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At a time when districts have mandated coverage of elaborate lists of content standards, most teachers are feeling the challenge of covering so much material with students who come to class lacking the interest, background knowledge or content language necessary for reading historical texts. An additional challenge affects our instructional decisions when we also must work with students who have no sense of the time and place in which they live. Christine’s 8th grade classroom offers us a great example of how difficult it is to teach, or even to know where to begin, when this combination of problems occurs. Christine and her students had just begun a unit on Colonial America, and Christine worked with her students to generate a list of information they would need to find in order to be experts on what life was like in one of the three Colonial regions. After generating their lists, students used three sources to create their descriptions of life in Colonial America: A History of US, the district-adopted textbooks, and related supplemental trade books. Imagine Christine’s surprise when one group of experts reported that colonists traveled by whores and communicated via cell phones! On days like this, we are reminded of how important it is to build background knowledge with students before asking them to read, write, or conduct research. Even our best students struggle to understand concepts that seem far removed from their lives, and our most struggling readers are often so overwhelmed they do not even attempt to read their assignments. As content teachers, we have four broad tasks:… • Assessing the knowledge base students bring to the study • Providing students with experiences that give them a rich and memorable context for their reading • Anticipating words and concepts that may make reading difficult • Helping students develop questions they would like to answer so that they have a purpose for reading… As we were writing this book, Christine reminded me just how important it is simply to ask students what they already know—before beginning teaching. She said she often starts class by writing the following statement on the board: “What do you already know or think you know about ___________?” She then records students’ answers on a chart or transparency.

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