Teach stuff that matters...
A history teacher sounds off on the science of reading
There is a terrible game that history teachers play. It’s the one where a fellow teacher says,
“I had a student who didn’t know who fought to keep slavery, the North or South.”
And you reply,
“I can top that. I had a student who didn’t know who won the American Revolution.”
Though I cannot but help laugh at Richard Lederer’s “The World According to Student Bloopers,” I also have a deep sadness and sense of outrage when confronted with how little our students know. This “game” I have described is pretty horrific if we think about it.
Every few years we see the headlines about the low percentage of students who don’t know the years of the Civil War or who the U.S. fought in World War II. Perusing the results of the NAEP is disheartening, and adults do not fare much better in the realm of civic understanding. It might be comforting (thought I’m not sure why) to realize that this is NOT a new problem. The New York Times reported on students’ poor knowledge of history back in 1943. I imagine we could find even earlier examples.
As a high school teacher, I used to wonder what the on earth the middle school teachers were doing. My friends who are college professors wonder about the high school teachers. As a middle school teacher, I wondered what the elementary school teachers were doing. I’m sure many grade school teachers wonder what the teacher the year before was doing, and we all sometimes wonder about the parents.
This is not helpful. Blaming previous teachers before us or parents is simplistic. Nor can we blame it on the phones (though they don’t help!) And yet both of the examples at the top of this post are from actual high school juniors. And those are things they should know from grade school.
Let me be clear: I am NOT blaming grade school teachers. Or even administrators. This is larger problem that involves many moving parts. Fortunately, I don’t think the solution is terribly complicated. Neither do people who know way more than I do. In the trailer for the 2023 documentary The Right to Read, literacy expert Dr. Kymyona Burk noted that “Illiteracy is one of the most solvable issues of our time.”
So here is my not-at-all-original idea:
Teach social studies & science starting in Kindergarten!
Educators often say we want our middle and high school students to engage in meaningful analysis and critical thinking; but it’s hard to do that when so many are missing the basics.
How I reached this not-at-all original conclusion about the importance of science and social studies
In the summer of 2017, I picked up an issue of The American Educator from one of my “I’ll read it when I have more time” piles. In that issue, I chanced upon an article, “One Sentence at a Time: The Need for Explicit Instruction in Teaching Students to Write” by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, co-authors of The Writing Revolution. The idea was so simple, but POWERFUL: content will improve student writing and writing will improve students’ content knowledge. I bought their book. I read the article about it in The Atlantic and checked out the program. I wrote about how I used some of the ideas in my classroom. (If you’re a history teacher, check out those quick, easily-implemented ideas.)
I browsed through a few more back issues of The American Educator — what other gems might be in here? The concept of “grit” was having a moment in my community, and Daniel Willingham’s column, “Ask the Cognitive Scientist: “Grit” Is Trendy, But Can It Be Taught?” caught my eye. (Answer: no.) I bought his book, Why Students Don’t Like School and read some of his other articles.
A cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham "How Knowledge Helps” and his low budget video, “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading” do a fabulous job of explaining the relationship between knowledge and literacy.
And then Emily Hanford’s podcast, “Sold a Story” went viral. And the documentary The Right to Read about literacy advocate Kareem Weaver. And Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap and her Substack Minding the Gap And Amplify’s podcast series, “The Science of Reading.” (Check out next week’s webinar series; looks awesome!)
That is the back story on how I began to put the puzzle together: how I came to understand why so many students (and adults) don’t know things I thought they should, and why they struggled with reading and writing. I will explore this more in future posts. Concern about a lack of social studies and science instruction in elementary education is having a moment, and I want to be part of the conversation and, more importantly, part of the solution.
Learning to read—and teaching things that matter to help students do it— could not be more important. As literacy advocate Kareem Weaver has pointed out, it is an issue of social justice. I was lucky to grow up in a household filled with books, with a family who took me to museums and libraries. I did the same for my children. Our public schools can be the great equalizer for those who do not have the privileges I had. Let’s start by teaching science and social studies to children.