# data[].attributes.body
https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2020/wexler

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Despite billions of dollars and massive efforts on the part of thousands of highly dedicated and intelligent people over the past 25 years, the size of the test-score gap between the wealthiest and the poorest students hasn't changed. ¹ Our mediocre standing on international literacy rankings is largely a reflection of how low our lowest scores are. ² Teachers in high-poverty schools in Washington, D.C., have told me they've had students at all levels of ability, including the highest, but some of their stories were deeply disturbing.

Their high school students often lack a sense of chronology, they said. Students may confuse the Civil War and the civil rights movement. They may think Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. were contemporaries. In a world history class studying the segregation faced by black soldiers returning to the United States after World War I, some students were under the impression that slavery still existed in 1918. In a course on the United States after the Civil War, the teacher couldn't assume that students knew what happened before that war, even though they had already taken a class that covered it. "You have to start with: there was a War of Independence," she said, "and this is who we won our independence from." ³

Others told me their students don't understand the difference between a country and a continent, or between a city and a state. One kid in an SAT prep class-one of the better students, according to his teacher, who cited the fact that "he could place the United States on a world map"-was surprised by the term South America when he saw it on a map, apparently for the first time: How could it be called America if it wasn't in America? ⁴

Another high school teacher said she's even had a few students who don't know the name of the country they live in. "They think Washington, D.C., is their country," she said. ⁵

Urban school systems have been faced with the impossible task of turning ninth-graders who arrive with gaps like these into "college- and career-ready" graduates in four years-and threatened with consequences under federal law if graduation rates dip below 67 percent. For a while, the threats appeared to be working: in 2016, the national graduation rate reached an all-time high of more than 84 percent. ⁶ But within months, it became clear that some urban school systems had turned to subterfuges. ⁷ These included having students pass courses by taking far less rigorous online versions and changing attendance records. In Washington, D.C.-a city that many reformers have pointed to as a model, and where the graduation rate rose 20 points in six years-an investigation revealed that a full third of the 2017 graduates hadn't met requirements. ⁸

These problems don't end at high school. Studies suggest that students with low test scores are less likely to pursue higher education, obtain and keep jobs, provide for their families, exercise their civic rights and responsibilities, and lead fulfilling lives. ⁹ Education is supposed to enable everyone to do those things. It represents our best hope for breaking the cycle of multigenerational poverty. Really, it's our only hope.

And it's not working. Socioeconomic inequality in the United States is on the rise. ¹⁰ Many students proudly enroll in college-the surest route to success-only to discover they're so ill-prepared they need to take remedial reading and math. The vast majority of lower-income students never manage to get that coveted degree. ¹¹

Knowledge Makes a Difference

In 1987, two researchers in Wisconsin, Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, conducted an experiment that shed some light on the roots of many of the problems that afflict our education system-and especially the gap in test scores between students at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale. They constructed a miniature baseball field, ¹² installed it in an empty classroom in a junior high school, and peopled it with four-inch wooden baseball players arranged to simulate the beginning of a game. Then they brought in 64 seventh- and eighth-grade students who had been tested both for their general reading ability and for their knowledge of baseball.

The goal was to determine to what extent a child's ability to understand a text depended on her prior knowledge of the topic. Recht and Leslie chose baseball because they figured lots of kids in junior high school who weren't great readers nevertheless knew a fair amount about the subject. Each student was asked to read a text describing half an inning of a fictional baseball game and move the wooden figures around the board to reenact the action described.

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop, the passage began. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single, Johnson stayed on third. The next batter is Whitcomb, the Cougars' left-fielder.

It turned out that prior knowledge of baseball made a huge difference in students' ability to understand the text-more of a difference than their supposed reading level. ¹³ The kids who knew little about baseball, including the "good" readers, all did poorly. And among those who knew a lot about baseball, the "good" readers and the "bad" readers all did well. In fact, the bad readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the good readers who didn't.

In another study, researchers read preschoolers from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds a book about birds, a subject they had determined the higher-income kids already knew more about. When they tested comprehension, the wealthier children did significantly better. But then they read a story about a subject neither group knew anything about: made-up animals called wugs. When prior knowledge was equalized, comprehension was essentially the same. ¹⁴ In other words, the gap in comprehension wasn't a gap in skills. It was a gap in knowledge.

The implication is clear: abstract "reading ability" is largely a mirage constructed by reading tests. A student's ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on many factors, prime among them being his familiarity with the topic. While instruction in the early grades has focused on "learning to read" rather than "reading to learn," many educators have overlooked the fact that part of learning to read is acquiring knowledge.

Research has established that one aspect of reading does need to be taught and practiced as a set of skills, much like math: decoding, the part that involves matching sounds to letters. (For more on decoding, see the article on page 4.) The problem is that the other aspect of reading-comprehension-is also being taught that way. The prevailing approach is to focus on skills and strategies such as "finding the main idea" and "making inferences," with students practicing the skills on books on random topics that have been determined to match their individual reading levels. While there's plenty of evidence that some instruction in some comprehension strategies can be helpful for some children, there's no reason to believe it can turn struggling readers into accomplished ones.

That's particularly true when it comes to nonfiction, which generally assumes more specialized background knowledge. To acquire the knowledge and vocabulary that will help them understand nonfiction, children need to do more than read a single book on a topic before skipping to another one while practicing how to identify text features or determine text structure. They need to stick with a topic for days or weeks, encountering the same vocabulary and concepts repeatedly so they will stick. ¹⁵

It's not so much that particular bits of information are vital in and of themselves-although some certainly are. It's more that people need to have enough facts in their heads to have what one commentator has called "a knowledge party" ¹⁶ -a bunch of accumulated associations that will enable them to absorb, retain, and analyze new information. Education certainly shouldn't end with facts. But if it doesn't begin there, many students will never acquire the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive both in school and in life.

Vocabulary Is Essential, but Not Enough

It's not that educators are unaware of the importance of knowledge and vocabulary. One frequently taught reading comprehension strategy is "activating prior knowledge." If the story is about a trip on an airplane, for example, the teacher might ask kids if they've ever taken one. And if a text assumes knowledge many students don't have, he might quickly supply it. But that kind of on-the-spot injection of information is unlikely to stick without reinforcement. ¹⁷

Teachers are more likely to be aware of the need to build students' vocabulary rather than their knowledge; those gaps are more obvious, and more research has been done on the importance of vocabulary to comprehension. To be sure, it's important to focus on words that are used frequently in academic writing but are unlikely to be acquired through spoken language-words like merchant, fortunate, and benevolent. ¹⁸ But it's impossible to equip children with all the vocabulary they need by teaching it to them directly. During the first several years of schooling, children add eight words a day to their vocabularies, on average; ¹⁹ the only way to expand vocabulary that quickly is to expand knowledge. A single word is often just the tip of an iceberg of concepts and meanings, inseparable from the knowledge in which it is embedded. If you understand the word oar, for example, you're probably also familiar with the concepts of rowboats and paddling.

But building knowledge is trickier than teaching vocabulary. Teachers sometimes overestimate what children already know: I watched a class of second-graders struggle for half an hour through a text about slavery before their teacher realized they didn't understand the word slavery. Kindergartners in one low-income community had an average score in the fifth percentile on a vocabulary test, ²⁰ which reflected their inability to identify pictures showing the meanings of words like penguin, sewing, or parachute, and educators have told me of students who don't know simple words like behind and bead.

At the same time, teachers can underestimate students' capabilities. In addition to limiting children to books at their supposed levels, they may explain an entire text in simple language before reading it aloud, thus depriving students of the chance to wrest meaning from complex language themselves. (For more on misconceptions about reading levels, see the article here.)

"I believe what everybody believes," said one fifth-grade teacher at a high-poverty school in Nevada. "I don't mean to believe it, but it gets into you-this idea that certain learners are less capable of engaging with certain content. And I think that we've been making a lot of mistakes based in compassion for our students.... We make this great effort to smooth the road for them."

After experimenting with a text she was sure would be too challenging for her students-and being surprised by how well they did-she came to realize that she'd been doing them a disservice. "Unless they learn to navigate the bumps," she said, "we're not teaching them to be thinkers or readers." ²¹

Knowledge Is Like Velcro

There are multiple reasons that children from less-educated families arrive at school with less knowledge and vocabulary than their peers from highly educated ones-many having to do with wealth and income, which are highly correlated with levels of education. Children who live in poverty are far more likely to suffer the consequences of traumatic events that can interfere with their ability to learn. ²² Wealthier parents are better able to invest in their children; ²³ that can mean anything from buying more books to paying for tutoring or extracurricular activities.

In recent years, the difference between what lower- and higher-income parents spend on their children has increased dramatically. In 1972, the wealthiest Americans were spending five times as much per child as the lowest-income families. By 2007, parents at all economic levels were spending more on their children, but the highest-income families were spending nine times as much. ²⁴ As "human capital"-skills and education-has become increasingly vital to success, families in the top 20 percent have invested more heavily in ensuring their children can compete. It's become increasingly difficult for the bottom 80 percent to keep up.

Poor and working-class families are also more likely to practice "natural growth" parenting, according to sociologist Annette Lareau, allowing their children lots of unstructured time and tending to give directions rather than soliciting opinions. Middle-class and affluent families, on the other hand, generally practice "concerted cultivation": driving their kids to soccer practice and band recitals, engaging in family debates at dinnertime, and encouraging independent thinking. Each parenting style has its advantages, but the concerted cultivation kids are better equipped to do well in school. ²⁵

And then there's language. Children whose parents read to them frequently become familiar with the sophisticated vocabulary and syntax that appears in written rather than spoken language. ²⁶ Talking is important too. One much-publicized study published in the 1990s estimated that high-income children hear 30 million more words than low-income children by age 4. ²⁷ Recent research has called that estimate into question and focused instead on the number of "conversational turns," or back-and-forth verbal interactions, between parents and children; the more conversational turns, the better a child's language skills. ²⁸ And-although the ubiquity of cell phones and other screens has interfered with conversational turns across the spectrum-on average, higher-income families engage in more of them. ²⁹

Less-educated parents are also less likely to use complex vocabulary in conversation, and teachers may not be exposing students to it either. One study found that children living in high-poverty neighborhoods get "a double dose of disadvantage" as compared to their higher-income peers: the language they hear is less sophisticated both at home and at school. While these children "may have unique linguistic strengths that serve them well in their immediate settings," they were less likely to have the language skills that would enable them to do well academically. ³⁰

Whatever the causes, it's clear that children with certain risk factors begin school with skills that may be almost a year behind those of their peers. ³¹ And the gap only widens over time. ³² The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She'll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge.

This phenomenon of snowballing knowledge accumulation by kids who start out with more-while those who start out with less acquire less-has been dubbed "the Matthew effect." ³³ That's a reference to a line in the Gospel according to Matthew-"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath": or, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." And the longer the Matthew effect is allowed to continue, the harder it is to reverse. That's why it's crucial to envelop students from less-educated families in a knowledge-building environment as early as possible.

Rather than being restricted to the simple material they can read on their own, young children need to listen to their teachers read more complex books aloud and engage in discussions about what they've heard-and, depending on their age, write about it. ³⁴ Even many middle schoolers can take in far more sophisticated content, and the vocabulary that goes with it, through listening and speaking than through their own reading. ³⁵ If teachers organize their read-alouds by topic instead of the skill-of-the-week, children have the chance to hear the same concepts and vocabulary repeatedly. Once they have a general familiarity with a topic, they can read more difficult text about it independently.

The Role of Working Memory

When we try to make sense of what we read, we rely on what cognitive scientists refer to as working memory, something psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham has called the staging ground for thought. Another definition might be consciousness. It's the process whereby we take in new information and combine it with the facts and procedures stored in our long-term memory. The key thing about working memory is that it has a limited capacity. And information in working memory is lost if it isn't quickly "rehearsed"-perhaps articulated or written about. By one estimate, the limit is just 15 to 30 seconds. ³⁶

So time is of the essence when trying to assimilate new information. If we can relate it to something we already know, it speeds up the process considerably. If we need to stop and look up every other word, or puzzle them out from context, we're far less likely to be able to understand and retain what we're reading.

Background knowledge, Willingham explains, also enables a reader to engage in something called chunking. Let's say the text in the 1987 baseball experiment said that the shortstop threw the ball to the second baseman, who threw the ball to the first baseman, resulting in two runners being out. The students who knew a lot about baseball could "chunk" those actions by recognizing them as a double play. But those who knew little about baseball would have to try to remember each step in the series of actions described, which occupies more space in working memory.

Scientists also use the word schema to describe this process. A schema is a mental framework constructed from accumulated information and experience and stored in long-term memory. When people already have a schema for a topic, new information on that topic has something it can stick to. If knowledge about baseball helps readers understand a text about baseball, it follows that knowledge about the world in general equips readers to do well on a test that covers a variety of subjects. And that's exactly what experiments have shown. ³⁷

There's no one right way to provide a high-quality education, and this country is too big and varied for one-size-fits-all prescriptions. But if we're equipped with a basic scientific understanding about which methods are most effective-and most likely to provide an engaging experience for kids-we should all be able to distinguish between approaches that are likely to produce the outcomes we want and those that will only lead to a heartbreaking waste of precious time. The best first step is for a school or district to adopt one of the new content-focused elementary literacy curricula that have appeared on the market-and in some cases online, for free-over the past several years.

We'll need to simultaneously pursue many other reform efforts, of course, including improving teacher training, ensuring that students living in poverty get the mental health and support services they need, and engaging families in their children's learning. But if we don't also give students access to knowledge of the world during elementary school, we'll never achieve the result we want: a system that equips all students to lead productive and fulfilling lives and carry out their responsibilities as members of a democratic society.

Natalie Wexler is an education journalist and coauthor with Judith C. Hochman of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. This article is an excerpt from her book The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System-and How to Fix It (Avery). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright 2019 by Wexler.

Endnotes

1. E. Hanushek et al., "The Achievement Gap Fails to Close," Education Next 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019).
2. S. D. Sparks, "Global Reading Scores Are Rising, but Not for U.S. Students," Education Week, December 5, 2017.
3. Kerry Sylvia, former teacher at Cardozo Education Campus, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, July 12, 2016.
4. David Tansey, former teacher at Dunbar High School, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, April 30, 2016.
5. Kim Stalnaker, teacher at Eastern Senior High School, Washington, D.C., conversation with author, June 16, 2016.
6. M. Balingit, "U.S. High School Graduation Rates Rise to New High," Washington Post, December 4, 2017.
7. M. Dynarski, "Is the High School Graduation Rate Really Going Up?," Brookings (blog), May 3, 2018.
8. K. McGee, "In D.C., 34 Percent of Graduates Received a Diploma against District Policy," NPR, January 29, 2018.
9. R. Chetty, J. N. Friedman, and J. Rockoff, "Great Teaching," Education Next 12, no. 3 (Summer 2012); and E. A. Hanushek et al., "Education and Economic Growth," Education Next 8, no. 2 (Spring 2008).
10. K. G. Bates, "Report Updates Landmark 1968 Racism Study, Finds More Poverty and Segregation," NPR, February 27, 2018; D. DeSilver, "U.S. Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, Is Now Highest since 1928," Fact Tank (blog), Pew Research Center, December 5, 2013; and R. V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017).
11. D. L. Kirp, "Ending the Curse of Remedial Math," New York Times, June 10, 2017. More than two-thirds of community college students need to take remedial math or English classes, which cost them money but don't earn them any credit. Only 15 percent of these students get their degrees on time.
12. L. Holt, "The Baseball Experiment: How Two Wisconsin Researchers Discovered That the Comprehension Gap Is a Knowledge Gap," Amplify Blog, accessed July 28, 2018.
13. D. R. Recht and L. Leslie, "Effect of Prior Knowledge on Good and Poor Readers' Memory of Text," Journal of Educational Psychology 80, no. 1 (March 1988): 16-20.
14. T. Kaefer, S. B. Neuman, and A. M. Pinkham, "Pre-Existing Background Knowledge Influences Socioeconomic Differences in Preschoolers' Word Learning and Comprehension," Reading Psychology 36, no. 3 (2015): 203-231.
15. G. N. Cervetti, T. S. Wright, and H. Hwang, "Conceptual Coherence, Comprehension, and Vocabulary Acquisition: A Knowledge Effect?," Reading and Writing 29, no. 4 (April 2016): 761-779.
16. M. Fordham, "The Knowledge Party in My Head," Clio et cetera (blog), November 21, 2016, www.clioetcetera.com/2016/11/21/the-knowledge-party-in-my-head.
17. D. T. Willingham, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 89.
18. I. Beck, M. McKeown, and L. Kucan, "Choosing Words to Teach," in Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (New York: Guilford Press, 2002), 15-30.
19. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight and Sound: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done about It (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 111-113; and Cervetti, Wright, and Hwang, "Conceptual Coherence."
20. L. C. Moats, "Overcoming the Language Gap," American Educator 25, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 8-9.
21. Linnea Wolters, quoted in E. Hanford, "Common Core Reading: 'The New Colossus,' " NPR, November 11, 2014.
22. N. B. Harris, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); and M. Kirk, "What Kids' Trauma Looks Like across the U.S.," The Atlantic, February 27, 2018.
23. E. Caucutt, "Why Do Poor Children Perform More Poorly Than Rich Ones?," The Conversation, April 23, 2015, www.theconversation.com/why-do-poor-children-perform-more-poorly-than-r....
24. S. Tavernise, "Education Gap Grows between Rich and Poor, Studies Say," New York Times, February 10, 2012.
25. A. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
26. M. Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 85-90.
27. B. Hart and T. R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Brookes Publishing, 1995).
28. A. Trafton, "Back-and-Forth Exchanges Boost Children's Brain Response to Language," MIT News, February 13, 2018.
29. E. Christakis, "The Dangers of Distracted Parenting," The Atlantic, July/August 2018.
30. S. B. Neuman, T. Kaefer, and A. M. Pinkham, "A Double Dose of Disadvantage: Language Experiences for Low-Income Children in Home and School," Journal of Educational Psychology 110, no. 1 (January 2018): 102-118.
31. S. Bernstein et al., "Kindergartners' Skills at School Entry: An Analysis of the ECLS-K," Mathematica Policy Research, July 15, 2014, 3.
32. J. S. Chall and V. A. Jacobs, "The Classic Study on Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump," American Educator 27, no. 1 (Spring 2003). On nationwide reading tests, the gaps don't appear to increase much if you look only at standard deviations, which is the way the results are reported. But it takes far more work to make up one standard deviation at upper grade levels than at lower grade levels. In the early grades, a student might need to make up only one grade level to move up a standard deviation. By eighth grade, it would take three grade levels to move up one standard deviation-and far more at the high school level. David Grissmer, research professor, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, conversation with author, April 27, 2016.
33. K. Stanovich, "Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy," Reading Research Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 360-407.
34. M. J. Adams, "Advancing Our Students' Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts," American Educator 34, no. 4 (Winter 2010-2011): 5; and S. L. Hall and L. C. Moats, "Why Reading to Children Is Important," American Educator 24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 26-33. While class discussion is also important, teachers need to read aloud to children because virtually all written language uses more complex vocabulary and syntax than spoken language, with the only exception being expert witness testimony.
35. D. Fisher and N. Frey, "Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning," The Reading Teacher 68, no. 1 (September 2014): 64-69.
36. R. C. Atkinson and R. M. Shiffrin, "Human Memory: A Proposed System and Its Control Processes," in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Theory and Research, vol. 2, ed. K. W. Spence and J. T. Spence (New York: Academic Press, 1968), 89-195.
37. D. T. Willingham, "School Time, Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension," Science and Education (blog), March 7, 2012.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Despite billions of dollars and massive efforts on the part of thousands of highly dedicated and intelligent people over the past 25 years, the size of the test-score gap between the wealthiest and the poorest students hasn't changed. 1 Our mediocre standing on international literacy rankings is largely a reflection of how low our lowest scores are.

# data[].attributes.body
https://shar.es/aWvE2c

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One sometimes hears that the real goal of education is "learning to learn." As the proverb says, "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime." Better to teach students how to learn facts on their own, rather than teach them facts. The idea sounds appealing, but if it's coupled with the idea that teachers should emphasize cognitive processes (like comprehension and reasoning strategies), and place less emphasis on content, then it's wrong.

The effects that I described in the main article indicate that many of the cognitive skills we want our students to develop-especially reading with understanding and successfully analyzing problems-are intimately intertwined with knowledge of content. When students learn facts they are not just acquiring grist for the mill-they are enabling the mill to operate more effectively. Background knowledge is absolutely integral to effectively deploying important cognitive processes. What does this mean for teachers?

1. Facts should be meaningful. "Fact learning" should not be understood as "rote memorization." The importance of knowledge to cognition does not mean that teachers should assign lists of facts for their students to memorize.* As described in the main article, facts are useful only if they are meaningfully connected to other bits of knowledge. So, fact learning should be thought of as the kind of learning that results from, for example, reading a richly detailed biography-not a barren timeline of a person's life. Teachers should include opportunities for students to learn new material about the world and connect it to prior knowledge wherever possible. Mindless drilling is not an effective vehicle for building students' store of knowledge.

2. Knowledge acquisition can be incidental. Every fact that students learn need not be explicitly taught-students can learn facts incidentally. Incidental learning refers to learning that occurs when you are not specifically trying to learn. Much of what you know stuck in your memory not as a result of your consciously trying to remember it, but as a byproduct of thinking about it, such as when you reflect on a novel word that someone used in conversation or are fascinated by a new fact. When schools use a content-rich curriculum, students have many incidental learning opportunities as they are immersed in meaningful, connected facts throughout the day. Teachers can also look for extra opportunities to provide incidental learning opportunities for their students, for example, by using a vocabulary word that the students likely do not know, but the meaning of which is deducible from the context of the sentence.

3. Not all knowledge needs to be detailed. Note that the cognitive benefits described in this article differ in their knowledge requirements. For example, the knowledge required to increase reading comprehension is often fairly superficial. Using our examples from the main article, you don't need detailed knowledge about penguins or Arnold's life to understand what is meant by the relationship between a fish and a penguin or between Benedict Arnold and a traitor.

Fortunately, this sort of superficial knowledge is easy to pick up incidentally. For example, a rich fourth-grade unit on the American Revolution would likely include extensive information on key players such as King George III, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, but nothing more on Benedict Arnold than an aside emphasizing his role as a traitor. Such an aside would usually be enough to enhance reading comprehension. Most of us spend the majority of our time reading material intended for a general audience and for that material, superficial knowledge is sufficient.

Looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, deep knowledge is needed to attain benefits related to thinking such as the recognition of a chunk (as in the example from the main article of the students who have memorized the distributive property). Practice in a number of different situations is required before knowledge can be used with ease for problem solving.

4. Knowledge learning should start early. Building a store of knowledge works like compound interest-it grows exponentially. For that reason, the earlier that students add to their database of knowledge the better. This process begins at home, long before children attend school. (Note that virtually all learning before children start school is incidental.) All teachers should take the job of teaching content to students seriously, but this job is doubly serious for teachers in preschool and early elementary classrooms. Because of the exponential learning rate, once children fall behind their peers, it becomes increasingly difficult to catch up. These young children can learn little, if any, material via reading, so they must learn by listening to fiction and nonfiction books read aloud, by watching demonstrations, through hands-on experiences, and so forth.

Daniel T. Willingham is professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Cognition: The Thinking Animal. He is author of American Educator's regular feature, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist." His research focuses on the role of consciousness in learning.

*For a full explanation, see "Inflexible Knowledge: The First Step to Expertise," in the Winter 2002 issue of American Educator. ( back to article)

Related Articles
Knowledge: The Next Frontier in Reading Comprehension
Building Knowledge
The Case for Bringing Content into the Language Arts Block and for a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for All Children
By E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
What What Do Reading Comprehension Tests Mainly Measure? Knowledge
Engaging Kids with Content: "The Kids Love It" (PDF)

How We Neglect Knowledge-and Why (PDF)
By Susan B. Neuman

Why the Absence of a Content-Rich Curriculum Core Hurts Poor Children Most (PDF)

How Knowledge Helps
It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning-and Thinking
By Daniel T. Willingham
Knowledge in the Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One sometimes hears that the real goal of education is "learning to learn." As the proverb says, "Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime." Better to teach students how to learn facts on their own, rather than teach them facts.

# data[].attributes.headline
Increasing Opportunities to Acquire Knowledge Through Reading

# data[].attributes.subject
Increasing Opportunities to Acquire Knowledge Through Reading

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.textproject.org/assets/library/papers/Cervetti-Jaynes-Hiebert-increasing-opportunities.pdf

# data[].attributes.headline
Show & Tell: A Video Column / Why Do Students Disengage? 

# data[].attributes.subject
Show & Tell: A Video Column / Why Do Students Disengage? 

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/show-and-tell-a-video-column-why-do-students-disengage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Taylor isn't motivated." How many times have you heard that about a student? It's an explanation for lack of progress that, unfortunately, looks past what might be getting in the student's way.

"I taught it. They didn't learn it." This comment betrays an uninformed view of how learning happens. We have long known that a transmission-of-knowledge model, where students passively receive and then reproduce information, isn't how learning occurs.1

"They just don't care." This kind of reasoning reflects a lack of understanding about the importance of relevance and purpose for learning as a foundation for building from known knowledge to new knowledge.

Too often, we ascribe student barriers to learning in sweeping terms without looking closely at causes. That makes it impossible to see what we might do to make a positive impact. Better to flip the script and examine what's getting in the way of learning, realizing that there are cognitive barriers to effective teaching.

Engagement Tip

Explain the value of learning, increase students' ownership of it, and explore the habits of minds and mindsets to strengthen engagement in the classroom.

Nine Cognitive Barriers...

Drawing on extensive research on how students learn, Chew and Cerbin2 proposed a framework for understanding what might be getting in the way of being able to teach a student effectively. These barriers don't only block students; they represent roadblocks to our own effectiveness. Figure 1 shows the nine cognitive barriers to learning, as well as teaching strategies that aim to overcome them.

...And How to Surmount Them

You can increase the precision of your teaching by aligning your efforts with the barriers you perceive in students. When confronted with a student who isn't making expected progress, resist the urge to focus on outward behaviors alone. Learning struggles that manifest through similar behaviors often have far different root causes. Rather than simply attributing the behavior to disengagement, find out from the student what's getting in the way. Talk with the student about where they're having difficulty-and what's helpful for them-with questions like:

Tell me about a time when you learned something you were interested in learning. What did you do to help yourself?

What's an idea, topic, or project you're doing right now that really interests you?

When you make plans, how do you carry them out?

What do you find to be easy about school? What's more difficult for you?

What learning strategies would you recommend to a future student taking this class?

The idea is to keep the questions open-ended so the student can give you insight into how they perceive themselves as learners. In addition, the student's responses can tell you about whether any ineffective cognitive habits and dispositions are getting in the way. The insights you glean from the conversation can inform your teaching responses.

Gradual Release of Responsibility Instructional Framework

Join Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey for a Virtual Author Workshop series where they will walk you through a deep dive on their groundbreaking work. Seats are limited.

2-part series starts March 14, 2023, 6:30 PM-8:00 PM EDT

In the video accompanying this column, 4th grade teacher Sara Ortega of Chula Vista Elementary School District in California holds a follow-up conference with a student whose comments about her learning had given Sara a glimpse of her student's problematic mental mindset, a barrier that could undermine a teacher's effectiveness. The student seemed to have an externalized belief that it was solely because of the teacher that she'd improved her reading. Sara discusses this with the student to increase her sense of agency, empowering the girl to see her actions as key to reaching her goals. Making these actions explicit will help this girl continue to enact them in her future learning.

Becoming Barrier-Spotters

Let's promise ourselves to not rely on simplistic explains of complex learning barriers that students face. When confronted with outward signs of disengagement, let's dig further to find out what's getting in the way. Effective teachers are strength-spotters who notice what each child brings to the learning community. The best teachers go further to be barrier-spotters-and teach intentionally to remove barriers that can slow student learning.

Show & Tell / Tending to Students' Mindsets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Show & Tell: A Video Column / Why Do Students Disengage?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Taylor isn't motivated." How many times have you heard that about a student? It's an explanation for lack of progress that, unfortunately, looks past what might be getting in the student's way. "I taught it. They didn't learn it." This comment betrays an uninformed view of how learning happens.

# data[].attributes.body
https://shar.es/aWvEuF

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In August 2020, I welcomed 400 educators into my Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) by Design Online Professional Learning Community (PLC). This nine-month deep dive into redesigning instruction through a culturally responsive lens went beyond gimmicks and one-off activities. Then, in January 2021, we welcomed another 600 teachers, instructional coaches, and site leaders who wanted to participate. The CRE by Design virtual platform was a few years in the making, long before the pandemic.

I started playing with the idea in 2017, two years after I published Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. ¹ I wanted to share how the principles of cultural responsiveness, when coupled with the science of learning, can be leveraged for liberatory education-which means positioning students to be the leaders of their own learning by helping them increase their ability to actively improve their cognition.

This is something I learned firsthand when teaching writing to high school students and college freshmen. All of my classroom teaching career was devoted to expository writing. In my credential program, I focused only on writing instruction and reading development. Literacy was (and still is) personal to me. Why? My maternal grandparents who fled the Deep South in 1940 to California were illiterate. Because of Jim Crow segregation, they never got the opportunity to learn to read.

In my early days as an educator, as passionate as I was about helping students become powerful writers, I struggled to help my lowest-performing students of color improve their writing. Many came into my class with skill and knowledge gaps that made critical reading and effective academic writing hard. There was no amount of red ink on their papers that easily changed that reality.

So, I did two things. I stopped using my red pen to correct papers, and I began my own inquiry as teacher-researcher. I leaned into Lisa Delpit's seminal essay, "The Silenced Dialogue," which addressed equity and literacy issues for historically marginalized students. ² I wanted to understand how to use the funds of knowledge ³ my underprepared students brought with them as an asset to accelerate their growth as writers. I read Linda Christensen, a teacher-scholar with the Oregon Writing Project who went on to author Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, to help me reimagine what a writing class could look like for students of color that centered their language experiences and ways of learning rooted in collectivist cultural principles. ⁴ Over time, with more responsive structures, processes, and routines in place, my writing students slowly became the leaders of their own learning. It was an outcome I went on to replicate over and over again as a writing teacher. When I left the classroom to support equity efforts, I shared this knowledge as a coach and curriculum designer.

Now, this body of knowledge is at the core of the CRE by Design Online PLC. Our primary goal has been to use collaborative inquiry to deepen the effective implementation and impact of culturally responsive practice directly on student learning. We asked the bold question: How do we support historically marginalized students-particularly Black, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous students-to be truly independent learners, not just compliant ones? Yet, try as we might, our conversations kept going back to remote learning issues, such as: Should students be able to have cameras off during instruction?

One day during a Zoom Q&A session, a teacher asked the question for the 100th time: "How do I get my students to turn on their cameras?"

"Why is that important to you?" I asked in the spirit of inquiry, trying to get to the real concern behind the question.

"Because it is," she said adamantly. "I want to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing-otherwise, they will fall behind."

We then began to talk about how we can spark their intellectual curiosity instead of demanding cameras on. Curiosity, as I shared in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, stimulates neurotransmitters like dopamine that can entice students and pull them into learning rather than having us cajoling students to engage or making our interactions punitive. Still, there it was: the concern that students were falling behind, especially for students of color and students from under-resourced communities. This concern was coupled with the belief that doubling down on compliance was going to prevent what's been dubbed "learning loss" during remote learning.

Fast forward to this moment, as we prepare for full-time in-person teaching and learning again. It feels like every day there has been a new national report about the damage done to student achievement as a result of "learning loss" during remote learning. ⁵ Many believe that the academic impact of distance learning will have far-reaching effects that will likely exacerbate long-standing opportunity gaps and resulting inequities in academic achievement. Many school districts are preparing post-COVID-19 plans that are aimed at helping students not lose any more academic ground.

The Racialized Nature of the Learning Loss Conversation

Ironically, early in the pandemic, closing school buildings and sheltering in place (for all but essential workers) laid bare systemic racial inequities in education for children of color across grade levels. As a result of the racial justice reckoning happening alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, more educators were able to see the impact of gross inequities in education. The educational disparities went beyond the digital divide and access to technology: the more insidious gaps were in the ability of students to be independent learners during distance learning.

We had not prepared all students equally to be powerful self-directed learners. ⁶ In some cases, we had relied too heavily on over-scaffolding instruction in the name of equitable access for our neediest students, who are disproportionately children of color growing up in chronically and systemically under-resourced communities. ⁷ For the students most in need of enriching learning experiences, we all too often impose a pedagogy of compliance ⁸ that prizes orderliness and completing work over getting to understanding. This point was highlighted in a recent report, The Opportunity Myth, that summarized a study in which almost 1,000 lessons in five school districts were observed. It found that although 71 percent of students were doing what was asked in their assignments (with more than half receiving As and Bs), they were meeting grade-level standards only 17 percent of the time-mainly because the assignments did not ask for grade-level work. ⁹

It is clear that prior to the pandemic, we failed to help the most marginalized, underperforming students strengthen their cognitive muscles through the process of productive struggle so they could carry more of the cognitive load, which left them unprepared for asynchronous learning situations (and for challenges beyond high school). A majority of these students are children of color* and from low-income families and neighborhoods. ¹⁰

This reality became painfully obvious during the pandemic, when high numbers of African American, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous students learning online from home (or wherever they could find an internet connection) found themselves in their zone of frustration rather than in their ideal zone of proximal development. Many simply disengaged from remote learning by turning their cameras off. Others, especially middle and high schoolers, stopped logging in altogether.

Now, COVID-19 learning loss is being compared with summer learning loss, ¹¹ in which some students appear to lose about 25 to 30 percent of their content knowledge and skill between June and September ¹² (despite some recent analyses questioning the widely accepted concept of summer slide ¹³). My fear is that because of the way we talk about the problem, we will respond as we have in the past (particularly under No Child Left Behind) to disparities in academic achievement: double blocks of literacy and added time for mathematics, while dramatically reducing arts, science, social studies, and, in extreme cases, recess-all in the name of increasing literacy and math scores. ¹⁴

How do we avoid post-COVID-19 instructional planning becoming a pedagogy of compliance in an effort to get students "caught up"?

Our dominant narratives around learning loss reveal that we are still oriented around a banking model of learning for Black and brown children; we see their minds as empty accounts into which we must deposit knowledge. ¹⁵ We have framed these students as "behind," while blaming their teachers and families for not making enough standards-based content deposits. This narrative of learning loss takes a deficit view of home-based and community-based learning. It disregards what students have learned in other contexts and what they have learned in class that does not show up on standardized tests. It disregards their existing funds of knowledge and thus fails to recognize the strong foundations on which we could be building.

We Need a Counter-Narrative to the Idea of Learning Loss

From cognitive science, we know that this banking model is not how learning works. ¹⁶ Learning is the brain's prime function-and all of us are wired for high intellectual performance and expansive, self-directed learning, if given the right conditions. Even when we are not aware of it, we are learning all the time-including outside of school. In addition to taking in new information and experiences, we integrate those new bits and pieces of information into our existing background knowledge and mental models (or what cognitive scientists call schema). Realizing that learning happens everywhere, maybe we should be asking different questions: As students devoted less time to traditional classroom-based learning, what did they gain from their home- and community-based learning? What they learned no doubt differs, but have students actually lost anything?

Our counter-narrative to learning loss begins with reframing this period as a time of family- and community-based learning. Children learned something. We need to welcome this new "off topic" knowledge back into the classroom as an asset. If we don't, we send a dangerous message to students that "real" learning only happens in school. That message robs diverse students of the chance to recognize their own agency as learners. In contrast, our counter-narrative embraces the notion of redesigning teaching and learning for liberatory education.

A Path Forward

What are the implications of liberatory education? How do we reimagine what teaching and learning can be as a result of the new bodies of knowledge students will bring with them? How do we avoid overcompensating with compliance-based practices just because our students' funds of knowledge do not clearly meet a standards-based learning target? A recent white paper from the Aspen Institute proposes five principles to guide post-pandemic school planning. ¹⁷ Here, I elaborate on three that are particularly relevant for us to keep in mind as we create instructional plans to revitalize learning and provide the enrichment all students need to reach their potential:

View student success over multiple years.

Use the science of learning to guide us.

Set an agenda for innovation and continuous improvement.

View Student Success over Multiple Years

Let's start with viewing student success over multiple years instead of grade by grade. We must prioritize helping students continue to grow as learners before focusing on covering particular grade-level content. Helping diverse students who are historically marginalized become more powerful learners is the endgame of equity. And, that is not going to happen if we are not making room in our curriculum and pacing guides for students to engage in the type of learning behaviors, like productive struggle and academic conversation, that grow the brain's neural pathways. ¹⁸ Over time, the brain's complex network of neural pathways-what we have come to know as "background knowledge"-helps struggling learners do more rigorous and complex work. In short, the more you know, the easier it is to learn. ¹⁹

Our long view of student success has to be twofold: helping students learn grade-level content while simultaneously coaching them to master essential "learn-how-to-learn" moves that allow them to accelerate their own knowledge and skill mastery over time. We cannot simply give these learn-how-to-learn moves to students. They are cultivated by the students over several years with the coaching support of the teacher and in the context of grasping challenging academic content (i.e., content that is worthy of students' efforts).

Use the Science of Learning to Guide Us

To succeed in this acceleration, we will have to be guided by the science of learning. Based on my experience, it seems that many elementary school educators are familiar with the science of reading, but fewer have heard about the science of learning and development (though American Educator's readers have long had the benefit of Daniel T. Willingham's column, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist"). It might seem like the new kid on the block in education circles, but its research foundation stretches back several decades. This body of knowledge we are calling the science of learning is summarized from cross-disciplinary studies highlighting the social and cognitive science behind how young people learn, develop, and grow their brain power to master complex skills.

One particularly compelling synthesis of emerging and established findings is offered by the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) Alliance. ²⁰ This growing partnership of education leaders, researchers, cognitive scientists, and their organizations is united in the belief that these findings present powerful lessons to transform our education systems (and other child-serving systems) to help young people reach their fullest social, emotional, and academic potential. To elevate the essential understandings from this rich body of research, the SoLD Alliance has articulated eight core findings (see the sidebar "Core Findings for Transforming Education" to the right). ²¹ Four of these core findings- malleability, context, meaning-making, and integration -have immediate implications in our post-COVID-19 school design planning, so I draw on them in the discussion that follows, as we build a vision of liberatory education.

Set an Agenda for Innovation and Continuous Improvement

The first of SoLD's core findings-malleability-is critical for acting on the Aspen Institute's principle of continuous improvement and innovation as we plan for liberatory education. Malleability reminds us that the brain is highly adaptable and resilient. One's ability to learn does not stop, and adversity in life is not predictive of one's cognitive capacity. Our plans for moving past the effects of the pandemic should be inspired and energized by this understanding. While we will need to be sensitive to rebuilding community, repairing relationships with students and families, and helping some families and even whole neighborhoods process the trauma brought on by all the disruption, students are still able to embrace learning when it is purposeful, is joyful, and sparks curiosity.

Liberatory Education = Science of Learning + Culturally Responsive Practice

Although this social-emotional regrounding is essential for healing, it is not sufficient for achieving liberatory education, in which students lead their own learning. We also have to plan for more opportunities for accelerated learning. When I speak of accelerated learning, I am referring to the process of coaching students to expand their ability to process information more effectively and do more complex academic work in order to get more than a year's academic growth in a year's time. The ability of a student to learn new content at faster rates with deeper understanding is the hallmark of liberatory education.

It is only through powerful teaching that we can apprentice students to be active agents in their own learning. This process is going to require them to build and braid together multiple neural, relational, and experiential processes to produce their own unique learning acceleration process. ²² I like to think of it as "watering up" instructional practices with the science of learning instead of watering them down with the compliance-oriented deficit views.

That is why any effort to accelerate learning to achieve greater equity and help all students reach their potential has to couple the science of learning with culturally responsive practice. These two together create a synergetic effect that promotes more equitable outcomes; their combination helps humanize and empower marginalized learners so that they have the social-emotional capacity to level up their learning. The SoLD Alliance's core finding of integration reminds us that learning depends on far more than the brain. The brain is nested within the body, and both are nested in a young person's physical, cultural, cognitive, and emotional environment. Feeling a sense of belonging and intellectual safety free of racial microaggressions is essential.

Connecting Culture and Cognition

Beyond just relationships, we will have to make the culture-cognition connection explicit. ²³ Too many teachers (as well as professional development providers, professors of education, administrators, etc.) think of culture erroneously in terms of superficial multiculturalism; their intent is well-meaning, but their actions are often limited to promoting racial and social harmony in the classroom by offering a feel-good "It's a Small World" environment. Others see the limits of multicultural education and focus on social justice education. They add literature or topics to diversify the content in hopes of increasing diverse students' motivation, engagement, or self-esteem. As summarized in the "Distinctions of Equity" table below, both of these views dramatically underestimate the influence of culture and the instructional changes needed to engage in liberatory education.

In reality, culture-how one makes meaning of the world based on shared beliefs, norms, cosmology, and so forth- is the software to the brain's hardware. Cultural mental models, understandings, and experiences create cognitive "hooks" or reference points that help to organize our schema into a knowledge network that facilitates our understanding of how things work. Our cultural frames of reference reflect the ways our beliefs, knowledge, and behaviors are patterned on a neurological level. ²⁴ The work of being a culturally responsive educator isn't simply about diverse books or social justice curriculum topics. It's about gaining insight into your students as learners and being able to craft cognitive hooks between their funds of knowledge and the standards-based content in authentic and meaningful ways that make learning sticky.

Master Moves for Liberatory Instruction

Our ultimate goal is to design learning so students become self-aware and self-directed as learners. Then they can grow their smarts and expand their intellectual capacity. In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, I offer instructional "master moves" that have a strong connection to the science of learning keys of context and meaning-making as training ground for accelerated learning. Of these master moves, the following three are critical for students to be knowledgeable, not just information filled:

Expand background knowledge in context.

Cultivate information processing skills with cognitive "studio" habits.

Enrich word wealth through contextualized word study.

Expand Background Knowledge in Context

One way that so-called learning loss shows up is in shallow background knowledge. We have to resist thinking that the solution is just about feeding students more random, decontextualized facts and figures. For instruction to be truly liberatory and for learning to be sticky, it has to help students expand what they know, make deep connections across disciplines, and integrate new content into their existing funds of knowledge. This idea of expanding background knowledge is tied to the culturally responsive principle that says: All new information must be coupled with existing funds of knowledge in order to be learned. This is why we have to honor the things students have learned informally during the pandemic. New learning won't stick if we don't help students integrate it with their current understandings.

But, helping them make connections isn't enough. We also need to focus on helping students build and expand their existing background knowledge consistently. Why? The science of learning tells us that background knowledge plays a significant and fundamental role in learning-including in critical thinking and reading comprehension. ²⁵ When building a tall skyscraper, the taller the building, the deeper the hole for the foundation must be. The same holds true in education. The more rigorous and complex the learning, the deeper general background knowledge needs to be. Background knowledge is essentially about meaning-making.

The National Research Council's findings in the seminal report How People Learn ²⁶ shows that having background knowledge is not the same as having a collection of disconnected facts. Background knowledge is connected and organized around important concepts (reinforcing this key distinction is why I often use the terms funds of knowledge and schema).

One of the fastest ways to accelerate learning is to authentically build students' background knowledge. ²⁷ Here's the rub: all new learning must be coupled with and integrated into existing knowledge by the learner, because only the student can build background knowledge.

To cultivate that expansion of background knowledge, teachers can create a variety of opportunities for students to learn new things that might interest them that can be related to the grade-level content they will be covering in future units. And to help broaden students' interests, teachers can provide space in the curriculum for them to follow their curiosity, with a little scaffolding:

Create a Netflix-like resource list of developmentally appropriate documentaries, nonfiction books, nature shows, and the like that are linked to the content standards. Ask students to offer titles of movies, graphic novels, and documentaries that they've devoured.

Let students choose content from the resource list once or twice a month.

Gamify the process to encourage intellectual curiosity that will keep students motivated. For example, use a 30-day challenge format or turn it into a scavenger hunt. Keep it nongraded (learning for the joy of learning).

Create fun ways for them to process the new information. Ask them to relate it to what they already know using a thinking routine like "I Used to Think, but Now I Think."

Cultivate Information Processing Skills with Cognitive "Studio" Habits

Although the expansion of background knowledge sounds simple enough, experienced teachers know that this process of integrating new and existing information and understandings is quite challenging. As the thinking routine described above hints at, sometimes prior knowledge is not accurate, which can hinder comprehension and integration of new knowledge. And, even when prior knowledge does not need to be corrected, often new knowledge is only partially understood, which also may hinder assimilation. To help the process of integrating new content with students' funds of knowledge, teachers need to coach students to develop internal cognitive routines for processing new content that are grounded in the craft and techniques of deep learning.

Building background knowledge and understanding new content requires turning inert facts and figures into usable knowledge. This calls for what I call "cognitive chewing" on the part of the student. In cognitive science, it's called information processing, ²⁸ and it is at the heart of liberatory education. Students need a set of learning-how-to-learn "studio" habits that help them with the business of learning, just like artists develop a set of studio habits to sharpen their craft and technique around their chosen art forms-writing, sculpting, painting, etc.

Too often, when we deem students behind academically, we increase compliance measures and actually decelerate learning. We over-scaffold rather than coach students to engage in productive struggle to process the content. In contrast, liberatory practices grounded in the science of learning focus on building student independence through developing their own repertoire of studio habits.

Note that cognitive studio habits differ from the typical set of disposition-oriented "habits of mind" many teachers are familiar with. ²⁹ Those are generalized dispositions toward thinking that are mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent, successful people when they are confronted with challenges during learning.

To help students to cultivate their own studio habits, and thereby improve their information processing skills, teachers can:

Coach students to be meta-strategic. While the popular notion of metacognition focuses on being an observer of one's thinking in the moment, being meta-strategic focuses on cognitive planning and task analysis in order to size up the task and select the right cognitive tools and strategies for the job.³⁰

Provide adequate time for processing. Cognitive scientists have long known that working memory (i.e., the mental space in which information processing happens) is limited-but what does this mean for teaching? Simply put, it means we need to pause active learning to give students time to chew on the new information and make connections with their existing knowledge. Honor this processing time. With our youngest students, it's helpful to pause and process every few minutes. With adolescents and young adults, pause and process at least every 20 minutes.

Provide visual processing tools. Effective pausing and processing often requires more active manipulation of the content than we can provide students in a brief turn-and-talk structure. Common processes that add visual supports to ongoing verbal work,** like sketchnoting, thinking maps, or thinking routines (such as "Parts, Purposes, and Complexities"³¹), can be external tools students add to their internal cognitive toolkit. Over time, these are used less often as external scaffolding tools, and the thinking routine or processing tool becomes a permanent internal cognitive structure in their brain for turning facts and figures from inert information into usable knowledge. The added benefit is that these visual processing tools become part of their lifelong toolkit for thinking through complex problems.

Offer students the option of choosing from a variety of tools. Everyone doesn't have to use the same cognitive tool at the same time-though everyone should have the same opportunities to master a variety of tools. For liberatory education, each student is building a customized set of studio habits. When teachers have created time and space for this, it is easier to manage.

Enrich Word Wealth Through Contextualized Word Study

The way the brain organizes and maintains its schema is deeply related to authentic vocabulary development. Think of vocabulary richness as the brain's Google search engine. Deep background knowledge and word wealth go hand in hand. That is why our third master move is robust, contextualized word study.

When teaching vocabulary development, we have to resist the old school (pun intended) practice of only creating a word wall and not interacting with it or merely front-loading vocabulary without ever talking about those words during a lesson. That's not how we learn words. We learn them actively in context. Our brain uses the three branches of word study for this process: word play, word consciousness, and word knowledge. This is where the science of learning intersects with the science of reading. When our vocabulary expands, we become better thinkers, stronger readers, and more powerful writers. Why? Because words themselves are a form of background knowledge. When word wealth is developed in context, students are not merely learning vocabulary, they are mastering terms that represent whole bodies of knowledge. These are known as "concept words." Take the word democracy, for example. A second-grader may learn about democracy with a teacher who engages the children in deciding what their classroom rules will be or by connecting to community norms they are learning at home. An eighth-grader in a US history course may come to understand the complicated aspects of democracy from America's Jim Crow era through the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And a 12th-grader in an American civics course may grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of our democracy today in light of globalization.

We have to help students build "word wealth" as part of an ongoing process of building cognitive capacity. The key is making it fun and letting students own the process as their curiosity takes them down different paths based on their own community context. Here are some key tenets of word learning:

Play with words to stimulate intellectual curiosity about how words work using games like Taboo and providing time for students to explore the words that catch their interest.

Introduce morphology to students to highlight word knowledge and help them tune into roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Make it a regular practice with each new unit. Begin with word curiosities to spark interest.

Build word consciousness through the study of word evolution in engaging ways. For example, students can trace the evolution of slang terms across generations and regions through oral interviews (or Zoom chats) with aunts, uncles, and cousins in different age ranges and parts of the country or world.

Create explicit bridges between vocabulary development and the other master moves described earlier. Coach students to always notice and name similarities and differences in how language is used between their community and school contexts. As students consume the offerings from the Netflix-style resource list for expanding their background knowledge, get them to track new words as well as how familiar words are used in new ways. Teach them to use visual tools specifically for word learning, like a Frayer Model graphic organizer³² or concept mapping, as part of their cognitive studio habits to capture words into their own personal dictionaries. Above all, cultivate a culture of word learning that builds collective word wealth over time.

Conclusion

Many schools will be looking to the science of learning and culturally responsive practice to improve teaching and learning and ameliorate post-COVID-19 learning loss. Yet, so many existing pre-COVID-19 structures, processes, and supposed "best practices" run counter to what we understand about information processing and the eight core findings from the science of learning and development. In addition, there are still myths and misconceptions about culture and the role it plays in learning. We too often reduce culturally responsive teaching to relationships, motivation, or engagement. In reality, it carries the blueprint for liberatory education by helping historically marginalized students who are underperforming to engage in deeper learning by expanding their brain power. We don't want to miss the moment. Students have been continuously learning during the pandemic at home and in their communities. We have to honor this new knowledge. We have to learn to leverage it wisely.

This simply means that as classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and school site leaders, we will need to be in a continuous process of unlearning, relearning, and reflecting in ways that empower students to be the leaders of their own learning.

Zaretta Hammond, a former writing teacher, has been a national education consultant for more than two decades. She is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students and a member of the Center for the Collaborative Classroom's Board of Trustees. Previously, she worked with the National Equity Project.

*As explained in "Suppressed History: The Intentional Segregation of America's Cities" in the Spring 2021 issue of American Educator, Black families were prevented from buying homes and building wealth. ( return to article)

†The five principles are "ensure equity and engagement," "take a holistic view to set a coherent strategy," "ground the work int he science of learning," "take a long-term view of student success," and "embed an innovation and learning agenda." The white paper is avilable for free here. ( return to article)

‡To ensure your knowledge of the science of reading is up to date, see Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, 2020 by Louisa C. Moats. ( return to article)

§For the latest installment, see here. For the free online archive, see here. ( return to article)

** Combining visual and verbal processing, while avoiding the pitfalls of accidentally distracting students, can be tricky. For guidance, see "Sparking Interest, Reducing Learning?" in the Fall 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. Z. Hammond, Culturally Response Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Diverse Students (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2015).
2. L. Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children," Harvard Educational Review 58, no. 3 (August 1988): 280-98.
3. L. Moll et al., Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005).
4. L. Christensen, Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2017).
5. See, for example, M. Kuhfeld and B. Tarasawa, "The COVID-19 Slide: What Summer Learning Loss Can Tell Us About the Potential Impact of School Closures on Student Academic Achievement," Collaborative for Student Growth brief, NWEA, May 2020; E. Hanushek and L. Woessmann, The Economic Impacts of Learning Losses, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, September 2020; E. Dorn et al., "COVID-19 and Learning Loss-Disparities Grow and Students Need Help," McKinsey, December 8, 2020; and K. Reilly, "The Learning Gap Is Getting Worse as Schools Rely on Remote Classes, Especially for Students of Color," Time, December 8, 2020.
6. Z. Hammond, "Looking at SoLD Through an Equity Lens: Will the Science of Learning and Development Be Used to Advance Critical Pedagogy or Will It Be Used to Maintain Inequity by Design?," Applied Developmental Science 24, no. 2 (May 22, 2019): 151-58.
7. G. Ladson-Billings, Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
8. M. Haberman, "The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching," Phi Delta Kappan 73, no. 4 (December 1991): 290-94.
9. TNTP, The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down-and How to Fix It, September 25, 2018.
10. B. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).
11. D. Irving, "The COVID Slide: How to Help Students Recover Learning Losses," RAND Review, July 9, 2020; and Kuhfeld and Tarasawa, "The COVID-19 Slide."
12. D. Quinn and M. Polikoff, "Summer Learning Loss: What Is It, and What Can We Do About It?," Brookings, September 14, 2017.
13. P. von Hippel, "Is Summer Learning Loss Real?: How I Lost Faith in One of Education Research's Classic Results," Education Next 19, no. 4 (Fall 2019).
14. Knowledge Matters Campaign, "Restoring Wonder and Excitement to the Classroom," March 2016, knowledgematterscampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WhyKnowledgeMatters-1.pdf; and Horizon Research, Highlights from the 2018 NSSME+ (Chapel Hill, NC: National Science Foundation, January 2019).
15. Dorn et al., "COVID-19 and Learning Loss"; and Hanushek and Woessmann, The Economic Impacts.
16. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching.
17. Aspen Institute Education and Society Program, "Recovery and Renewal: Principles for Advancing Public Education Post-Crisis," May 2020.
18. J. Zull, The Art of the Changing Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2002).
19. R. E. Nisbett, "Schooling Makes You Smarter: What Teachers Need to Know About IQ," American Educator 37, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 10-19, 38-39.
20. Science of Learning and Development Alliance, How the Science of Learning and Development Can Transform Education: Initial Findings, May 2020.
21. Science of Learning and Development Alliance, How the Science of Learning.
22. P. Cantor et al., "Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context," Applied Developmental Science 23, no. 4 (2019): 307-37.
23. National Research Council, How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (Washington, DC: National Academies, 2018).
24. Y. Jackson, Pedagogy of Confidence: Inspiring High Intellectual Performance in Urban Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011).
25. D. T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2021).
26. National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academies, 2000).
27. D. Fisher and N. Frey, Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle (New York: Heinemann, 2009).
28. A. W. Boykin and P. Noguera, Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving from Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2011).
29. A. Costa, "Habits of Mind," Institute for Habits of Mind, habitsofmindinstitute.org/about-us/hear-art.
30. R. Ritchhart, Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).
31. Project Zero, "Parts, Purposes, and Complexities: Looking Closely," Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2019, pz.harvard.edu/resources/parts-purposes-complexities.
32. IRIS Center, "What Should Content-Area Teachers Know About Vocabulary Instruction: Page 7: Building Vocabulary and Conceptual Knowledge Using the Frayer Model," Vanderbilt University, 2010, iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sec-rdng/cresource/q2/p07.

[illustrations by Gaby D'Alessandro]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In August 2020, I welcomed 400 educators into my Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) by Design Online Professional Learning Community (PLC). This nine-month deep dive into redesigning instruction through a culturally responsive lens went beyond gimmicks and one-off activities. Then, in January 2021, we welcomed another 600 teachers, instructional coaches, and site leaders who wanted to participate.

# data[].attributes.headline
Examining the Research Base for Literacy Accelerators & the Intersections for Equitable Personalization 

# data[].attributes.subject
Examining the Research Base for Literacy Accelerators & the Intersections for Equitable Personalization 

# data[].attributes.body
https://achievethecore.org/content/upload/1_Executive%20Summary.pdf

# data[].attributes.headline
Why A Structured Phonics Program is Effective

# data[].attributes.subject
Why A Structured Phonics Program is Effective

# data[].attributes.headline
Which is best? Analytic or synthetic phonics?

# data[].attributes.subject
Which is best? Analytic or synthetic phonics?

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/which-is-best-analytic-or-synthetic-phonics#sthash.tyVOBCE8.y1gKwU7i.dpbs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on February 4, 2018 and was revised and reposted on August 28, 2021. Recently, a research study on "connected phonation" appeared (Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri, 2021) that addressed a problem with synthetic phonics discussed below. It found that teaching students to sound out words in a more blended fashion improved student reading performance. This reminded me of a study that Suzanna Pflaum and Ernie Pascarella did back in the 1980s; they found that explicitly teaching blending also improved synthetic phonics outcomes. The point is that one of the major problems of synthetic phonics can be addressed successfully through instruction, but it is not clear that this adjustment is sufficient to make synthetic phonics better than analytic. Though folks have argued over this for over 50 years at this point, there is still not a direct experimental comparison. In other words, despite the new study, the advice given here still appears to be sound. I've taught literacy and literacy courses in every grade from K-graduate school. I take the view that synthetic phonics taught directly and systematically is essential to any literacy program. However, we also propose that teachers be given the training an option to use analytic phonics when, after reasonable attempts of using direct instruction, the synthetic phonics approach fails a particular child. I recognize that currently virtually no one is doing it that way. Now my criticism of systematic synthetic phonics is not that it shouldn't be done, I believe that it should. Rather it's that the way it is being done in many places is taking up far too much instructional time. Is there a middle ground that would help teachers help students? I await your answer. Shanahan response:
Forty-eight years ago, I was taking my first course in the teaching of reading. The previous fall I had been tutoring reading in an inner-city classroom in Pontiac, Michigan. I didn't plan on becoming a teacher, but the experience intrigued me, so I wanted to know more.

I was taught in that college class that there were two kinds of phonics: synthetic and analytic. These supposedly differed in effectiveness and so the only reasonable approach was analytic phonics. I dutifully recorded this in my notes. Basically, synthetic phonics taught children letter-sound correspondences and then had kids synthesizing words by blending the sounds for each of these in the following fashion:

Analytic phonics, on the other hand, focused on combining larger sound units (such as word families or phonograms: ab, ack, ad, ag, am, an, ap, at, etc.), or using known words as analogies for figuring out unknown words. Using that a student might approach decoding like this:
"I already know the words big and rat and here is a new word bat... so it starts out like /b/ig and ends up like r/at/... so it must be /bat/."
My professors claimed analytic phonics was better because students wouldn't get confused by all those extra vowel sounds that plagued synthetic phonics (it's impossible to pronounce most consonants without adding a vowel sound, hence we may end up with /buh/ rather than /b/.

Then I became a first-grade teacher.

I taught analytical phonics lessons, following all the steps, and my kids-well some of my kids-did fine. The others struggled to make sense of those lessons. They were trying to learn what I was teaching but found it too complicated or abstract. These 6-year-olds were just confused by it all.

So, I started to "cheat."

Because my students were having trouble I began "simplifying" my instruction by teaching synthetic phonics lessons and that seemed to help. I saw it as a useful expedient, teaching synthetic phonics to get the kids started more straightforwardly.

Jump ahead 28 years... I served on the Alphabetics committee of the National Reading Panel. We reviewed the 38 existing experimental studies on phonics instruction in grades K-12.

We found that systematic phonics instruction was best. Please note the highlighted word. It is amazing how many phonics proponents mistakenly read that word as "synthetic."

What we meant by systematic is that successful decoding instruction employed a specific sequential phonics curriculum. Kids did best when their teachers employed such a regimen. This was better than trying to teach phonics skills as kids seemed to need them. We didn't conclude that one particular sequence was best, since so many of these schemes had worked well, only that schools needed to follow a well-planned sequence.

What did we find out about synthetic versus analytic phonics?

Across those 38 studies, synthetic instruction led to higher average effect sizes. That means kids taught synthetic phonics scored higher on reading tests than those taught analytic phonics. However, that difference wasn't statistically significant. That means that the difference was so small that could just be a chance occurrence rather than any consistent genuine superiority.

Since then, there have been some reviews that have claimed that synthetic phonics really is better, but these have not controlled for some important differences, so I wouldn't trust those.

That means that phonics instruction is beneficial, but there is no clear learning difference between synthetic and analytic phonics.

Given this, based on my personal teaching experiences, I'd begin with synthetic phonics (or would insert synthetic supports into an analytic program if I were required to teach that). It's just easier for kids.

However, at some point kids do need to analyze words (and this analysis should consider both phonemic and morphological features, addressing pronunciation, spelling, and meaning implications of these patterns).

The big take away:
If kids are having trouble learning However, if kids are having trouble applying something that they have learned, then you need to complicate it. something, simplify it.
No matter what your beliefs about learning the alphabetic system, we are teaching it to young children. Simplifying things to get them started makes a lot of sense-and synthetic approaches are relatively easy to understand.

When children know their phonics skills but struggle to read or spell words, then working with word analogies and getting kids to thinking about alternative pronunciations of spelling patterns ( bread, break, bead) is the way to go.

The idea of combining synthetic and analytic phonics instruction violates no research, and if done well, may help more kids to succeed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Which is best? Analytic or synthetic phonics?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on February 4, 2018 and was revised and reposted on August 28, 2021. Recently, a research study on "connected phonation" appeared (Gonzalez-Frey & Ehri, 2021) that addressed a problem with synthetic phonics discussed below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

# data[].attributes.headline
Building Instruction in ARC Core Checklist

# data[].attributes.subject
Building Instruction in ARC Core Checklist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
TCS Leadership Learning Walk Reflection Tool-V1