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Over the past few years, millions of educators have embraced the science of reading, in many cases radically transforming how the youngest students learn how to read.
But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among other measures, suggest that something is missing — a focus on substantive knowledge, including detail-rich lessons in science and history.
Author Natalie Wexler, whose 2019 book The Knowledge Gap advocated a greater emphasis on these topics paired with explicit instruction, has said these principles are supported by cognitive science. A content-rich curriculum, she maintains, allows students to go deeper, helping information stick and building an academic foundation that allows them to write more easily, creating a kind of virtuous circle of reinforcement: The more they know, the better they can write; the better they can write, the more they can learn.
Six years later, Wexler is back with a new warning. In her book, Beyond the Science of Reading, out Feb. 3. (pre-orders open today, Jan. 21), she says the benefits of improved reading instruction will go to waste if we don’t offer students a more vibrant, content-rich set of lessons to go along with it.
She spoke recently with The 74’s Greg Toppo. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The 74: Your book The Knowledge Gap came out in 2019. A lot has happened since then, including a pandemic and an explosion of interest in the science of reading, thanks in part, to the work of folks like Emily Hanford. Would you say we’re in a better place in the knowledge discussion than we were in 2019?
Natalie Wexler: Yes, definitely. For one thing, there are now a number of knowledge-building curricula available that were not around when I was researching the book. There are more choices than there used to be. And although we don’t have really reliable data on what curricula are really being used, all indications are that more and more districts and schools are using those knowledge-building curricula. That’s been a very promising development. It’s still a minority, but certainly more than in 2019. Emily Hanford and other science of reading advocates have done a great service to the public and to the nation’s children by shining this spotlight on things that are problematic about typical phonics instruction. The risk is that it can lead, and has led in some places, to the assumption that if we just fix the phonics part of reading instruction, everything else is going to be fine. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
A lot of people see the science of reading as just “more phonics.” How do you describe this more comprehensive approach?
People outside the education world assume that schools are teaching social studies and science and all of those things. I have to do a lot of explaining when I talk about how we’re not building knowledge in school effectively. With The Knowledge Gap, the publishers expected that the audience would be primarily the general public and parents. But where it’s really taken off is among educators. And it’s because it’s a lot easier, certainly for elementary level and maybe some middle school level educators, to understand the argument, because they’re living what I’m describing: There isn’t much content in the elementary curriculum, and there is a lot of emphasis on teaching reading comprehension skills, making inferences as though they were abstract skills you can teach directly and apply generally. Many of them have seen that that doesn’t really work very well.
As I was reading your book, it reminded me of some of the conversations I’ve had with Joy Hakim, who wrote the great series, A History of US and The Story of Science. Her books are favorites among people who are enlightened about this topic. One of the things she says is that we’re underestimating how much our kids can understand if they’re exposed to difficult material. Is that the right word, underestimating?
“Underestimating” is the right word, and I use that a lot myself. But you have to be careful about what we’re underestimating. It is often assumed among educators that young children won’t be interested in history or can’t handle history because it’s just too abstract, too remote from their own experience. There’s no evidence to support that. And in fact, there’s anecdotal evidence that kids can get very interested in history.
I’ve seen this myself: second graders getting fascinated by the War of 1812. But at the same time, we’ve overestimated kids’ abilities sometimes to handle certain abstractions. I open The Knowledge Gap with a teacher who’s trying to teach kids the difference between a subtitle and a caption, which is abstract but not particularly interesting to them. They don’t get it. They want to know what’s going on in the picture. What is that shark eating? But the teacher feels that it’s more important. This is what her training in the curriculum has led her to do, to focus on the abstract difference between a caption and a subtitle.
You and I have both interviewed teacher Kyair Butts in Baltimore, and I love what he tells you: He was initially skeptical that his students would like a Dust Bowl novel, Out of the Dust, but as the drama unfolds, they’re hooked. I wonder what that tells you, not only about the topic, but about how he was able to approach it and make it come alive.
Jerome Bruner said that you can teach almost anything to a child of any age if you do it in a way that makes sense. Those weren’t his exact words, but if you engage kids, they will get interested in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with their own experience. If you basically tell them a good story, that’s the way you can teach history, science. This is what Joy Hakim does so beautifully in her work, both in history and science: telling stories that really hook kids, and then they learn a lot, almost effortlessly, along the way.
There’s a lot of emphasis on having kids “see themselves” in what they’re reading, which is important. But it is at least as important to expand their horizons to other realms of experience. Fiction, novels especially, are a great way to do that. As Kyair said, when they learn that the main character’s little brothers died, they care. They care about this story and these characters. There’s also some evidence to show that this is the way empathy develops, through reading fiction about lives that are very different from our own.
In Chapter 3 of the new book, you talk about teachers colleges, and note that today’s teacher educators — that is, the people working in the colleges — have been shaped by “a system that devalues knowledge and prioritizes engagement.” In a way, you can’t blame teachers for this crisis.
Absolutely. It is no individual’s fault that we are where we are. It’s a systemic problem, so it’s not going to change overnight. It’s difficult, not just for teacher educators to step out of this system, but also the teachers themselves. If you’ve been teaching in a certain way for years in the sincere belief that you are doing a great job, and someone casts doubt on that, it’s a very difficult message to take in.
What really amazes me is how many teachers, despite the painfulness of the message, are nevertheless embracing it because they really care about the success of their kids. With teacher training, it’s going to be hard to change that overnight. We’re really trying to fix a broken system with the products of that system, which is very difficult. I don’t think we can rely on teacher training to change the system. Once teachers are on the job, we also need to continue communicating this message, doing training to undo some of the training they’ve gotten pre-service.
Historically, teachers also haven’t learned much about cognitive science. Do you get a sense that’s improving?
As I say in the book, there are efforts. Deans for Impact is an organization that is doing great work with some institutions of teacher training, but it’s going to be very slow. There are hundreds of programs that train teachers, and just a handful are signing up to bring their curricula in line with principles of cognitive science. Even within those programs, not every teacher is on the bandwagon. You can’t really, at the university level, control what goes on in the classroom. Professors are used to having a lot of autonomy.
Let’s talk about writing. You’re the co-author of The Writing Revolution as well. Reading your new book, it seems that writing brings together a lot of your ideas. Can you talk a bit about the importance of writing?
Since I finished writing both of those books years ago, I have continued to think more about the relationship between reading and writing and learning in general. I’ve become more and more convinced that the combination of a content-rich curriculum and explicit, manageable writing instruction embedded in that curriculum can provide all the benefits of cognitive science-informed instruction, and possibly more. Without going into a lot of detail, we have evidence that when you write about what you’re reading or what you’re learning about, it enhances your learning. It enables you to retain the information better, it enables you to understand it better, and it enables you to think about it analytically.
The problem is that writing is really difficult. We have studies, like write-to-learn studies, where they have kids write about the content that they’re learning. Overall there’s a positive effect from that. But in one meta analysis, in 18% of these studies there was a negative effect. In other words, kids writing about what they were learning actually retained less of it. It’s impossible to know why. But the reason is we sometimes ask kids to just write without giving them enough support, and that is cognitively overwhelming, so they don’t get the potential learning benefits.
So what’s the key?
The key is to make writing manageable, not cognitively overwhelming, but still requiring some effort. The best way to do that is to start at the sentence level — because if writing is hard, then writing at length is only making it harder — and explicitly teach students how to construct sentences and eventually clear linear outlines for paragraphs and essays that are embedded in the content they’re learning about. If you do that, you’re having them engage in retrieval practice, which we know is a very powerful boost to retention of information. You’re also having them engage in elaboration, explaining what they’re learning about, giving examples, all of that. That has been shown to really help with comprehension. You’re familiarizing them in a powerful way with the complex syntax of written language, which can be a real barrier to reading comprehension.
You say that content-rich curricula are under fire from both sides, the left and right. I love the anecdote where you visit a small town in Ohio where this group of parents objected to the use of the words “God” and “Goddess” in a second-grade unit on Greek mythology. You note, “It’s hard to imagine how children could truly understand Greek myths or ancient Greek culture without hearing those words.” I have two questions. Number one, how do we get out from underneath this? And number two, is there a way in which this is kind of a red herring?
This is coming not just from the right and not just from the left. The same curriculum has been attacked, sometimes, from both sides for different reasons. What we need to fundamentally do is realize that compromise is essential, and it’s got to be compromise that doesn’t interfere with kids’ ability to learn. There’s been a lot of opposition from the right to teaching about Greek myths in a curriculum called Core Knowledge Language Arts. Sometimes it’s perceived as trying to proselytize about Greek myths or other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism. When school leaders have explained to the community, “No, this isn’t an attempt to convert kids to these other religions. It’s a part of teaching them about history and other cultures,” sometimes those controversies have been defused — not in every instance.
Another thing to bear in mind, though, is that sometimes the people who are protesting are not representative. They’re maybe a small but very vocal group of parents. You have to ask: Does it really make sense to deprive all students of exposure to some valuable information because a small group is protesting? Maybe there’s another way to handle it, some alternative texts or something for those kids. But fundamentally, everybody needs to realize that the curriculum is not going to align with your individual preferences about what you would like your kids to learn. And we have to find consensus. There’s more consensus than there appears to be, which kind of gets to your second question: The media have kind of elevated these conflicts. In many instances, there isn’t that much conflict.
Is there anything you see in the landscape that gives you hope that we are moving in the right direction?
For one thing, I have gotten many invitations to speak recently. The interest in this, at least from my limited personal perspective, is not dying down. It’s only growing. And that’s encouraging. There are other people taking up this message. I’m seeing the beginnings of a recognition that phonics instruction is important, but we may be overdoing it with all of the focus on it in some places — the one generalization you can make about American education is you can’t generalize, because who knows what’s really going on?
But in some places, schools are spending an hour a day on phonics and giving short shrift to some of these other important components of reading, like building knowledge. That really relates to reading comprehension. Even some of the people who have been in the forefront of the science of reading movement, like Mark Seidenberg, have been saying this: Let’s not overdo it, because there’s an opportunity cost, and one of those opportunities that’s being lost is the chance to build a kind of knowledge that kids will need to read and understand the texts they’ll be expected to read in years to come.
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