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Truth for Teachers

Why activating prior knowledge doesn't work ...

Published about 2 months ago • 2 min read

You've heard "activate prior knowledge" a million times.

And, you're already good at it.

You ask kids what they remember from yesterday, you do the KWL chart, you run the quick turn-and-talk.

But there's a whole layer of behavioral science underneath that phrase that most teacher PD skips entirely.

It's called priming, and it's happening in your classroom every minute of every day whether you plan it or not.

Priming is when exposure to one thing changes how your brain processes the next thing.

When kids walk into your room, everything they see, hear, and feel in the first 60 seconds is priming them for something. The question is just whether it's priming them for the lesson, or for logistics, or for whatever chaos they carried in from the hallway.

Here's one example from the new Truth for Teachers podcast episode I did about this.

Say you're about to start a novel study of The Great Gatsby with your students. Before the books even come out, put one pre-question on the board:

"If you suddenly became wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, what's the first thing you'd buy or do?"

Have kids share their answers with a partner, but DON'T have any follow-up whole class discussion. Just begin the lesson without referencing the prequestion.

Students' brains are now primed to notice every detail about wealth, desire, and class in the novel. They're ready to read with a mental model already activated.

A 2024 study across 30 classrooms and over 1,500 students found that kids who answered short questions like this before a lesson significantly outperformed kids who didn't.

And what's interesting is the mechanism. It's not that the questions grabbed attention, as previous researchers assumed. It's that the questions activated a relevant mental model in advance of instruction.

That's the power of priming, and you can add it to a lesson tomorrow morning without changing overhauling what you've already got planned.

In the article + audio, I walk through six research-backed ways to prime students' brains for learning, with specific classroom examples for every K-12 grade level.

I cover how to treat your opening hook as instruction (not just engagement), the pre-question research above, how to prime the emotional state AND the cognitive mode you want students in, and why the last 30 seconds of class matter more than most teachers realize in terms of priming for the next day's lesson.

No time to read OR listen?

I've got you. Swipe through the carousel here to learn all 6 ways on Instagram instead.

Enjoy!

Angela

Angela Watson

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If you're teaching students who struggle with focus and follow-through, Finding Flow Solutions gives you no-prep lessons that help kids build the executive functioning skills behind real learning. Download a free unit for either elementary, middle, or high school at findingflowsolutions.com​.​

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