The Importance of Background Knowledge in Teaching

Your background knowledge really helps you understand what the teacher is explaining. If you've got a vocabulary term missing from your long term memory, you're going to be massively confused by what it is your teacher's saying. Your background knowledge has to kind of bridge that kind of gap of assumed knowledge that the teacher is not a kind of explicitly teach as part of their explanation. It's our disadvantage students that are generally more likely to have a limited vocabulary. Our privileged students have a wider vocabulary generally, and their knowledge about the world is greater. So how is a school, if you're thinking about your students, do you start to kind of close that gap?