Activating Prior Knowledge With Hexagonal Thinking
By creating a visual web of knowledge, students can demonstrate what connections they have already made about a topic, and where they might need additional clarification and support.
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Go to My Saved Content.At Monocacy Middle School in Frederick, Maryland, students in Allison Marsh’s 8th grade English language arts class are preparing to analyze informational articles about technology and social media. In order to help her students be successful in the task, Marsh first wants them to connect their prior knowledge to new content so they can properly engage with the big essential question of the unit: “How do the challenges you face today shape your future?” To make these connections visible, Marsh uses an activity called hexagonal thinking.
Students get into groups of four with one set of hexagon-shaped cards per group. Today, they were given a starting card with the the topic of social media on it. Additional cards containing key terms from the text—parent concern, technology, and addiction, for example—were dealt out. Each student has an opportunity to match the edge of one of their cards to the starting card in the center of the table. Students may also link to cards other students have put down, or even match up two edges at once, ultimately creating a web of related terms that represents their thinking. As they place each card, they offer a rationale for why they see a connection.
Explains Marsh, “You can't just look at a kid and know how they think or what they understand about something. So we have to be explicit using strategies to glean what they already know and what they can bring to the activity.”
Learning Science Partners’ Jim Heal describes why this activity is so effective. “Schema is a term that describes the way that we organize information in our minds,” he explains. “As students learn a new topic, they move away from thinking of ideas as isolated facts and instead consider them in relationship to one another.”
By asking students to participate in the hexagonal thinking activity, the teacher is able to make the students’ interconnected networks of ideas explicit. And when the ideas are literally laid out on the table, the teacher also has a chance to push for further rationalization, which makes connections stronger, and lets her address any misconceptions before students engage in the analysis.
Find additional resources and templates for hexagonal thinking in Sarah Gonser’s article for Edutopia, “Using ‘Hexagonal Thinking’ to Deepen Classroom Conversations.”
This video is part of our How Learning Happens series, which explores teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development.