When I introduced a new topic in class, I would often refer back to something said or discussed during a previous class period or to a reading assigned for homework. I would attempt to make connections for students so that they could link the new material to content we'd already covered. But my students had a great deal of difficulty remembering what we'd discussed previously. Often they hadn't done the reading, so connections I made to text content were meaningless to them. If I asked them to make connections, they were unable to articulate how the concepts and ideas were connected. I was frustrated, troubled, and ready to try some different approaches.
