Here’s a really clear and useful blog by David Rodger-Goodwin on David Ausubel’s Advance Organisers.
The Situation – Expert teachers create and maintain, almost automatically, complex networks that link concepts, ideas and facts within their domain which students don’t have.
The Solution – Popularised by the psychologist David Ausubel (1968), advance organisers provide the conceptual framework for the incorporation and retention of new information. They should be presented in advance of a new topic (or sequence of learning) and at a higher level of abstraction than the learning that follows.