To Read Stuff, You Have to Know Stuff with Kelly Gallagher

Episode 251

One of the most consistent findings in reading research is this: how much you know determines how far you can go as a reader.

In this episode, we’re joined by Kelly Gallagher, author of To Read Stuff, You Have to Know Stuff, to explore why knowledge is central to comprehension and what that means for classroom instruction.

Kelly helps us rethink the long-standing emphasis on isolated reading strategies and instead focus on building knowledge at multiple levels: word, sentence, passage, article, and book.

Kelly offers clear examples and practical thinking that will help you reflect on how knowledge is built over time and how we can design instruction that goes deeper, not just wider.

RESOURCES

• To Read Stuff, You Have To Know Stuff by Kelly Gallagher
• Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week 

If you’re enjoying Melissa & Lori Love Literacy, bring us to your school or event.

We offer keynotes, presentations, and live podcast-style sessions focused on practical, science of reading–aligned strategies aligned to our podcast and book, The Literacy 50. Email LiteracyPodcast@greatminds.org to learn more.

Get free resources and updates at literacypodcast.com.

Transcript

Knowledge Drives Reading Comprehension

Melissa 0:21

You've probably heard that knowledge plays a huge role in reading comprehension. But you may not always be sure what that means for day-to-day instruction. In this episode, we get concrete about what knowledge building actually looks like.

Lori 0:35

We're joined by Kelly Gallagher, author of To Read Stuff, You Have to Know Stuff, to explore how knowledge builds, from words and sentences to passages, articles, and full books, and how thinking differently about knowledge can help students make sense of what they read. Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori. And I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa 1:02

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori 1:07

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa 1:13

Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Kelly. Welcome to the podcast. We have been fans of yours since we worked in Baltimore together. Um, and we're just so excited to talk to you and to talk to you about your new book.

Kelly Gallagher 1:30

Well, I'm very pleased to be here and uh a fan of you and your podcast as well.

Lori 1:37

Oh, well, thank you. That's very kind. We really, I really mean it. We've we've been talking about you for a long, long time. So you've been on our list for a while. We're so glad to have you here. Um, I do want to jump right in though, because it your book is phenomenal and we we really loved reading it. Um, but one of the most replicated findings in research, right? We we know this is true. It how much you know determines how far you can go as a reader. And I love that. How much you know determines how far you can go. So when you say to read stuff, you have to know stuff, what are you hoping that teachers immediately understand about reading and reading comprehension?

Becoming A Literacy Teacher

Kelly Gallagher 2:19

Well, the exact line that I cite in the book is one of the most highly replicated findings of education research is that a good predictor of how much students will learn tomorrow is how much they know today. And so this kind of came home to me when I was in the classroom because I, and I was a high school teacher for 35 years. And so I'm not talking about emerging literacy here. I'm talking about kids who already have some fluency. But I would say for secondary students or maybe even grades four through 12, but especially when they got to me in high school, the number one problem they could read the words. It wasn't a fluency issue or phonemic awareness issue. They could read the words. But if you don't know what the International Monetary Fund is, then you can't really understand too much of what you're reading. Uh and one way I would always illustrate this to my students is I would always bring in a political cartoon where they could read the words, but they had no idea what it was about.

Lori 3:27

Yeah, that's such a good point. Political cartoons or any, like I think jokes actually, jokes, you have to really understand a whole lot of background knowledge in order to laugh about, right? You there's a lot of stuff you have to know to be able to laugh at that joke. Exactly. That's uh that's such a great thing. What did your students realize, like as you would as you did that? Were they like, oh, I don't get it. I can read these words, but like what does it mean?

Kelly Gallagher 3:50

I think it was a revelation to them. Uh it was my way of introducing something called article of the week, which I have I did for many, many years with the kids. I'm still posting them actually on my website. Um but um I realized, you know, when I had a senior who couldn't tell me who the vice president of the United States was, but could identify, you know, theme in Lord of the Flies, that that was kind of a moment in my career where I shifted from being a literature teacher to a literacy teacher. And I know you guys love literacy, uh, but um that that was a real pivotal moment for me. And so for many, many years, I worked very hard via the Article of the Week of trying to get them out of their entertainment silos uh and get them to broaden their knowledge because uh I really do believe to read stuff you have to know stuff.

Melissa 4:56

That point about the literacy teacher to or literature teacher to literacy teacher, I that is home with me even. I think that you know, I I was English teacher um at a high school first, you know, and I think that I went in with that idea of being a literature teacher and realized very quickly a lot of my students needed a little more support. And I think then I moved to middle school. And I think my idea there was like, yes, how do I teach them actually how to read? And became a literacy teacher. So I never thought of it like that, but that was I like that.

Kelly Gallagher 5:27

Yeah, you know that that story I just told about not knowing who the vice president of the United States is. I actually told that story in a workshop one time that I was giving in Northern Virginia, and I had a guy in the back raise his hand and he said, I'm a government teacher, and my high school is 10 miles from the White House, and 90% of my seniors cannot tell me who the vice president of the United States is. Uh now this was several years ago, um, but it was really an eye-opener at that time that you, as a reader, it when you face unfamiliar text, you reach for your reader's tool belt, right? You look at context, you look at, you know, you you try to make sense of the text. But um I'll give you an example. I have a cartoon that this is not as racy as it sounds, but it I have a cartoon in which a woman is lying in bed and her husband bursts into the bedroom and says, Okay, where is he? And strewn on the floor are Waldo's clothes, right? And so if you don't know who Waldo is, or what he wears, or what he looks like, right? You you can read the words, okay, where is he? But there is not a tool on your tool belt that's going to help you comprehend that if you don't know who Waldo is.

Knowledge And Strategies Work Together

Melissa 6:59

So that brings me to my next question, which is you know, when you talk about they don't know who the vice president is, uh an argument I hear sometimes is like, well, then can't they read something that would then teach them about who the vice president is? But I love the point you made in your book, which was like, yes, we can learn something from text even when we don't have knowledge about that topic at all. But that learning tends to kind of be pretty shallow. And then it really does like opposite of that is like if we do have knowledge that we're bringing to the texts, we get we can go so much deeper. And I just love for you to talk a bit about that.

Kelly Gallagher 7:38

Right. So the argument is why teach them stuff? It's all on their phone. They could just grab it and look. And I probably look up stuff on my phone 20 times a day.

Lori 7:46

I look up everything. Oh my God, it's a lot, yeah.

Kelly Gallagher 7:49

So there's I get the argument. The argument is we should teach them, instead of teaching them stuff, we should teach them to think critically. Uh and I agree we should teach them to, but I don't think it's an either or. Uh and the reason is is the research is pretty clear that kids who know more, they read more, they read faster, they learn more, and they remember more. Think about it. If you're reading about something you're unfamiliar with, you have to stop, you have to go, wait a minute, what's the International Monetary Fund? What is this? You have to back up. Uh, and there's a real value, of course, in teaching kids to embrace confusion and wrestle with text. But uh the more you know, I I think I say in the book, the more you know about baseball or music or math. I think that leads the book, right? So there was a uh uh an obituary of Cole and Powell, and what I do is I mark up, you know, where I'm reaching in my brain while I read that, right? And my level of understanding that paragraph is at a much deeper level because I remember uh as we're recording this, you know, uh there's a lot of world strife, and there was a lot of world strife back then as well. So I know the background of Colin Powell. I know that the American government at that time used a false pretense to get Americans uh behind that particular war. Uh and so there's a level of understanding uh that's much richer and deeper if you bring stuff to the page.

Melissa 9:27

Yeah, and I'm not you have me thinking back to you know how I started teaching, and Lori always talks about she did kind of the same thing. And we both were really taught to teach with strategies. And I think it was right when the national reading panel was like hot and they showed all the research behind teaching reading strategies for comprehension. And so we did a lot of this, like, you know, we would teach it for a week, we would check it off and say they know how to do this thing now, and then we'd move on to the next strategy. We're wondering if you did the same thing and if you had a shift and this if this knowledge was a part of that shift for you.

Kelly Gallagher 10:04

Well, I've written several books that have several strategies in them. I mean, the this book has several strategies in it. Um, but as I said, you know, 20 years ago, I think is when I kind of shifted and tried to balance uh knowledge building with strategies. I mean, if you if you look at uh, you know, the sort of iconic reading strategies, right, to infer. You can't infer if you don't know things.

Melissa 10:35

Absolutely not.

Kelly Gallagher 10:36

Right. And so, you know, I remember once teaching a novel and I asked the kids, because I uh, you know, prediction is another thing we want kids to be able to do. But you can't predict if you don't know things. And so I asked a kid one time, what do you think's gonna happen to the character? And the kid said to me, I think he's gonna die. And I said, Oh, well, tell me, tell me what makes you think that. And the kid looked at me and I remember his exact words, he said, That would be rad. Well, okay, that would be rad, but you have to base your prediction. All right. If if you know if you understand foreshadowing, then you're much more likely to be able to, or theme, you're much more likely to be able to make a prediction. But if you don't, right, if you don't have that knowledge, and it's uh So I would say it's again not an either or, but having knowledge uh supports kids when we teach them to infer uh or we teach them to question text, right? You can't, if you're reading something that's super, super hard, your level of qu and you don't know much about it, your level of questioning is gonna be very superficial. Like, what does this mean? What is this word, right? And you know what? A lot of us are in reading situations like that. But again, the more you know, uh, the better you're gonna be able to tackle that text.

Lori 12:03

Yeah, that's such a good point. It's not an either or, it's a both and we're right there with you. You know, you need both. Um, you can't visualize unless you have some knowledge about what you're visualizing, right? I I mean, that's it's just I I feel like it's so common sense, it almost feels silly to say. Like if we're reading about, you know, wind wind energy and you have never seen the turbines, you can't visualize those. If you, you know, and it you could you could literally sit there and be like, okay, we're gonna use a strategy of visualizing. But if the kid doesn't have anything to no schema of the wind turbines, that they're just they're just sitting there thinking, like nothing. I don't know what they're doing, they're not doing it. So it's not helping.

Kelly Gallagher 12:45

Right. I I I I was in front of teachers last week and I said, Okay, I'm gonna give you one minute, take out a pen and pencil, draw me a Bielman spin. And they all looked at me like, what? Okay, and then I showed them a photograph, and it is a move that's made in ice dancing in the Olympics, where the skater puts one one leg up above her head, right?

Vocabulary Waves And Reading Momentum

Lori 13:12

That's why it sounded so familiar because the Olympics just happened and I knew I heard it, but I couldn't, I had no idea what it is. I've never heard it, but I've seen it.

Kelly Gallagher 13:19

Right.

Lori 13:20

But what I'm saying, we're always on the opposite ends, Melissa.

Kelly Gallagher 13:24

Not not one teacher in that room could visualize it. You can't visualize something if you don't know what it is, as the point you're making, Lori.

Lori 13:34

Yeah, for sure. So I think that kind of gets us into this next piece, Kelly. Like, like in the book, you talk about knowledge showing up at different levels. And I I love this. Thinking about knowledge at the word level, at the sentence level, at the passage level, at the article level, and then at the book level. And every level matters. It's really important, but each one looks a little bit different in practical application, right? So we might start with word level knowledge and emphasize vocabulary is cumulative, it's incremental, and that knowing words gives students access to ideas and meanings and all kinds of good stuff. Um, can we talk a little bit about vocabulary and how you think about it as part of knowledge building?

Kelly Gallagher 14:16

Yeah, sure. It's interesting that, you know, the average literacy level of an incoming kindergartner ranges from three years old to eight years old, right? And so you ask a kindergarten teacher, can you tell who's sort of come from a language advantage background and who hasn't? Right. And so what we want to do by the time they get to me in high school got to me in high school, you know, there was a tremendous amount of word poverty going on. Kids had very, very narrow uh word banks. Uh and I think what's interesting is the research that I had covered when I wrote the book is that I know this kind of falls under the get alive category, but somebody has actually tagged every single word and they can run third grade curriculum through a computer, fourth grade, fifth grade, and they they they know when words arri arrive, right? So if you're in third grade, you're gonna see the word balloon. If you're in 12th grade, that wave has come and pretty much gone. And it's very rare in the 12th grade that you're gonna see the word balloon. Uh you know, you're gonna see a word in 12th grade that you would never see in third grade. But what they have found is that the kids who catch the early waves are much more likely to be able to catch the later waves, right?

Lori 15:49

And so they should be surfing. You're in California, right? Yeah.

Kelly Gallagher 15:52

Right, right, right. So I think the research is pretty clear. There's times where I would teach targeted vocabulary, like if we're gonna read a chapter and here are three key words you're gonna know, you need to know. Um but I think the research is also very clear that exposure to rare words, right, is really, you know, how many words can you get past a kid's eyeballs in a year? Uh and the difference is astounding between reading, say, five minutes a day and 20 minutes a day, you know. But you read 20 minutes a day. A middle schooler who reads 20 minutes a day over the course of uh entire school year is going to read almost uh a million and a half words, right? And it's it's the rare words. Uh I think there's a study in there where we looked at Captain Underpants and just the rare uh unusual words that that kids encounter. Uh and and we know, of course, that vocabulary acquisition theory suggests that to take full ownership of a word, you have to see it multiple times, right? Even as adults, we all have words that we kind of own, right? Uh we sort of get, but you know, I've seen that word before. But it really is about uh getting kids to read, uh, which raises a whole other can of worms.

Lori 17:22

But uh, right, right.

Kelly Gallagher 17:25

But it it's it's really about the reading diet being unbalanced in American schools. You know, when kids get in high school, they uh a lot of them don't like to read already, you know. And so, hey, let's start with Hamlet. It's probably uh that's teaching stuff, not teaching kids. And I believe it's malpractice, right? So the first goal I think any teacher at any grade level should have is number one, we're going to re-establish reading momentum. And number two, we're gonna re-establish reading identity. And you can't do that unless you have things kids want to read.

Lori 18:01

Yeah. You know, it's really interesting, like going back to this vocabulary, like what that when you're there reading more, they're getting more vocabulary. We had uh Margaret McCowan on the podcast, and I really love the visual that she created with vocabulary. She said it's like kind of what you said, right? We're getting students to step onto a ladder of vocabulary. So they might be at a lower rung, another kiddo might be at a higher rung. But either way, getting them on the ladder of vocabulary is really important because we want them to start those exposures to the word so that by the time they see you in high school, they've already had so many exposures that hopefully they're at higher rungs of the ladder. But even if not, they're at least on the ladder. That's the important part. They're not off to the side of the ladder, right? So um I I think, yeah, that's a I like that kind of like connection there that you're making with that one.

Sentence Study For Better Understanding

Kelly Gallagher 18:52

Yeah. And I think, you know, even in high school, uh, I celebrated words. I mean, I had a uh page in my notebook, words I like, words I don't like. Uh we had a we had a word nerd page where the kids would read independently for 10 minutes, and I'd say, go back and find an interesting word and just kind of keep lists of words. I would show them, you know, the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year, uh, and we would have talks about um, you know, why uh what has to happen for a word to get adopted, right? It has to show some staying power. Uh and the idea that some words die every year is really fascinating. So I, you know, somebody sits there and makes a decision what goes out of the dictionary. Um and so I always celebrated words and and and really, really wanted kids to be a word nerd like me. And the other thing I would say is I think there is a value in teaching roots, prefixes, and suffixes. I think giving kids word attack skills uh is important.

Lori 20:03

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. We agree. All right, so I want to take us from the word level to the sentence level. So let's expand a bit. And when we talk about knowledge, you know, I know people often think about that as background knowledge, but I think that understanding how a sentence fits into the bigger picture is really helpful to know something as a reader. So, what should teachers keep in mind about sentence level knowledge as they're planning for reading instruction?

Kelly Gallagher 20:30

Yeah, it's fascinating because kids who have primarily on different metrics uh the same reading abilities, same fluency. Uh, the kid who understands how sentences are constructed, the kid who really gets syntax is going to comprehend better than the kid with equal skills, other than that skill. Uh, you know, and so even in even in 12th grade, I always had a sentence study unit. Uh because, you know, if a kid's not a not a uh a rich reader, but you know, gets lost in compound, complex sentences. They, they, they, you know, uh, and so I think it also begins with sentence construction. Um in my book, uh, Write Like This, I show I think about 20 weeks where I did sentence of the week with kids, and then we would infuse those in whatever writing we were doing. But even in high school, week one, simple sentence, what's a subject? What's a verb? I had seniors didn't know what a verb was, right? And so, you know, week two, compound sentence, week three, you know, we and we would just, you know, get into dialogue and and uh and we would just revisit and circle around and circle around and do them again and do them again and do them again. And so um I think sentence study is really, really important. Sentence combining. You know, there was a major study done about 25 years ago called Writing Next. Uh, and it wasn't even uh a single study, it was uh uh like 150 studies uh uh about how what works when you go to teach kids how to write. And they came up with 11 recommendations. And one of those is sentence combining. So I might put on the board, you know, I drove in the rain, the freeway was crowded, I was late to work. Those are three sentences, but the kids would have to then combine them into one sentence. Or we would do, you know, sentence scrambles where I would give them complex sentences that were cut up and they had to rearrange them and try to figure out the sequence of them. So I would say, even up into the 12th grade, I think sentence study, kids who read sentences better read books better. Right. And so I think we want to get kids. I think there's an assumption sometimes in the upper grades that kids don't need this approach. And I I found the opposite to be true.

Lori 23:12

Yeah, I tend to think they even they need it more as someone who's taught high school as well. Kelly, I feel like the sentences get so much more complex as they make that jump from middle to high school, that just revisiting those basic skills with the higher level sentences is immensely helpful and really smart teaching.

Kelly Gallagher 23:33

I have a uh friend, Donna Santman, who taught in New York City and she taught sixth grade, and she spent the first two months of school studying sentences. Now, they did other things during those two months, but for maybe 10 minutes a day for the first two months, there was some sort of sentence study. And what she found was that when that was over, the kids not only wrote better, they read better because they didn't get lost in the syntax.

Melissa 24:02

Yeah, that's the key I was gonna say. I I feel like I did a lot of this in writing instruction with sentences, but I never made that bridge to reading, even in my own brain, thinking like this is going to help them with their reading. But I was just curious, is there anything that you did or that you would suggest for how to like help kids see? Because I this is also where Kelly, I think sometimes like, ugh, like why do we have to learn about simple sentences? Um you suggest about helping kids see like how this is not only gonna help you with writing, but also with your reading?

Passages Assume You Know Things

Kelly Gallagher 24:33

Yeah, I mean, um yeah, I think a lot of that came through that sentence of the week study because what would happen was then you know, let's say this week uh, and I didn't always use like highly technical grammar language. I would say we're gonna write a one-word front branch, tired, comma. The teacher walked in the room, right? And then, okay, the kids then would write them, and then in reading, they'd go find them. And then you I just kept building the sophistication of those. And when we got into compound complex stuff, then we would break it down and we would really talk about, okay, hold on to this thought while you're going here, kind of thing. And I don't, I don't know, other than that, you know, if I had a specific that in the sentence study other stuff, I think uh was, and I don't know how Donna measured it, but she was pretty uh uh pretty clear that the kids were better readers for it.

Melissa 25:31

Yeah. No, I mean it makes so much sense. So it just makes sense. They're connected for sure. And I wanted to take you all to the next level. So we're talking sentence level, but then we have passages, right? So then we have sentences upon sentences upon sentences. We can already see like if they're struggling at a sentence level, this is going to get even tougher. But I'm wondering like, is there other other kinds of knowledge they would need to bring to a passage versus just uh comprehending a sentence?

Kelly Gallagher 26:00

Well, yeah. I mean, they have to string them together. And the other thing is, one of the things I would teach kids is that the author assumes you know things, right? And so I would, you know, give them a one-paragraph passage about any, you know, about uh World War II. Uh and if you read any paragraph that's looking back at World War II, the writer is going to assume you know what allies mean. The writer's going to assume. But here's the thing if the writer didn't assume that, that one paragraph would be five pages. It would be very burning. And and so this gets to the idea to read passages. You know, one of my favorite activities was to have kids bring passages they think I would have a hard time reading.

Melissa 26:46

Oh, that's interesting.

Kelly Gallagher 26:47

And they would bring me like instructions on how to get to whatever level on whatever video game, or you know, they would bring me electrical engineering guide, things like that. And and and because they think as the English teacher, I just read and understand everything. I think the kids need to see the struggle, both on reading and writing. But I I want kids to know, yeah, I'm probably a better reader than the kids in the room, but it's only because I've read a whole lot more, and it's because my web, it's all uh, you know, uh geometrical connections uh is is broader because I've been reading a lot longer than they have.

Melissa 27:29

Yeah, and I'm thinking even like I remember teaching the great Gatsby in high school, and I remember one student was she was a great reader, but in the middle of that book, she was just like, I don't know who we're talking about, right? Because there's so many characters, and it was just like he, she. It was like, who, who, or I can't even follow it.

Kelly Gallagher 27:45

What I think is important though, when you talk about passages or or larger readings, is it's not an intelligence issue. It is not an IQ issue. We're all good readers, we're all poor readers. Depends on what we're reading, right? And I think that's kind of an eye-opener for kids, is that you want to make sure that, you know, you come to text as prepared as you can. That and I tell kids all the time, you're not gonna like the article of the week. I didn't pick it to entertain you. I picked it because of what's at stake here for you, right? And you know, anybody listening to this, uh, it's uh it's free, it's not a money-making thing.

Lori 28:37

We're gonna link it in the show notes, Kelly. I already have it up. Yeah.

Kelly Gallagher 28:40

Cool. Could go to kellygallagher.org and look at the AOW uh and just see the kind of things that I think kids should know. And sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's something they're super interested in. Do you know, do cell phones cause cancer? Uh and sometimes it's something like, no, I don't really care about Vladimir Putin right now. Who's Vladimir Putin? Right. So right.

Lori 29:02

But either way, I think it's helpful because I mean, as we all know, we've had to read things both in school and at work that perhaps are not the most interesting, but you still do it. And as a reader, it's not like about you really like, yes, we I want students to love me reading just as much as the next person. And there's a functional component to reading where we all just need to be able to do it and need to be able to get through whatever the task is, right? Because your task is different every time. So I, you know, I'm I'm reading a book for enjoyment right now. That's my pleasure book. I'm also reading things for work that perhaps are not as enjoyable as the book that is making me laugh out loud every night. You know? So that needs to happen too. And we need to figure out how to help kids get through that as well.

Kelly Gallagher 29:49

Yeah, I'm not uh they're not designed to entertain you, they're designed to inform you. But your comment is also, I think, really rich too, because it reminds me of Nancy Atwell, who said there are three kinds of books in the world. There are challenge books, there are just right books, and there are vacation books. And kids should be reading all three, and they should be reading all three in school. But I also do believe there is a place, uh, you know, there's sort of this idea that kids should never read above, you know, at their frustration level. I don't necessarily agree with that because I read things that are at my frustration level. And like I'm reading a book about physics that I don't understand, this guy won the Nobel Prize. I don't understand half the book, but I'm learning a lot reading it. The problem is when you take an adolescent who hates to read, you don't start with a challenge book. You start with something the kid wants to read, something where, again, coming back to what we talked about earlier, the idea of rare words. Comic books are really rich resources for rare words. So, you know, we want to put things in front of them. Reestablish reading momentum first because you can't start with the frustration level. They won't go with you on that.

Lori 31:06

Yeah, there has to be a level of trust. And like you said, with that um physics book you're reading, you're you're getting on the ladder and you're okay with feeling like you're at a low rung for perhaps more of the book than not, right?

Articles And Reading Through Confusion

Kelly Gallagher 31:18

Well, it also comes back to the vocabulary idea that we talked about earlier. Like when I read this book, um, I there's a depth to words that we want kids to know, right? Uh what would you rather be? Smart, clever, or wise? You know, ask kids that. You know, the words kind of mean the same thing, but they kind of don't, right? Um, and you know, when I read the physics book, I know what a comet is. But when I read the physics books, I realized I don't really know what a comet is. Right. Um, and so there's that depth that comes from more long form reading that I think often doesn't come in passages and articles.

Lori 32:06

Yeah, I do. I want to get into articles a little bit before we go into some longer form reading. Um, Melissa's gonna take us to the longer form reading. But when we read an article, you know, I feel like the reading experience changes from passage to article. Passage, you're really zooming in. Likely it's something really important or vocabulary that's really important, something that we want to draw students' attention to, right? It's standing out for a reason or it's it's important for a reason. We're we as the teacher, as the expert, are pulling it out to make a point, right? And um, but yet articles, they're really long enough that like readers are not understanding everything right away, right? That that wave is kind of cresting over them and coming back again, like you said earlier. So in uh the book to read stuff, you to you have to know stuff, you introduce this like really helpful way of thinking about article reading. And I want to give you a moment to talk about that. Um, you talk about reading locally and reading globally. So sometimes when students are reading an article, individual sentences or paragraphs don't make sense yet. And I think as adults, like this is really rings true, right? There are things that I read sometimes. Like I'm reading, if I read an article about a current event that I don't have a whole lot of background knowledge on, it's I I I have that moment where I'm like, this doesn't make sense yet. But when we read the whole piece and zoom out, the meaning starts to come together. So I just want to give you a moment to just chat to us about that.

Kelly Gallagher 33:30

So it reminds me, one of my mentors is Sheridan Blau, and Sharid always talked about the idea that confusion is not bad, confusion is good, because confusion is the place where learning happens. We want to teach kids that confusion to see confusion as an opportunity. Ooh, I'm confused here. I might learn something, right? You know, I used to play like you could read the first sentence or paragraph of any article or novel, you know, and you're already confused. I mean, the first line of 1984, it was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13. Uh I don't really, really get that. So what we want to teach kids uh is that comprehension is not yes or no. It's not black or white. Comprehension is a gathering process in which you learn to live with ambiguity and you trust that the author is going to reveal and clear up your confusion. You know, I would give kids a little line from a text, uh, oh John, I missed you. And then I'd have the kids predict the next line. And they would say things like, Oh, I missed you too, or how have you been since I saw you at the reunion and blah, blah, blah. So they would come up with all these predictions. Then I would show them the next line. Oh, John, I missed you. So she reloaded the gun and fired again. Right? Nobody knew what okay, that's a little violent, okay, but nobody knew what, oh John, I missed you meant until you got later in the text and you, oh, your comprehension shifts. You now have something to glue together to to gather a little bit more understanding. You know, ask kids have you ever gone to a movie and you are confused after five minutes? You didn't walk out. You have developed the ability in a movie to trust that the filmmaker is going to reveal to you, right?

Melissa 35:45

Yeah, in fact, they kind of do that on purpose, right? They want you to like have something that you want to figure out and keep watching.

Kelly Gallagher 35:51

Right, right. I mean, you watch almost any, if you watch Severance, you're not going to understand anything for hours and hours and hours, right? Or any miniseries, really. It's a slow reveal. And so what I try to teach kids is that when we start reading, confusion is normal, and that we're not going to, you know, panic when we don't understand. We're gonna, we're gonna do things that readers do, we're gonna hang on to what we know, and we're gonna build from that. I would add to that that, like at the passage or at the article level, one of my favorite reading strategies along these lines is I would give kids two different color highlighters, yellow and pink. And I would say, as you read this article, uh, I'd like you to highlight every single word. Yellow is I understand what I'm reading, there's no issues, there's no problems, I'm flowing. Pink is uh-oh, I don't know what's happening here. It could be at the word level, sentence level, idea level. And what happens is they color code, and what's nice about that strategy is that while the kids are doing it, the teacher can walk the room and look where the pink is. Is it in the same place? Is everybody confused in the same place, or is it scattered all over the place? Um, and what will happen when kids the kids will say, Well, why do I have to color the whole thing? Why can't I just go pink, pink, pink and be done? And the answer is because what happens is sometimes kids will go, I get this, I get, oh, maybe I don't get this. Or they'll do the opposite. I don't get that. Well, uh, oh, I get it now. It's not black and white, yes or no. It is a constant shifting and gathering that helps build the comprehension. I think color coding helps kids to see that.

Lori 37:46

What a fun metacognitive way to do that. With and also, oh my gosh, they get to highlight every word you are giving them the best gift of ever. That's all they want to do. You know that. They all just want to highlight everywhere. So I like put it to the good use of have a metacognitive moment. Do you understand this? Do you not? And if it's, oh, I don't okay, maybe I don't understand. Okay, so maybe the highlights running over each other. I think that's really cool too, right? It helps you see as the teacher. There's some blurred lines.

Framing Novels Finding The Sweet Spot

Kelly Gallagher 38:16

You put them in groups and say, okay, is your confusion the same? Help each other. I, you know, I have bad news, kids. When you go to college, I'm not going with you. So we need to use this year to learn how to wrestle with stuff we're having trouble with. So as a as a group, turn and talk. How much of your confusion can you clear up without the teacher's help? And then let's share out as a whole class. And then if there's something the whole class doesn't get, then then okay, uh, I'll I'll come in. I I like to teach behind the reading. You know, I don't, you know, of course you have to frame text and sometimes what you do before they read. Like if you don't know who Waldo is, I I'm gonna teach you what Waldo looks like before we read the cartoon. Otherwise, you're not gonna get it. So there comes that whole framing thing. But there's a lot of times I want the wrestling to happen before I get involved as well.

Melissa 39:09

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you as I we move up to talking about full books. And that that's always my question is like, how much do you teach them beforehand about the topic versus like what can they learn from it? I remember um some teachers were teaching Persepolis in high school, you know, and a lot of them were like, they don't know anything about this, they need to know about it beforehand. And some just went like wild and taught so like a whole course about this war. I forget what what war it is exactly, but they taught the whole this whole thing. And then others were like, well, they need to know a little bit, but then they learned from the actual text itself. So I'm just wondering what your take is on that.

Kelly Gallagher 39:52

Well, if I could answer that in a sound bite, I'd be a wealthy man because really what you're talking about, Melissa, is the art of teaching. And what I talk about a lot, and not just this book and some of my other books, is where's that sweet spot? How much am I helping them too much? Am I not helping them enough? Uh what I do know, and I'll criticize myself first because I did this early in my career, is that if you're taking eight weeks to teach a novel, it's not a novel anymore. It's an eight-week worksheet. So that goal is where that I talk about that in redescide, but the goal is how much do they need me, how much do they not need me. Uh I'll give you uh at the book level, I'll give you two examples. One I talked about a little bit already, 1984. I was mandated to teach 1984 in my school district to 12th graders. Now, that book is difficult, and it's intentionally difficult because George Orwell wants the reader to feel the confusion that Winston Smith feels in this society where you can't figure out what's real and what's not real, right? Um and so my kids will not go on this reading journey with me unless I frame the heck out of that book and maybe even read the first chapter with them. Right. Uh I they don't know, they know Hitler, they don't know Stalin, they don't know Mussolini, they don't know, you know, I like Jeff Wilhelm's idea that the setting in a book is not just the time and a place, it's where the author's rear end was sitting when he wrote it, right? They don't know that this was written in the shadow of World War II. They they don't they won't go with me unless I start with the guided tour. And eventually I want to transition to the budget tour. But with 1984, I have to hold their hand into the book, right? And you know what? Sometimes second period needs even more than third period. I had a class that had uh inclusion class, I had 12 special ed kids in the room with adult aid in the room. I had to do more to get them ready, right? So the bell rings, they walk out the door, a different species walks in the door, ninth grade, they sit down, and we're gonna read Orwell too, but we're not reading uh 1984, we're reading Animal Farm. And I say to them, hey, we're gonna read Animal Farm today. Uh let me frame it for you. And this is the extent of my framing. This is a story about animal talking animals, but it's really not a story about talking animals. Open up, let's get started. Because the text isn't that hard.

Melissa 42:41

Right.

Kelly Gallagher 42:42

Right? And it's really about the metaphor, or, you know, it's really a, you know, I in the old days I would teach the Russian Revolution to frame it and then we would jump in. But later in my career, I would just read it and then I would teach the Russian Revolution and have the kids make the connections. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Lori 42:59

Yeah, or even paw pause alongside it and you know, read an article here or there or a little video. They're getting they're getting it because they're able to draw those connections themselves. Yeah. Right.

Melissa 43:09

They don't need that to actually read the text itself, but to get the bigger meaning, eventually they do.

Kelly Gallagher 43:16

If it's if it's at the chapter level or law or longer, and one of the arguments that Penny Kittle and I make in our the couple of books that we wrote together is we should we should, in high school, should abandon side-by-side teaching. You go read chapter one, I meet you quiz. You go read chapter two, I meet you quiz.

Lori 43:33

Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that.

Long Books Build Focus

Kelly Gallagher 43:36

Instead, go go out and read 80 pages and I'll meet you next Thursday, right? And so, and then we're gonna we're gonna wrestle with that. Uh but again, you have to you have to, depending on the complexity of the text, will depend on what level of of a tour guide that I will be. And even after 35 years, uh first of all, you teach any novel, I think it's three or four or five years before you hit stride with it. So, you know, what is how much is too much? Where's the sweet spot? How much is not enough? Um really, really is an important question, uh Melissa. And and especially Especially before they get to page one in a novel. You know, you teach to kill a mockingbird. I taught in Southern California. Kids would not know a veranda if it fell on their head, right? So you have to do a lot of, you know, that first chapter to kill a mockingbird is a little bit dry, right? You have to do a lot to get them to go on the journey with you. What I do know though is this that if you're going to teach a book or a novel, and let's say it's Sunday night and you get that Sunday afternoon, uh-oh, weekend's almost over vibe, right? And you're going to start this novel Monday morning and you already have the eye twitch because you know this is the most difficult novel you will teach all year. My argument is this the reason it's the most difficult novel for them is because it's the farthest away from their prior knowledge and background. So that has to drive, you know, when I plan a uh if I'm reading a chapter or 80 pages, I ask myself three questions. Number one, when they finish reading this, what is it I want them to take? Number two, if I don't help them, how much of that list of what I want them to take will they take without my help? And number three is what won't they get unless I'm in the room? Right. And so that helps me determine, okay, they won't get this idea unless I'm there. And now I have to make a decision. Should I frame it and kind of give it to them? Or should I let them wrestle with it and then we'll come back to it? Right. And so it's that balance of trying to ease uh reluctant readers into what I would call productive struggle.

Melissa 46:01

Yeah, I just love this idea of finding that sweet spot. And and it's not easy, right? Like you said, it's gonna change with each text and it's gonna change with who the students are that are in front of you. So it's not like a there's not a one size fits all for that answer.

Kelly Gallagher 46:15

The kids today are different than they were, you know, five years ago, obviously. Right.

Melissa 46:20

So for sure.

Kelly Gallagher 46:22

This raises questions, by the way, of another time perhaps, but uh uh of how problematic the whole class novel has become.

Melissa 46:30

That's exactly what I wanted to talk about. Can we talk about it real quick? There's a lot of talk about that, right? Is like, well, why don't we just if if novels are so hard, this full book is hard, just let's just teach with the articles and the passages and the sentences, right? Like, can't they get everything they want from that? Laureen, I don't agree with this, by the way. Um we we love we love the idea of full books, but I'm wondering what your take is on like why why should we use a full book?

Curiosity And Pushing Back

Kelly Gallagher 46:54

There's two competing things here. Number one is that when I go to teach when I went to teach 1984, mandated, the problem was half the kids in the room could not read it. Literally could not read it. It was too hard for them. So why am I taking kids who already dislike reading and jamming this down their throat, even though I love the book and I love teaching it? So hold that idea for a minute. The reason we don't want kids to only read short stuff, it comes to Marion Wolfe's idea that we want to build biliterate readers. And by biliterate, she doesn't mean bilingual. She means that click and go reading is a very different cognitive task than holding on to your thinking over 300 pages. And in an age of distraction addiction, the ability to do longer reading is more critical today than ever before because what she argues in her book, Reader Come Home, is that kids from birth to about 20, your brain is in really hardcore developmental growth. And what she says is you learn uh to think critically while you're in that window. And if you do, then you will be a critically thinking adult. But if you don't learn to think critically, or if you don't learn to like hold on to thinking over time, you lose the ability to have that as an adult. And so what she has a phrase I like a lot that in kids we want to try to develop a quiet eye, right? And one of my things with high school kids was how, you know, I give them a survey first day of school. How long can you how long can you read without looking at your phone? And we just made it a goal that by the end of the year that would be an hour. And you know, some kids couldn't do two minutes in September. But by June, we want to, you know, re-establish that reading momentum and have them be able to do that.

Lori 49:06

Yeah, that's fantastic. I think just even pointing it out like that is probably helpful. Those kids who read two minutes might or might might not even have realized. I know, like we, you know, we've been talking about to read stuff, you have to know stuff, but there are, I think, some misconceptions about building knowledge or teaching knowledge, especially this idea that curiosity is to either something students have or don't have. And I just don't agree with that. I think every person is innately curious. Like it's just how we bring it out. Like you said, those four boys.

Kelly Gallagher 49:38

Yeah. There's a book called Curious by uh Ian Frazier, I believe. Um and in that book, he argues uh exactly what you're saying, Lori, that, and I used to believe this, that some kids are just naturally more curious than others. What he argues is that kids who appear to be non-curious is because there is no connection, right? You have to know a little bit about something to be more curious about it, right? And if you don't know anything about it, you know, neo, you know, whatever, neoclassical architecture, you might not care about it. And so what he says is indifference is created by distance of whatever it is you're asking them to think about or read about. So, you know, there's a book called uh The Curious Researcher. It's an old book by Bruce Ballinger. And he, one of the activities that he did that I stole in my classroom was the myth of a boring topic. So I would have kids write down things they would think would be extremely boring. And they would write things like dirt or a paper clip or algebra or whatever, right? But and then the assignment is guess what? Pick one that you're that you think would be most boring, and then they find they do some research and they find out it's not boring. A spoonful of dirt has more living organisms than people who live in California, right? And so there's millions, right? And so nothing is boring. It's only boring because you don't know anything about it, right? And so it's making that connection to it. Uh and again, the more connections you make, the more, the wider your curiosity zone is.

Lori 51:34

I like that. That's really fun.

Kelly Gallagher 51:36

Uh before you leave, I want to just say, or we leave, I want to just add one more idea that just popped into my head, too. And that is, and I think given uh given how our concerns about, you know, uh creating adults who are deeper readers, is that I just want to also say that not only do you have to know stuff to read stuff, you really, really, really have to know stuff to push back on stuff. Um and uh if you want to argue against uh a policy or a politician, you know, we all we've all assigned argument essays where kids just know one side of the argument and it's very shallow and they they really don't so it's really about adults who, you know, and I wanted to say, and I'm this isn't a left or right thing, but I can watch news online or on TV, and I I I can already tell that person does not know what he what they're talking about. Like that, you know, and so we if we're going to have adults who are really, really critical thinkers, the the idea that prior knowledge not only helps them read, but also helps them to push back.

Lori 52:49

Yeah, it helps you be, I think, a critical, and I would add a curious thinker, right?

Kelly Gallagher 52:54

Exactly.

Lori 52:55

I love that.

Kelly Gallagher 52:57

I talk, I talk about uh in in my book, Deeper Reading, uh, if we have time for one more short story. Um in 1980, I think, I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert, like because I love Bruce Springsteen, right? And so I'm there, I'm off to the side of the stage, I'm all fired up and ready to go. And the event was billed as a uh charity event for Vietnam War veterans. And so, okay, whatever, I don't care. I'm gonna go see Bruce. And the lights come down, and instead of the band coming out, this guy comes out in a wheelchair and he's got the microphone down here, and this guy gave the most incredible speech that had 18,000 people in tears. Uh, turns out that the speaker was a man named Ron Kovac, who wrote a book called Born on the Fourth of July, which was made into a movie with Tom Cruise. And he basically talked about how when they came back to America, people spit on them, they did all kinds of bad things. That moment spurred me to read about Vietnam. And I read a whole bunch of books about Vietnam. And then Vietnam got me to read about Afghanistan. And what I talk about in deeper reading is growing that tree that once you have one branch, it's gonna lead you to another branch. But you gotta, you gotta have a couple little branches to get going.

Closing And Staying Connected

Melissa 54:19

Yeah, Lori and I talk about it all the time. We like go in in these rabbit holes, right? Of like things that we're interested in. You just start watching things and reading things and listening to things, and you get really deep into some weird topics sometimes. Yeah.

Lori 54:31

Or really good topics. Or really good topics.

Kelly Gallagher 54:34

Right, right, right.

Lori 54:35

Yeah, but you're right. I mean, there has to be that first flick of curiosity or that that first little spark of interest for sure.

Melissa 54:43

Yeah. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today here on the podcast and also for your book. I mean, I just think you took a topic that can sometimes feel a little like, you know, it's just what is it? What does knowledge really mean? Um, and you made it really concrete with these different like layers and what it means at the different different levels. So thank you so much for your book and for your time today.

Kelly Gallagher 55:06

You're welcome, and thank you.

Melissa 55:08

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Lori 55:18

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Melissa 55:28

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Lori 55:40

We appreciate you so much, and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.