Special: Why the Science of Reading isn't just about reading with Natalie Wexler

Back in 2019, Natalie Wexler joined Susan Lambert as the very first guest on Science of Reading: The Podcast. Now—more than three years and three million downloads later—Science of Reading: The Podcast welcomes Natalie back on the show. She and Susan discuss what she's seen in the 3+ years since releasing her groundbreaking book The Knowledge Gap and delve into the importance of managing cognitive load, building long-term memory, writing, and the broader science of literacy. Lastly, Natalie shares what she hopes to see in the education headlines in the not-so-distant future.

Show notes:

• Our first episode with Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap
• The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System—And How to Fix It , by Natalie Wexler
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• One Sentence At A Time, by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler
• The Writing Revolution website
• Knowledge Matters Campaign
• Statement from Knowledge Matters Campaign

Quotes:
“I'm a little worried that Science of Reading, narrowly defined, isn’t encompassing everything we need to do. And people are getting the idea that if they just add more phonics to what they're already doing, they'll have solved the problem.” —Natalie Wexler

“Even if we do a great job on that foundational skills side of things, if we are not also changing current standard practice with regard to comprehension. If we don't start building kids' academic knowledge and vocabulary early, we are gonna find, at higher grade levels, kids are gonna be able to decode complex text, but they may not be able to understand it.” —Natalie Wexler

“There are serious problems with how we have been approaching decoding instruction. There are equally serious problems with how we've been approaching comprehension instruction, and that's the message that I think is not getting out.” —Natalie Wexler

“You can't get to the top without going through the bottom. You can't think critically about a topic that you don't have understanding or knowledge of, it's just not going to work.” —Natalie Wexler

“Here's the catch about writing: It's hugely important. It can help cement knowledge and long-term memory, and deepen knowledge.” —Natalie Wexler

“Even if you as a teacher have doubts about the curriculum. It's really important to give it your best shot and approach it with enthusiasm.” —Natalie Wexler

“It's great to focus attention on problems with phonics instruction, but we also need to bring attention to problems with comprehension instruction and the failure to build a kind of knowledge that fuels comprehension.” —Natalie Wexler

“What has amazed me is how many teachers and educators have nevertheless really embraced this message. And I think that really speaks to how much they care about their students. Change is hard, but they are undertaking it daily.” —Natalie Wexler 

Transcript

Susan Lambert: 1:13

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading the podcast. Before we go any further, I want to thank you and all our listeners for your support of this show. We are thrilled to have completed six seasons, and we now have more than 3 million downloads. It wouldn't be possible without you. Before we jump into season seven, we thought it would be amazing to bring back a very special person. In fact, she was our very first guest way back in 2019. On today's episode, Natalie Wexler joins me for a fascinating discussion about her new book, "The Knowledge Gap." She talks... Back When I sat down to record that first interview with Natalie, I couldn't have guessed how much the Science of Reading movement and this podcast would grow in three+ years. Thank you for your part in making that happen. To celebrate all our fantastic listeners who are out there doing the work, we wanted to bring Natalie back on the show to talk about the changes she's witnessed and what's on the top of her mind now. So without further ado, here is the return of education writer and author, Natalie Wexler. Well, Natalie Wexler, you're joining us again for another episode of the podcast. This is exciting.

Natalie Wexler: 2:37

Yeah, I'm delighted to be here.

Susan Lambert: 2:39

I can't believe, for those listeners that don't know, you were our very first episode close to three years ago, and this topic that you wrote about in your book "The Knowledge Gap" is continuing to be relevant and the message is actually growing.

Natalie Wexler: 2:55

Yeah, I think that is one of the things that has really surprised me. I'm not sure what I expected, but I think there's more interest now than there was when the book first came out. And I'm still like, as you know, crisscrossing the country , speaking about it and doing podcasts. Although I have to say, [Science of Reading: The Podcast] was, if not the first one I did, close to the first. But clearly, you know, this is , it wasn't just a flash in the pan. There's a lot of continuing interest in this.

Susan Lambert: 3:23

Yeah. And remind our listeners of when the book was published, what year?

Natalie Wexler: 3:28

It was August of 2019.

Susan Lambert: 3:31

And then I think we had you on the podcast pretty quickly after that. Maybe in the fall of 2019. I can't quite remember.

Natalie Wexler: 3:38

Yeah, I think that's right.

Susan Lambert: 3:39

And I was laughing with somebody recently. I was on a podcast from the L.A. County Department of Education, and we were talking about podcasting, and they ask me, "What's a memorable episode that you recorded on your podcast?" And I said, "Well, the very first one, because it was quite the orchestrated event." Now, for our listeners today, we are in different cities, so we literally have our producer Martin on with us. He's in a different city than I'm in, than you're in, Natalie. But the first recording of our podcast, we were in a conference room together side by side.

Natalie Wexler: 4:19

Yes. Very unusual. I think that's the only time I've recorded a podcast in the same room with the host.

Susan Lambert: 4:26

Anyway, I have to laugh about that because we felt it was quite an orchestration and it was a really big event. But since then, it has been fun to be able to do things with you and to share the message across the country. And, you know, we thought we would start this podcast episode with just a little clip from the first podcast episode. We're gonna have you listen to it and then have you respond.

Natalie Wexler: 4:48

Great. The focus has not been, certainly in the elementary and sometimes middle school grades, on the content. It's been on skills like finding the main idea or making inferences, and it is , the content basically has been secondary and hasn't really been thought to matter.

Susan Lambert: 5:07

So, talking a little bit about the skills and strategies in an ELA classroom, and it seems like the content didn't really matter. Has there been changes or advances since 2019 in that?

Natalie Wexler: 5:20

I would say in some places, definitely, yes. I mean, as we were just talking about there, there's been a lot of interest in this message in the book. I mean, there was some interest before the book came out, but I would say it tends to be kind of localized, but there's certain states, for example, where this idea that it really is important to teach content and not just comprehension skills has really gained a lot of traction. Like Tennessee, Texas , there's some other states where I've been traveling to. Louisiana was already starting when the book came out, but it hasn't taken off nationwide. I wish we had better data on exactly what's going on in classrooms. We really don't. So it's hard to quantify how many schools are making this shift and how many are not. I'd say it's still a minority of schools that are switching from a skills-focused approach to comprehension, to a knowledge-building approach. But I would also say even though it's a minority , clearly a minority of schools are making that shift, I think that proportion is growing.

Susan Lambert: 6:29

Hmm , that's great news. And then I know we've—well, we're called Science of Reading: The Podcast, so obviously Science of Reading has been sort of a big momentum across the country. How have you seen that momentum growing and this knowledge idea sort of fitting alongside it ?

Natalie Wexler: 6:51

Well, I have to say, I think it's great that this Science of Reading movement has shined a spotlight on problems, long-standing problems in the way we've gone about teaching foundational reading skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding. At the same time, I think that that message has gotten a lot more traction than the message about the need to build knowledge if we want kids to become truly literate. And I'm a little worried that Science of Reading narrowly defined is not encompassing everything we need to do. And people are getting the idea that if they just add more phonics to what they're already doing, they'll have solved the problem. And that's, it's an important thing to do, to not just add more phonics, but to do phonics, to teach phonics more systematically and other foundational skills. But even if we do a great job on that foundational skills side of things, if we are not also changing current standard practice with regard to comprehension, and if we don't start building kids' academic knowledge and vocabulary early, we are gonna find at higher grade levels, kids are gonna be able to decode complex text, but they may not be able to understand it. And my fear is at that point, what may happen, because this has happened before, is that those who were skeptical of phonics will say, "Well, you see, phonics doesn't work."

Susan Lambert: 8:19

Right.

Natalie Wexler: 8:19

And of course, you know, it doesn't mean that phonics doesn't work. It means phonics isn't enough. But that could lead to a rejection, once again, of phonics and a pendulum swing away from it. And then we could end up with kids who can neither decode nor understand complex text. So , don't wanna have that happen.

Susan Lambert: 8:37

Yeah. And I appreciate that you have been very clear about the fact that you're not ever saying that phonics is not important. As a matter of fact, you're saying phonics is important , but it's not the only thing we need to pay attention to.

Natalie Wexler: 8:51

That's right. And, and I just wanna clarify that a bit further.

Susan Lambert: 8:55

Sure.

Natalie Wexler: 8:55

I'm not saying that advocates of the Science of Reading are reducing reading to phonics. There is some criticism out there. I think everybody is acknowledging that's not the only thing. You also need comprehension. What isn't getting articulated clearly or getting mentioned sometimes is that just as there are serious problems with how we have been approaching decoding instruction, there are equally serious problems with how we've been approaching comprehension instruction. And that's the message that I think is not getting out.

Susan Lambert: 9:25

Hmm . And you've been doing a lot of thinking about that. I heard you say that recently you actually went back to the National Reading Panel report and read something about comprehension. How are you thinking about that?

Natalie Wexler: 9:36

Yeah, the National Reading Panel report, which , it was released in the year 2000, and its formulation of what goes into early literacy has been sort of enshrined as the definition of the Science of Reading. And for a lot of people , there's this infographic that shows these five pillars of early literacy, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. And that's sort of become this litany. And I think maybe one reason there hasn't been more attention paid to problems with comprehension instruction is if you, as I recently did, look at what the National Reading Panel report, what it says in this section on comprehension, I think a lot of people think, well, they ask , "How can we best help students comprehend what they read?" But what I realized was no, they asked a much narrower question, which was, "Is there evidence that teaching reading comprehension strategies works?" And they found that there was evidence, and I'm not questioning that evidence, although I must say what they endorsed doesn't have much to do with what you find going on in most classrooms. But they also intentionally didn't look at the other factors, hugely important factors that go into comprehension. They didn't purport to be doing that. They were just looking at this one thing that you can do, which is teaching comprehension strategies. And there are studies, most of them lasting no more than six weeks, showing that certain kinds of comprehension strategies, like essentially monitoring your comprehension, asking questions as you go along, that kind of thing, can help at least some kids with comprehension. But as I said, a lot of the skills and strategies that are focused on American classrooms, like finding the main idea, comparing and contrasting, determining author's purpose, the National Reading Panel actually didn't find any support for those kinds of things. So a lot of what we do isn't even—and of course we do this year after year, and these studies only lasted six weeks. But I think the larger point I wanna make here is we can't look to the report of the National Reading Panel to tell us everything we need to do to enable kids to comprehend what they read. They didn't even say that that was their mission.

Susan Lambert: 11:55

So if you were going to tell our listeners how you view comprehension in a comprehensive, I don't know what other word to say, comprehensively viewing comprehension , how would you explain that to our listeners?

Natalie Wexler: 12:10

Yeah, I mean, this is something my thinking has kind of evolved on since I wrote the book, but I think really when you get past foundational skills in reading or writing, then what you're really talking about is not so much the Science of Reading or the science of writing, or even the science of literacy, although I think that might be a better term because, you know, writing's really important, too. But even reading and writing is not the whole story here. There's also listening and speaking, and how these things can work together. And basically, when you get past foundational skills, what you're talking about is learning. It's not just reading. It's not just writing. Because everything we have learned goes into comprehension, what we can write, how we can write. So I've been looking more to cognitive science, which is the science of learning, as a sort of lens through which to look at what we're doing to help kids learn to read and write. And the thing is that reading and writing is actually, it is a way of learning, but it's more difficult than learning through listening and speaking. And so what we really need to do is tie those things together in a way that makes reading and writing easier for kids. So that would mean having kids listen to a text, because we know their listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension through about age 13, because, you know, if you're listening, you don't have to do the work of decoding or figuring out where the emphasis goes in the sentence. And so you can, before you're a fluent reader, you can take in more sophisticated concepts and vocabulary through listening.

Susan Lambert: 13:45

Mm-hmm.

Natalie Wexler: 13:46

And then talking about what you've just heard, the content you've just heard, using that same vocabulary helps get that information into long-term memory. And that's important. I'll pause here to talk about the importance of getting things into long-term memory, because I don't think that that is something teachers learn during their training.

Susan Lambert: 14:07

Agree .

Natalie Wexler: 14:07

They may learn, "Hey, you can always just look things up. You don't really need to have information stored in long-term memory." The thing is , so there's something called cognitive load theory that I think is very useful in this regard, which tells us that the aspect of our consciousness where we are taking in new information and trying to make sense of it, that's called working memory, is very limited in its capacity, and could only hold maybe four or five new items for about 20 seconds, and it starts to get overwhelmed. We don't really have the cognitive capacity to understand, analyze, retain information. And the way around that is to have relevant information stored in long-term memory, which is potentially infinite. So if you have that information, you don't have to juggle it along with the new information in your working memory. For example, if you're reading about baseball and you already know what a double play is, you don't have to think about that. You don't have to look it up. You can just attend to whatever the new information is and what you're reading. So as I was saying, we can build knowledge through listening, reading text aloud, having kids talk about it, and then they'll have some information and vocabulary about that topic in long-term memory. Then we can ask them to read about that topic. And they will not need to puzzle over terms as much. They'll have that information already in long-term memory, and we can also ask them to write about it. And writing imposes an even greater cognitive load on working memory than reading does, both of them impose quite a heavy cognitive load. But writing, you know, you may be juggling spelling and organizing your thoughts and what words to choose and all sorts of things that you don't actually have to grapple with so much with reading. And then you are gonna be able to read and write at a higher level. But what the current system has kids do is, they may be reading to a text, it might be a pretty simple text, about one topic, let's say it's sea mammals, and then the discussion often doesn't really focus on that content. It really focuses more on whatever skill the text is being used to " teach." So, author's purpose, whatever. And then we ask them to go off and read at their level, yes, but could be about a topic, completely different topic they know nothing about, could be the solar system, you know, and that's gonna make it much harder if they don't know anything about the solar system. And then often we ask them to write about yet a different topic, you know, "Should we have chocolate milk in the cafeteria?" Or it could be a writing curriculum with its own content, you know, "Here's three paragraphs about insects. Now you write about insects." And that's just not enough information. It's just making those already difficult tasks of reading and writing much harder than they need to be for kids.

Susan Lambert: 16:56

Hmm . Alright, I wanna go all the way back a little bit here, because I think I heard something that I find is a misconception for teachers and administrators, is this idea of actually taking in ideas and information. Maybe in the old days we would call that memorizing facts, I'm not sure, but the importance of having a broad foundation of knowledge that's stored in long-term memory that you can actually retrieve when it's appropriate to do more information with it. So this is a little bit of the old, like Blooms taxonomy, right? That knowledge is really, really important. You can't extend knowledge or analyze knowledge or have opinions about knowledge if you don't already have the knowledge. So is that a little bit of what you're talking about?

Natalie Wexler: 17:47

Yeah, that's very much what I'm talking about. And I think you brought up Bloom's taxonomy and that pyramid with comprehension or knowledge at the bottom, and then these higher-order, quote unquote , well, they are higher-order thinking activities at the top, like synthesis and analysis. And I think that often educators have interpreted that to mean , well , you don't wanna waste time on the bottom, you just wanna jump to the top to those higher-order things. And no, actually, the point of that pyramid is you can't get to the top without going through the bottom. So you can't think critically about a topic that you don't understand or have knowledge of. It's just not going to work. So we can't sort of just teach critical thinking skills in the abstract, and we can't skim over that knowledge, that factual information that if you don't wanna say "memorize," you could say "retain," you know. I think that "memorize" has become the m-word, and I think it's often associated with the adjective "rote" as though all memorization is rote memorization. In fact, rote memorization is when you memorize things that you don't understand. You know, you memorize some phrase in Latin, but you don't know what what it means. And that's certainly not what anybody is talking about that I know of when we are saying you need to retain information. You need to understand it as well. And I think that teachers not only skip over that part or think it's not important or maybe even harmful, they also may assume that their students have understood at a literal level things that they have not in fact understood. Because kids don't always raise their hands to say , " I don't understand that." And they also may think they understand it when they don't. So, you know, asking good questions I think is a crucial part of teaching that doesn't get enough attention. And I think you've gotta start with questions that enable you to tell, "Hey, did these kids just understand what I think they understood? I mean, did they absorb this?" I always think of , there's a couple of history teachers who have come up with a wonderful framework for teaching history called the Four Question Method. The first question is, "What happened?" You know, because I think the teachers often just assume, "Well, kids understand that." And one of them, he tells an anecdote about how he was, he'd been teaching about the American Revolution for, I don't know , two, three weeks or whatever. And this is at the high school level. And one of the kids in the class raised his hand and said, "Oh, wait a minute, we're fighting against the British?" And the other kids were like, "Yeah, we're fighting against." So you cannot assume that kids have understood what you've told them. You know, you've gotta check that.

Susan Lambert: 20:29

Yeah. That's really a great story. And I mean, I see that, too, and thinking back on my own teaching, is we jump too quickly too high and make assumptions about what kids know. Now, when we're talking about word recognition development, right, we're talking about developing automaticity so that when you see a word, you don't have to sound it out anymore, you've sounded it out enough times that you can become really automatic and recognize that word. It's sort of the same and sort of different when we're talking about knowledge development because you sort of store that knowledge and you bring that back and add to it and store it again and bring it back and add to it again. So it's a little more complex when we're talking about knowledge development and vocabulary.

Natalie Wexler: 21:14

Yeah. I mean, we're not really talking about automaticity, right ? It's not a process the way decoding is. It's gonna be, there's gonna be more effort involved, more conscious effort involved in recalling information when you need it. But there are things that can help make it, if not automatic, easier at least. And so one thing , to go back to this idea about the relationship between working memory and long-term memory. So, there are two crucial tricks involved here to make this work. One is you've gotta transfer information initially from working memory, new information, from working memory to long-term memory. You also have to be able to retrieve it when you need it. So to transfer it, what really helps is to attach meaning to it. And that's why talking about it or writing about it is so important. Especially if you do this in your own words, it's very powerful. For retrieval to, to ensure you can retrieve an item of information when you need it, which as I get older, I realize is not always possible, right? But the more you practice retrieving an item of information, the more likely you are to be able to retrieve it when you need it. There are different things that work to practice retrieval, and one is just maybe quizzing. And it's important to give quizzes, not just for a grade, but because having kids do the , even like a quick multiple-choice quiz on information that they maybe learned yesterday is a great way of cementing that information in long-term memory. But another even more powerful way sometimes is to have kids talk about it or write about it. So writing is both a powerful way of transferring information to long-term memory and of retrieving it.

Susan Lambert: 22:58

Hmm . That's, yes. I mean, you have recently been talking a lot about the impact writing can have, not just on helping retain and retrieve information, but—well maybe it's helping retain, too—but for kids to actually process information and learn about how the structures of these things actually work. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: 23:21

Yes. And yes, and I'm glad you raised that point, that it's not just about retrieving information , it is also in the process of writing, we often deepen our understanding, come to new insights, maybe realize that what we thought we understood, we didn't really understand, or that we have to change our minds. So there's a distinction between what is sometimes called knowledge-telling forms of writing and knowledge-transforming forms of writing. And of course, knowledge transforming is gonna be more difficult. And here's the catch about writing is it's hugely important. It can help cement knowledge and long-term memory, deep knowledge, et cetera . All these potential benefits. And I should mention, it is a great way to familiarize students kids with the complex syntax of written language, which is another huge potential barrier to comprehension. Even if you have background knowledge about a topic, if you're not familiar with the sentence structure—which is more complex in written language than in spoken language—you could hit a wall. And, you know, there's the famous baseball study where kids who had background knowledge about baseball, who were poor readers, actually did pretty well when they were reading about baseball. But if they'd been reading a Ph.D. dissertation about baseball, they might not have done so well. Right?

Susan Lambert: 24:39

Right.

Natalie Wexler: 24:39

So writing has all these potential benefits, but it is also, as I mentioned, really hard. It's I'd say the hardest thing we ask kids to do in school. And so it's very easy for kids if you're an inexperienced writer, it's very easy for your working memory to become so overwhelmed that you don't get all those benefits of writing. And you probably don't learn to write well either. So it is crucial to both embed writing in the content that kids are learning, both because it's gonna make writing easier for them, and 'cause they'll have some information, you gotta start with some information to write about it . They will also be cementing and deepening that knowledge. But we have to make it easier. We have to modulate that cognitive load. And one way to do that, if this is what kids need, no matter what grade level they're in, is to start instruction at the sentence level. 'Cause if writing is hard, asking kids to write at length only makes it harder. And that is something that we have really not done. We've really put a premium on, especially for the last 30 years or so, getting kids to write at length, even in kindergarten, to find their voice, to develop writing stamina and fluency. And, you know, you just can't do those things if you really don't understand how to put a sentence together or even what the concept of a sentence really is.

Susan Lambert: 25:58

Yeah. I remember—so, shout out to you and Judith Hockman for "The Writing Revolution," we'll link our listeners in the show notes to that, we've talked about it on this podcast before. It's come up several times and I think other podcasts as well. You also wrote an article, and I hope I get this right, it's called , it's about something at the sentence level. Oh gosh, I can't remember the title of it.

Natalie Wexler: 26:22

Uh, well it might be, there's "One Sentence at a Time."

Susan Lambert: 26:25

"One Sentence at a Time," that's it.

Natalie Wexler: 26:26

Yes!

Susan Lambert: 26:27

We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that as well. I have become an advocate of the sentence. Right? Like, I think the sentence is so powerful and the reason that I started to think about this was because of the work from "The Writing Revolution," that learning how to write and construct a sentence, which seems kind of simplistic in some ways, but can be quite complex.

Natalie Wexler: 26:51

Oh yes.

Susan Lambert: 26:53

And in that process of learning to write a sentence or construct a sentence, it also helps kids be better readers of sentences and taking in more information. And we know there's a breakdown in comprehension at the sentence level a lot of times.

Natalie Wexler: 27:08

Absolutely. And I recently came across a study, I mean, this is, again, something I had read before, but I reread it and it really struck me. So this was a study that a couple of researchers did with a 10-year-old boy who had average decoding ability, but struggled with comprehension. And they read aloud to him. They read a sentence about Rachel Carson, who was the author of "Silent Spring" about pesticides. And the sentence was "Rachel Carson, a scientist, writer and ecologist, grew up in the rural rivertown of Springdale, Pennsylvania." And then the researcher said to the boy, "So what do you know about Rachel Carson now?" And he said, "They grew up together in the same place." And what he had done was he looked at the nouns that were closest to the verb and he thought that was the subject of the sentence. And they were three different people.

Susan Lambert: 27:58

Mm -hmm .

Natalie Wexler: 27:59

And this is not uncommon , that kind of mistake. And it's really because he wasn't familiar with that structure. It's called an apositive, a phrase describing a noun, "scientist, writer, and ecologist." And so, you know, it's not something we tend to use in spoken language. It's something that comes up often in written language, like sentences with lots of subordinate clauses where the subject may be separated from the verb by many other words. Or, you know, there's the passive voice. They're just all of these structures that kids are not gonna get familiar with from just conversation. And sometimes not really even from hearing text read aloud. Sometimes that'll work, sometimes kids are gonna need more. And teaching them to use those structures in their own writing is gonna make it much easier for them to understand it when they encounter them in their reading.

Susan Lambert: 28:51

So this reminds me of, you talk a lot about—both in reading comprehension, and I'll ask you to give some examples of sentences 'cause I know "Writing Revolution" has some great strategies for that—but you always talk about putting the content out in front first and then letting the strategies sort of support the content as opposed to putting the strategies first and forgetting about the content. And so one of the ways that teachers can learn to put the content out in front when also working with sentences is to use this really cool strategy you have in "The Writing Revolution" that's three different sentence constructs . Can you explain that?

Natalie Wexler: 29:36

Yeah. I mean, this is just one of a number of sentence-level strategies and the method goes beyond sentences. I do wanna make that point. It goes all the way through argumentative essays.

Susan Lambert: 29:47

Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Natalie Wexler: 29:49

Yeah I think you're thinking of the Beause , But, and So activity.

Susan Lambert: 29:53

Exactly.

Natalie Wexler: 29:54

Which can be embedded in any content and adapted to any grade level. And it's a fairly simple, but at the same time, very powerful activity where you give kids a sentence stem, doesn't have to be the same sentence stem , but let's say it is the same sentence stem. And they have to finish it in three different ways with each of these conjunctions. So "because" is gonna be asking for, they're all asking for different kinds of information that kids need to retrieve from long-term memory and put in their own words. "But" is gonna be more difficult than "because" 'cause it's asking for contrasting information. "So" is asking for a cause and effect relationship, but it's a different one from "because," so these have to be constructed fairly carefully, and if kids don't have contrasting information, you might not wanna give them the "but," you know?

Susan Lambert: 30:42

That's right.

Natalie Wexler: 30:42

I have an example, I'm not sure I can relate from memory, but to show this is not just an easy exercise, it's not for little kids just because it's a sentence-level exercise. It's about the philosophy of an 18th-century philosopher named Emmanuel Kant and it's something like "Emmanuel Kant believed that space and time are subjective forms of human perception, but..." You've gotta know a lot about that subject! Just because it's a sentence doesn't mean it's gonna be easy to construct.

Susan Lambert: 31:12

Yeah, that's right. And I love that example because it's one of those strategies—well, frankly, I've used it in professional development before. It's one of those strategies that you can do orally with the young students, right?

Natalie Wexler: 31:25

Mm-hmm.

Susan Lambert: 31:26

As you are reading aloud content and bringing that content to them and helping them learn how to construct sentences, but use knowledge to actually construct those. And you can use it all the way up through higher ed really to help people then both retrieve the content or the knowledge that they need to retrieve and further work with it.

Natalie Wexler: 31:48

Yeah. As Judith Hockman—and, by the way, this is Judith Hockman's method, not mine—and she says the rigor of the activity depends on the content. And it's also, it is simultaneously teaching students not just about "because ," " but," and "so," but you can then move on to "although," and "despite," and then, you know , they're all sorts of, it's teaching them how to construct sentences, getting them familiar with complex syntax. And at the same time it is reinforcing and deepening their knowledge of whatever the content is. And fostering analytical abilities, too, because they're having to connect these different bits of information, figure out why did that thing happen? And, you know, what is the contrasting information that goes in a different direction? All of those things.

Susan Lambert: 32:35

You know, I've heard you say, we should sort of tally, I've heard you say "content" so many, many, many different times, almost in every sentence that you've used in this podcast today. I wanna go all the way back to sort of the a-ha that you had about what wasn't working in elementary school and why you actually wrote this book. Because I think it's a message, this message that you go to school to learn stuff, that parents assume their kids are gonna go to school to learn stuff. And by "stuff" we mean content. But you had a real a-ha on that, which led you to write this book. Would you mind sharing that?

Natalie Wexler: 33:15

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I ever would've figured this out on my own. It was basically explained to me, and, and I should point out that, you know, E.D. Hirsch wrote about essentially the same problem back in 1987. And I learned a lot from his writing and from talking with him. But I was sort of involved in the education reform movement in Washington D.C., where I live. I was on the board of a charter school. I was writing about all this stuff. And it seemed to me at first that the problem was high school. And that's what everybody else seemed to be thinking, that we were making progress at elementary school, but somehow this just wasn't translating into progress at the high school level and what was wrong with high school. What I—I won't go through all of the steps I went through—but actually it was Judy Hockman who was the first one to explain to me that no, this problem actually doesn't begin in high school. It has to do with the fact that we're not building the knowledge, that we're not starting to build the knowledge that kids need in high school. We're not starting to build that in elementary school. And I'd been in elementary classrooms and I'd had kids who went to elementary school and I assumed that elementary schools were trying to teach substantive content and build knowledge and I realized I had not understood what I was looking at, and that a lot of other people didn't really seem to be understanding this and not getting the connection between what we were doing in elementary school and what was happening at upper grade levels. And, as I said, it had been written about before, you know, E.D. Hirsch and others, but what hadn't been written was a more journalistic account of what this problem was, that told stories and was maybe a little more engaging. And so that seemed to me that if somebody, like me, could write that book, I didn't think I was—at first, I tried to convince other people who I thought had a better chance of getting a book contract to undertake this. But I was told, "Oh no, no, that's too complicated." So, fools rush in. And once I got the book contract, I suddenly had a panic attack because I realized, "Oh, this really is complicated." But, you know, I thought it was really important to figure out how to lay it all out in a digestible way. And the rest I guess is history, although I didn't necessarily expect it to be.

Susan Lambert: 35:35

Yeah. And I think one of the things, so I actually, when I started my teaching career, I taught the core knowledge sequence. And you know, just a short story is those were back in the days when elementary school teachers were... you couldn't find a job. There was so many of them in the market where I was living that you were lucky if you got a job offer. And I got a job offer in a core knowledge school and I thought, "No, I don't wanna go there. I don't want somebody telling me the content that I'm supposed to be teaching. I want to bring the art, right? To this whole teaching process." And I tell people that I was in that school for maybe two or three weeks and I was sold because I taught in a third-grade classroom. I had kids that came to me that had been in that school from kindergarten, first, and second grade. When I started to teach the Ancient Rome unit—which, by the way, I knew nothing about Ancient Rome to teach that unit—the kids were so engaged, they came with some background knowledge. They knew about Greek civilizations 'cause they had learned it in second grade. But I was literally sold on this idea because I assumed going in that kids, why would kids wanna learn about that boring stuff? Right?

Natalie Wexler: 36:54

Yeah. Yeah. And I've heard that from other teachers who became converts as well. And what you probably did, I mean, I think this is really important, it's a point that I wanna start making—even if you as a teacher have doubts about the curriculum, it's really important to give it your best shot and approach it with enthusiasm, which presumably you did. Because I think if you had approached it like, "Oh, this is really boring stuff," that the kids would've picked up on that. And I think that is sometimes what happens. But I did a profile a while ago of a teacher in Tennessee who had the same reactions. She was teaching third grade in a school that was piloting CKLA, Core Knowledge Language arts. And she was asked to participate in the pilot. She was a veteran teacher. She'd seen fads come and go. And she was like , " Uch , well, you know, my kids, they're not gonna be interested in the Vikings, they're not gonna be interested in ancient Rome. But she said she decided to give it her best shot. And she said, you know, "Even if I didn't think what I was reading that day was the most fascinating thing I'd ever come across, I read it as though it was the most fascinating thing I'd ever come across". And, and very quickly she had the same experience you did. She saw that these kids were so engaged , they couldn't get enough, and it turned her into a total convert.

Susan Lambert: 38:09

Yeah. Yeah . Kids love it. I mean, what kid doesn't wanna be thinking like a scientist or a historian, you know?

Natalie Wexler: 38:16

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing , so she said there were three things that convinced her. One was the level of engagement. Another was the equity she saw in the classroom. This was a mostly affluent student body, but there were some kids from less highly educated families, and one girl in particular who did not come from a highly educated family and had been diagnosed with a reading disability. But when she was given access to the same information as other kids, she was able to participate in class discussion. She was the one who might remember the vocabulary word from two months ago. And it changed everybody's perception, including her own, I think, of who she was and what she was capable of doing. And her scores on a comprehension test zoomed up, which I think probably had more to do with her confidence than anything else since it was just a few weeks. But anyway, the third thing that convinced this teacher was student writing, to get us back to writing, that she said, "You know, at my school, everybody hated writing before CKLA," but she said once the kids were learning stuff they were excited about and they had stuff to say, and you gave 'em an opportunity to write about that stuff, she said you couldn't stop them. They loved writing. So sometimes that's all it takes.

Susan Lambert: 39:33

Yeah, I appreciate that. I know, because of your book we've been talking a lot about the importance of background knowledge and academic background knowledge to help with reading comprehension. But I love that you just made that connection, that you read better when you read about stuff that you know, but you can't write if you don't know about what you're writing. And so it's really important.

Natalie Wexler: 39:54

Yeah. I'd like to make one other point that I think sometimes is misinterpreted, which is , I've heard people say, "Well, yeah, but you know, you can't teach kids about every topic in the world." And, you know, like, "How does this really help them to learn about these topics?" Well, what learning about these topics does is actually develop their general academic knowledge and vocabulary and their familiarity with complex syntax. So the goal, of course, is to develop that general critical threshold of general academic vocabulary that we know is associated with better general reading comprehension. But you can't do that in the abstract. I mean, a word like "medieval" isn't gonna stick, isn't really gonna have meaning unless you also know something about history. So the way to that general academic knowledge is through knowledge of specific topics.

Susan Lambert: 40:50

Mm-hmm . Yeah, that's a really good point. Well, I'm gonna ask you this. If you could see anything in the headlines in the next 6–12 months, what would you like to see? I mean, as it relates to education.

Natalie Wexler: 41:04

Right, yes. Let's not cast too wide a net here! Well, I think I'm beginning to see some of this, that in coverage of the Science of Reading—which is a term we may need to make our peace with, I mean , I have advocated for something like science of literacy or science of learning, but let's say Science of Reading—that we need to go beyond phonics. That it really, if you look at all of the science related to reading, you will see not just that comprehension is also important, but also that our standard approach to comprehension doesn't line up with what science tells us about how comprehension works. And I think the media generally have not included that point. But I have seen a few articles lately that are beginning to make that argument. And I think it's really important because if you just say, "Well, of course comprehension is also important," or "It's the end goal," teachers may think that what they are currently doing—they spend a lot of time on comprehension, right ? That's mostly what they're doing, right, is teaching those comprehension skills and strategies that are gonna set their students up for success. And so it needs to be made really explicit that, you know, just as we've done on the decoding side, saying to teachers, "You may believe that you're teaching phonics, but in fact the information you've been given, the training you've been given, isn't really what is necessary to teach phonics in a way that works." We also need to say on the comprehension side, "Yes, you've been told what you need to do to foster comprehension, but it's not the whole story." You really need to go beyond that. And it is possible to do both of, I think, I would love headlines—or stories, you probably couldn't fit this all in a headline—that say, not only is it possible to do both of these things at the same time, teach foundational skills in a way that works and build knowledge in a way that works, it actually makes it easier for everybody if we do these things at the same time. And that there are now curricula out there that cover both of these things that provide teachers—I think teachers may learn about the Science of Reading but they may think, "Well, okay, this is great in theory, but how do I actually do this in the classroom?"

Susan Lambert: 43:27

Yeah.

Natalie Wexler: 43:28

A curriculum can help guide them through that, and at the same time, guide them through the kind of knowledge building that kids are gonna need to become fully literate.

Susan Lambert: 43:37

Yeah, that's great. And I know , can you talk a little bit about the Knowledge Matters campaign? Because I think they recently updated their website, right? To sort of highlight some of these curricula?

Natalie Wexler: 43:49

Yes, absolutely. So the Knowledge Matters campaign has been around for a number of years, but they did just recently update their website and it is a wealth of resources and information articles, but also videos and interviews with teachers, tours going into classrooms around the country that are using one of these curricula. But they have also identified six curricula that are out there now that in different ways do an effective job of covering both foundational skills and building knowledge. And there's quite a bit of information there. So I think the Knowledge Matters campaign is really , I'm expecting more good things. I should mention I'm on the board of their parent organization, so I'm not totally an objective observer, but I think they've been doing some great work and I think they're gonna be doing even more in the future.

Susan Lambert: 44:41

Yeah. We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that website because they're , is it called their Scientific Advisory Committee or something, put out a really nice statement, didn't they?

Natalie Wexler: 44:52

Yes. And essentially saying something along the lines of what I've just been saying about the need to also bring attention, you know, it's great to focus attention on problems with phonics instruction, but we also need to bring attention to problems with comprehension instruction and the failure to build a kind of knowledge that fuels comprehension.

Susan Lambert: 45:11

Well , that's awesome. Well, Natalie, anything else in closing? Any other messages you wanna send to our listeners?

Natalie Wexler: 45:19

Oh , I'd say, you know, first of all, I wanna thank the many educators and teachers out there who have embraced this message, even though I think it can be, I know it can be very painful , because if you've been teaching in a certain way, in good faith, in the belief that you are helping kids and you've been doing this for years, and then, you know, somebody comes along and tells you actually, you know, that it's not you, but this system is not working for a lot of kids, that's a a painful message to hear, and it can feel like blame, even if it's phrased differently, and it can stir up guilt feelings. And so, you know, it's natural to try to raise barriers against taking that kind of message. And what has amazed me is how many teachers and educators have nevertheless really embraced this message. And I think that really speaks to how much they care about their students , and that change is hard, but they are undertaking it on a daily basis.

Susan Lambert: 46:22

Mm-hmm . That's so true. And I just wanna say thank you to you, who decided—well, first of all, thanks to the other people who said "No" to writing the book about this knowledge idea. But thank you for taking it on because it's not an easy topic to describe. I can't imagine, but there may be listeners out there that have not yet, number one, listened to the first episode of this podcast, which they should , but also picked up the book and read the book. So we'll make sure people have access to that link to be able to grab it. So thanks again, Natalie, and thanks for joining us again.

Natalie Wexler: 46:58

And thank you, I should add, Susan, for this podcast and for all of the incredible work that you're doing to spread this message, the success of this podcast has also been truly amazing and gratifying.

Susan Lambert: 47:10

Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Natalie Wexler, education writer and author of "The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and How to Fix It." Check out the show notes for a link to that and much more. Coming up next time, we've got another special episode. I'm going to get a visit from a couple of VIPs from the Amplify podcast team.

Eric Cross: 47:39

Between Dan and Bethany, we have some phenomenal math teachers right here in this podcast conversation.

Dan Meyer: 47:45

We do love to talk. We love to talk.

Bethany Lockhart Johnson: 47:46

And we love the compliments.

Susan Lambert: 47:48

I'll be joined by the hosts of Science Connections: The podcast and Math Teacher Lounge. And I'm also going to have a fascinating conversation about the science of learning with Peter C. Brown, lead author of the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning."

Peter C. Brown: 48:06

What we are kind of intuitively drawn to do as a learning strategy, like rereading material, listening to lectures, practicing something over and over and over again , those strategies are pretty much labor in vain. They're not effective. They don't stick.

Susan Lambert: 48:22

That's all next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.