When Pre-teaching Is Helpful and When It’s Not 

From the Marshall Memo #438

In this article in Principal Leadership, San Diego State University professors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey say there are times when pre-teaching (frontloading) key information is necessary – students lack important background knowledge – and times when it isn’t. “The peril of pre-teaching is that in many cases, it can actually make learning more difficult because the learner hasn’t been primed to know the value of the new information,” say Fisher and Frey. “Sometimes it’s better to let students struggle a bit… [L]earning is not error-free, and sometimes an educator’s job is to provoke those errors and then teach toward rectifying them.” In addition, diving right into the content can introduce an element of excitement and suspense, with students wondering how the experiment or story will turn out. 

Fisher and Frey believe there are two types of lessons where pre-teaching is not a good idea:

• Inquiry-based instruction – In such lessons, the whole point is for students to uncover information through carefully planned learning experiences. For example, in a U.S. history class on the 1929 stock market crash, students took different roles – wealthy investor, common investor, broker, banker – and monitored the worth of their portfolios as they heard actual news bulletins on the status of the market. “It was amazing to watch all my money evaporate,” said one student afterward. “I was doing OK in the market at first, and then, just like that, it was gone. I hope the government has better rules now so that doesn’t happen to people.” This simulation would not have been nearly as effective with a lot of pre-teaching. 

• Close reading of complex text – “When students must carefully read a piece of text and dig deeply into the meaning, teachers should not pre-teach content,” say Fisher and Frey. “Like inquiry, the goal of close reading is for students themselves to figure out what is confusing and to identify resources that they can use to address their confusion. It is essential that they develop the metacognition required to understand difficult text.” For example, a history teacher had students read George Washington’s farewell address several times over several days, gradually unpacking and investigating what he was saying and why it was so important. If this teacher had done a lot of pre-teaching, students might have dispensed with reading the actual speech and paid attention only to what the teacher told them about it. 

“The Perils of Pre-teaching” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Principal Leadership, May 2012 (Vol. 12, #9, p. 84-86), http://bit.ly/KzDTZf; the authors can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu and nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu.