None of this is new, but it was clattering about in my head and I needed to get it written. I was originally working on something more overarching but it got a bit large and out of hand, so it's been broken into chunklets, of which this is one.
Ideally when we plan, we should be looking at the whole topic but in practicality, no one really has that sort of time. But, no matter what you do though, it's really blooming helpful to know what students should have covered [dare I say "learned"?].
In Adam Boxer's upcoming book Teaching Secondary Science: A Complete Guide*, he talks about "Directions of Travel", that is how one should proceed through an explanation. One of those is "familiar → unfamiliar": when explaining something, start with something that is familiar to the student [makes sense, right]. If we start with the familiar, we don't completely baffle the poor kids sat in front of us by springing something terrifying and seemingly random at them and we can more effectively "prime" the relevant schema, so it's all warmed up and ready for the juicy new knowledge.
Unfortunately, familiar is subjective. What I know about someone else might not know about. When I interviewed for my job I had to give an analogy for activation energy. It wasn't great; it was about eggs, obviously [Give me a break - I was anxious, tired, and it was a fast day]. I was then offered an alternative - one about height restrictions for rollercoasters. I thought, huh, that's a good idea, but I'm not sure how many of my students will have been to a theme park. As coincidence had it, I was teaching the same topic to my own year 10s a few weeks later and I thought, I'll use the height restriction analogy. Disaster. Absolute uproar from my students, >90% of whom had never been to a theme park. "I'm sorry?? You have to pay all that money to go to the theme park and they don't even let you on the rides if you're too short?? Wtf!" Balls. Next time I'll preface it with "without saying anything, put your hand up if you've ever been to a theme park". Anyway, I digress.
Familiar is subjective. What is familiar to one person isn't necessarily familiar to another. Without asking, you wouldn't necessarily know if a student is familiar with something. Unless you know what they've come across before. This stuff won't necessarily be super familiar - people forget, obvs - but it won't be completely unfamiliar either. [Booklets are great for this because you can very clearly see the stuff they've covered before without opening a million slide decks, and they give a bit more specificity than a SoW.]
I know roughly what students should have done when. It makes it very easy for me to stand at the front of a class and say "you will have seen some of this before in [year]". The number of times I've mentioned a semi-familiar concept to a class and they've looked at me blankly until I say, "you did this in year 5" and suddenly they're all "oh yeah, with the [thing]". You would be surprised how much a student can remember about what they learned in primary school simply by telling them what year it was they learned it. I guess what happens is I say, "can someone give me an example of an invertebrate?" and they go "I have no idea what an invertebrate is" and then I say "you probably came across invertebrates in year four" and then, mentally, they go: year four → that was in the room with the leaky window → I sat next to Callum → Callum freaked out when the teacher told us about spiders → spiders are invertebrates. Or something. I don't know how it works; I'm not a neuropsychowhoosit, I just know it seems to help!
By telling them when they learned something, and by using the same or similar examples, it can help students much more easily bring up the memory, which helps them learn the new content because it helps them to prime that schema. They aren't building a new schema that will hopefully become integrated to their long-prior knowledge. By knowing the sequence, you can make those references and link back, helping the students in front of you to "activate" the relevant schema, in preparation for their new learning.
TL;DR: Know what came before whatever it is you're teaching now. It's helpful
*This isn't an advert, or a sponsored post or anything like that, but if you did want to buy a copy it's out next month from John Catt and is available for pre-order on Amazon.