This post originally appeared on Substack.
Call me crazy, but if you give students a passage to read about volcanoes, why on earth would your objective be to find the main idea of the passage instead of, well, to learn about volcanoes?
I ask this after a webinar about the science of reading and the still-not-yet-won-battle to move away from “reading strategies” and move towards teaching students about the world. Even if you are teaching K-2, let’s say, and your #1 goal is to teach students how to read, the whole point is so they can read about the world. We read to learn about other times, places, peoples, animals, nature, inventions, things. The ultimate goal isn’t really reading—it’s learning.
What I am NOT saying is the well-intentioned, but unfortunately, misguided idea that first kids learn to read and then they read to learn.
What that misses is that when we read we are always reading about something. We are always reading to learn something.
When we don’t center content in the earliest grades, we pay an enormous opportunity cost. We miss years of opportunity to teach kids about weather and clouds, states and presidents, different countries and the people who live in them, the different religions we all have and the foods we eat and how those foods are grown and what kind of animals live in mountains and what kind live in deserts. And what even is a desert in the first place and that a desert is not the same as dessert.
(Because when we read, we are reading words and words have spelling.)
Words are cool, and kids think so too. Recently, I attended a webinar led by Sean Morrissey, a guru of words if I ever met one. (Check out his Word Mapping Project!) He regaled us with a story of a 4th grader who was quite elated about being able to use the word egregious the next time the ref makes a bad call at her soccer game. As a middle school teacher, I have heard my students complain about learning vocabulary, but then witnessed their pride when they use one of the words to tell me how their class is so much better than what they’ve heard about the obstreperous class that precedes them.
Kids want to learn. They are sponges. But if we don’t capitalize on that when they are young, we miss the opportunity to provide the knowledge that will help them learn the more advanced material in middle and high school. Any teacher who has ever switched from teaching an upper grade to a lower one knows that feeling of, “wow, they’re so much more enthusiastic about learning in X grade.” I noticed it when I shifted from high school to middle school, and my elementary school colleagues say the same thing when they move from 5th to 4th and so on.
I was in a 4th grade classroom last week and was delighted to see nearly every hand shoot up as the teacher asked them about one of the scientists they had just studied. I am currently reading weekly with one of those students. Her interests are wide. She’s a big fan of Roald Dahl and Judy Blume, but today we read Jaguar vs. Skunk (Who Would Win?), a nonfiction book comparing the two mammals. And because it was short, we had time to re-read a book about Robert Smalls, a man from South Carolina, who successfully escaped from slavery during the Civil War. The week before, she chose a graphic novel about a boy’s basketball team that embraced kung fu during practice.
And when flipping through the books to look for our next one, I paused for a moment on one about volcanoes.
“Oooh,” she exclaimed.
But just because K-5 students are interested in a gazillion things doesn’t mean we should teach about all those things. Choosing a variety of books to read for fun, or with your once-a-week volunteer who comes in to read is one thing. But planning a curriculum is something else. Teaching about too many topics about too many things is a mistake.
Why? Because jumping around from topic to topic in K-5, without systematically building comprehensive knowledge, doesn’t create the kind of rich schema that helps lead to future knowledge building. This is exactly what elementary science educator Olivia Mullins wrote about in a recent post, “What it looks like when content isn’t cohesive: Part II.” (See also this piece from Natalie Wexler, “How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?” where she unpacks Olivia Mullins’ post.)
Mullins describes a unit that moves from the invention of the telephone, to a poem about buffalos to a girl’s experience on the Oregon Trail to baseball to the Statue of Liberty.
Seriously?? The disconnect among those topics is just bizarre. (There is a connection between buffalos and westward expansion, but that connection was not made.)
There is so much in the world to learn about, we can’t possibly teach it all. So educators must be mindful about what we include in the curriculum and, perhaps even more careful, about what we leave out.
In the elementary years, we can afford to be broad, but even then we must make decisions. Those decisions should be based on thoughtful criteria about what will build the kind of knowledge that leads to future learning.1
Susan Pimentel and David and Meredith Liben offer a nuanced explanation of why organizing curriculum by topic (rather than broad themes) makes more sense and creates more opportunity for compounding knowledge. Check that out here.
The Connection between Motivation and Knowledge
An important thing we know from the science of learning is about motivation. Counterintuitively, we are motivated by our success— once we actually begin succeeding at something. As Nidhi Sachdeva and Jim Hewitt have explained,
A student’s lack of motivation in math class should not be viewed as a problem that can be solved by devising new, more exciting activities. Instead, it should be understood as a symptom of a deeper issue: the student lacks the prior knowledge necessary to complete the task. . . . No matter how engaging the activity or how motivated the student may seem, these gaps in foundational knowledge will continue to hinder progress until they are addressed.2
What if the reason students seem less enthusiastic in older grades is because they realize they don’t know enough? Because they are lost? Because they haven’t got the foundational knowledge to support what we are teaching them?
I think back to moments in my classes when students perked up because they were able to make connections to previous learning. Lessons about Chicago and industrialization resonate because, living in the Chicago area, they are familiar with it. They have learned all about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 in elementary school, so the industrial rise of Chicago following the fire is more meaningful to them.3
Sadly, there were not as many of those moments as I would have liked. It is not the fault of their previous teachers; it is the system. It is the lack of attention to coherence in curriculum, to vertical articulation— discussions about what is taught at each grade level. When I taught high school, I had conversations with the middle school teachers…wait for it…never. Similarly, when I taught middle school there were no discussions with elementary teachers about what social studies was taught K–5, nor with the high school teachers about what they hoped our students would learn. These sorts of conversations are sorely needed.
If we want students to read well, we have to give them something worth knowing. And enough of it that it sticks. That means making deliberate choices about content, building it coherently across grades. It means treating knowledge not as a byproduct of reading, but as its purpose.
Because if you give students a reading about volcanoes, the goal should be to learn about volcanoes.
And it’s that knowledge that makes the next reading—and the next, and the next—make sense.
Lauren S. Brown is a teacher/consultant of the U.S. History Teachers’ Lounge and editor/writer of Lauren Brown on Education.
- Check out the Knowledge Matters Review Tools for outstanding criteria. ↩︎
- See here for more of the evidence from Nidhi Sachdeva and Jim Hewitt. You can also read an earlier piece of mine, What Exercise Taught Me about Student Motivation. ↩︎
- See this post of mine on MiddleWeb about the kinds of connections we can make across disciplines. ↩︎