this make you think of a story from your life? Current events? Um, some kind of media, like TV show, movie, song, video game. Like I would list a bunch of media places or another form of media, like book or another subject in school.
Kind of like school media, right? Like does this connect to, if I'm teaching social studies, ELA, science, art, pe like, you know, what other place could you connect to math? Um, so think about what works for you. You can take or, or leave pieces that take pieces that work, leave pieces that don't make it your own and, and change the language or imagery, certainly.
But I will link in the show notes and blog posts for this episode. A resource that has some of these that I'm describing, these slides you can just take and use or you could adapt 'em. Now I wanna talk through, before we close, just an example of what this looks like or could be like in action. So recently was working with a bunch of teachers in Boston public schools, some elementary and middle and high school social cities, teachers.
And thinking about Loretta Hammond's Learn to Learn skills and those cognitive routines, as well as this challenge of kind of quote unquote lack of background knowledge. And what did we come up with? We came up with a framework. We came up with a lot of stuff, but, but what I wanna talk about now is a framework that invites students to generate questions with a little bit of queuing and structure to support students who may be struggling to ask a question about.
Like a new topic or were you learning this new unit? What questions do you have? Right. And that's kind of all we've got is like a quick question or prompts or image, like a very short amount of information. Small amount of information I should say, and then go time ask questions. So here's what they decided, they said, okay, so there's kind of two things happening.
We want students to ask about some important social studies themes. So the content is important, but we also want students to do some like skill-based stuff, like some cognitive routines as Loretta Hammond would describe them, right? So again, that. Uh, DSRP is what we're thinking about at this point, so. We want students to think about distinctions, like comparing and contrasting.
We want them to think about the systems like part to whole hold apart, right? Uh, relationships, like how does thing, how do things happen over time? Like what is the cause and effect relationship, for example, or perspective, right? How is perspective important? Certainly very important in social studies. So that's DSRP or the cognitive routines.
So we want both social studies, content themes, and we want the skills or the cognitive routines. And how do we invite students to do all of that? Well, they came up with a slide that's kind of like two halves. And so they're like, okay, so ask a question about, and then they gave a few examples that, and then they gave a few examples of cognitive routines.
So in the content themes, I'd be like, ask a question about, and here's on the imagine like the left side. People or land connections. This connects to, um, NCSS or the National Consult for Social Studies, themes, people, places, and environments, uh, is a very common theme. Um, seen in many social cities, uh, content areas in ch in chapters in history, as well as it also connects to like First Nation concepts of wellbeing.
Um, so I'll, I can link to some of that, but people and connections is a content theme. Or you could ask a question about another content theme, people's hopes and dreams. Again, that's directly from cultural wealth, um, but it also is present in the national social studies, civic ideals and practices theme.
Uh, ask a question about community care practices. So this was kind of adapted from, uh, yo's cultural wealth, also funds of knowledge, right? We're thinking a lot about family and community, um, friend groups, but also this is present in First Nations concepts of wellbeing. And then the fourth one, um, that they decided to include in this framework is what people did or can do to better the world.
So thinking about like a justice orientation, uh, collective action, civic action thing, right? This is certainly present in the national theme for civic ideals and practices. This also present in yoo's cultural wealth framework, um, with resistance particularly. So again, the content themes, people land connections.
People's hopes and dreams, community care practices, and what people did or can do to better the world. These are the big things that we're often talking about in a social studies environment, right? This particularly one that is, uh, angled towards like advancing justice and, uh, power with, right? I'm thinking about the Berkeley frameworks here.
Um, a criticality lens, thinking about Goldie Muhammad, right? This is all really important. Now the cognitive routines side of this, right? So ask a question about one of those content areas. Is there a pitch that does one of these things connects to today? So you got like some systems there, like part to whole hold apart.
Like how does this all fit together in the arc of history? But it also connects to relationships, right? I would say like cause and effect, like what happens in the past affects what happens today. And also NCSS, uh, their theme of time, continuity and change. So definitely still connecting the content themes there.
You could say, um, asking a question that compares or contrasts that we have. Distinctions that considers cause and effects. You have relationships there or the uplifts identities, so. Inviting students to push back on or ask the question of whose stories or voices are missing. So again, we have that perspectives.
Or also I would say systems like understanding systemic oppression, right? And how systems work to marginalize, I think is also present in there, depending on where students take the question or the analysis that follows. So again, we have a framework that BPS used to pull on social studies, content themes from various frameworks.
And national standards, as well as inviting students to use a cognitive routine stemming from the work of, um, that Zaretta Hammond highlights and the work of independent learners and kind of how they make sense of things when they chew and remix in her learn to learn skill series. So example, questions stems that come out of this.
Um, could be, and I mean this is a little high level, but we, we wanted to come up with something that was really meaty for an example. Um, but like. If we take, ask a question about the, uh, people land connections and we do something about, um, connecting to today for the cognitive routine, that might be how my indigenous people's connection to the land inform how we interact with the land today.
And that's the question. And that might be a question that students come up with. In third grade when we're learning about indigenous peoples in Massachusetts, that's the particular curriculum they were talking about in the unit they were talking about. And so they were like, that is something that would be really high level for a student to ask, but also is like very possible even if they just asked part of that question.
Um, because this cues them to think about those things. So obviously we took this in a direction in, in the BPS work and thinking about this framework in a direction that is. Um, far from the background knowledge, like we end up in a really analytical, kind of heady space, but we get there by first thinking about that content knowledge.
So again, we're thinking about that Zaretta Hammond progression. We're scanning a hard drive. Have I seen this before? Have I seen something similar? We are chewing and remixing. How is this new content connected to what I already know? How do I make sense of it? And which cognitive routines can I use?
Right? So as students are making sense of the new information, they're accessing background knowledge, what is familiar, they're using maybe one of those frameworks to do that. Then that's where they can start to make sense of things because they do have that affirmed background experience or connection to other media.
They have experienced this before. They have valuable, um, kind of knowledge and insight. So now we're gonna apply a cognitive routine and we're gonna elevate that into a critical question or a level of analysis that's going to truly. Level up the historical thinking skills and the analytical thinking skills in the class.
Whether we're generating questions, we are participating in student led discourse, we are writing a claim, evidence reasoning paragraph, whatever it is. So here is what I would advise if you're just getting started with this or background knowledge feels really hard. Um, what I would do is I would pick a framework.
So one of the ones that we did either, uh, funds of Knowledge or cultural Wealth Framework. Or pick a piece of that framework and just invite students to make connections using that one queue. Does this make you think of, you know, how you've learned to figure out roles and organizations, right? Whatever the, the queue is, right.
Often these connections can lead to very insightful analysis, and you can do this at any point in the unit. It could be just when you're starting, if you're inviting students to kind of access that background knowledge, like a typical KWL chart, like when you would do that, use that queue there. You could also use it at the very end of a unit or anywhere in the middle, but at the end of the unit it might be like when we are trying to, we got really granular, we learned a bunch of facts in the social studies unit, and now we're trying to analyze and draw bigger kind of key ideas.
Maybe answering the essential question and we're trying to connect possibly likely to the present. That is where that lived experience of someone in the present could do that, right? You're gonna tie it all together. You're gonna expand through connections. You started by like entering the conversation and entering the social studies content with a connection through your background knowledge linkage, and now you're expanding it outwards in your analysis at the end, right?
So you kind of start big, start broad, get narrow and get granular, and then you broaden out again for analysis. I think that's a very common kind of arc. Okay. And the number two option to get started, if that feels like, you know what, that's a lot to introduce a new framework to my students. Fine know instead where the connections are already being made by students.
So your students are probably doing this to some degree, or maybe they're just about to make them like they get really close. Maybe they make some offhanded comment about how it's similar to something in their lives, but they're making it. As a joke or something, right? Like whatever it is, share what you're noticing with students and then what you can do, and this is so cool, co-create your own slide or physical on paper anchor chart with those connection cues, because then they'll be rooted in the student ideas, which lends even more validity to this concept and this tool, and something that they could actually use.
They'll remember it better. Okay, that's what I have for you today. I will drop a link to the various frameworks in the show notes and blog posts for the episode. We'll also drop that, uh, free resource on generating questions, resource bank, which will have that slides for queuing background knowledge, connections from those, uh, kind of three categories we shared today.
All of this information is gonna be at lindsaybethlyons.com/blog/254.