Why a simple 30-year-old chart is an ingenious teaching tool today
Almost three decades ago, a simple chart known as the K-W-L was born — and it has helped millions of teachers help kids think and learn ever since. What is it and why is it so powerful? Author Alfie Kohn explains, and even makes the case that this old chart should be viewed as radical in today’s learning environment. Kohn is the author of 14 books, including “Schooling Beyond Measure….And Other Unorthdox Essays About Education,” just published by Heinemann.
By Alfie Kohn
I believe it was Dale Carnegie who first counseled public speakers to “tell the audience what you’re going to say . . . say it . . . then tell them what you’ve said.” This advice, which presumably appeared in his book “How to Lose Friends and Irritate People,” suggests a rather dim view of the audience’s capacity to comprehend or remember what they’ve heard – or, perhaps, the speaker’s capacity to come up with enough content to fill the allotted time.
Nevertheless, the general idea of sandwiching the main event between some sort of preparation and some sort of reflection actually makes a fair bit of sense when applied to learning — provided that the goal is more ambitious than mere repetition.
Consider the iconic K-W-L chart, first described by literacy expert Donna Ogle in an article published almost 30 years ago in “The Reading Teacher.”[1] Students are asked to brainstorm what they already know (K) about the subject matter of the text they’re going to read and also to anticipate the kinds of information it’s likely to contain. Then they discuss what they hope to learn (W). Finally, after reading, they consider what they actually did learn (L).
I’ll return in a moment to how this procedure illustrates what might be called sandwiching, but first let me say a word about K-W-L in its own right. Its status as one of those nifty practical ideas that teachers can pick up quickly and start using the following morning probably explains why it became so popular. But, like other teaching strategies that are deceptively radical in their implications, K-W-L is also easily corrupted – and often implemented so poorly as to undermine any meaningful benefit.
For example, rather than being given time to reflect on what, if anything, they genuinely want to know about a given subject, students may be asked to cough up questions on the spot — which results in responses that are perfunctory and inauthentic. Even when students come up with thoughtful questions, moreover, the teacher may write them down and then ignore them, teaching the unit exactly the way she had originally planned. Finally, the Why a simple 30-year-old chart is an ingenious teaching tool today - The Washington Post:
