This post is the result of a conversation with the great Alistair Gittner on Bluesky. We go back a way with Alistair supporting me on a project. We were discussing the background knowledge learners need to understand explanations (spoken or written) based on my post yesterday.
The idea is that it is impossible to transmit the model I have in my head straight into yours. I can only send information (words, pictures, demonstrations). You need to take that information and enrich it with your own knowledge and experiences to create a mental model of your own. Because your information and experiences will be different to everyone else’s, your model will be different too. Hopefully close enough, but not always.
In our discussion, Alistair and I came up with the idea of tiers of experiences. Just like the tiers of vocabulary developed by Beck and McKeown, our tiers of experiences relate to whether you can expect your pupils and students to have had them.
Tier 1 Experiences
These are the experiences we can reasonably expect every child to have had (the temptation is to say, “I’ve got kids who’ve never seen a bird,” but it’s probably rare). This list is likely to vary by locality, but will often include: playing on swings; going to a supermarket; playing with a ball; travelling on a bus.
In the fuzzy boundary between tier 1 and 2 you might include: visiting a zoo; visiting a library; visiting the seaside; playing in the woods. It will depend on your geography and your cohort.
Tier 2 Experiences
Tier 2 experiences tend to be culturally valued – often requiring more cultural capital to access. They aren’t always more expensive, but they tend to be less accessible by families which are struggling for resources or time.
Examples include: travelling by plane; sailing; gardening; foreign holidays; and cultural experiences, such as theatre visits.
Tier 3 Experiences
These are the school subject experiences. Every student can reasonably expect to have these experiences. Examples include: singing in assembly; using a Bunsen burner; playing badminton. It’s an argument for physical experiences in lessons – not just practical subjects, but also subjects like RE and history. If there are artifacts, make sure your students can handle them.
The Implications of Tiers of Experience
I was originally thinking about reading comprehension. For example, when reading ‘The Gruffalo’, pupils who have been on a walk through the woods will construct richer mental models of the situation than those who haven’t.
But as Alistair pointed out, these experiences are key to comprehending ideas in all subjects. In physics, for example, I might ask whether it feels different walking towards the front of the train (i.e. going faster than the train) compared to walking towards the back. Or talking about what happens to my cup of tea on the train when it goes round the bend. Or discussing how easy it is to make a shopping trolley full of tins speed up compared to an empty one.
My Trust has explicitly attempted to develop our students’ tier 2 experiences (we didn’t call them this until today) through our Hinterland curriculum. We have a team of teachers who have developed a coherent curriculum of experiences to support learning. It includes residentials; theatre trips and orchestra experiences as well as visits to power stations, castles and places of worship. We encourage teachers to help students make inferences between what they are learning in class and their hinterland experiences.
There is too much tier 2 vocabulary to list and teach it all. You do the best you can. It’s the same with tier 2 experiences – you’ll never give every child every experience, but you can provide a really solid foundation and build learning from there.
Ben
Reading for Learning 