S1-01. The Knowledge Gap: Natalie Wexler

What’s broken in our education system? Natalie joins Susan for a provocative talk about her latest book, The Knowledge Gap, and how a knowledge-based curriculum can change classrooms—and students’ futures.

Quotes

“Kids actually love to learn stuff. They love to feel like they’re experts. It does wonders for their self-esteem.” - Wexler

“Once teachers try it and can see what can happen…they’re going to say ‘I’m never going back to what I was doing before.” - Wexler

Resources

Natalie Wexler’s books:

The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it

The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grade

Natalie Wexler’s articles:

“Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong: The Case for Teaching Kids Stuff” (The Atlantic, August 2019)

“Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years” (The Atlantic, April 2018)

Additional resources:

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham’s education blog

Want to discuss the episode? Join our Facebook group Science of Reading: The Community.

Episode Content Timestamps*

2:00: Introduction: Why is Natalie Wexler?
4:00: The meaning of "content"
6:00: How did the problem of not teaching content evolve? Why do we need to teach content?
10:00: Observations from a knowledge-based classroom
13:00: Education reform and the current attention on knowledge building
17:00: Classroom teachers: Addressing misconceptions and confusion, and insight
26:00: The knowledge gap issue beyond just the individual teacher
34:00: The connection between content and writing
36:00: Top things for listeners to take away from this episode

*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Transcript

Susan Lambert: What if a change in classroom practice could lead to change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read and why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Lambert, from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with Science of Reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. On today's episode, Natalie Wexler joins me for a fascinating discussion about her new book, The Knowledge Gap. She talks about how paying attention to this issue can bring about real change in the lives of students. I know you'll enjoy this discussion as much as I did.

Susan Lambert: Hello, Natalie. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so excited to have you here to talk about your new book, which is really getting a lot of attention. But before we dive into that, what I'd really like to hear is what drew you into this place. How did you end up writing this book, and how did your background lead you to that?

Natalie Wexler: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I am thrilled to be here. Well, I think if you want to go far farther back than just the specific thing that led to this book, I became fascinated by education and what was going on in Washington DC, where I live. There was a lot of education reform activity. And it just seemed to me that if, you know, you want to advance social justice in society, you want to break the cycle of multigenerational poverty, that education is really your best bet. And so I threw myself into this. And I started writing about it when I realized I have a background in journalism and I realized that there was way more going on in the educational world in Washington DC, than than the publications, the Washington Post, was really able to cover. So I started writing about it for a website called Greater Greater Washington, a sort of communal news website. and that was really eye-opening, because I got to actually talk to teachers and not just walk through classrooms for five minutes and things like that. But there was this mystery that I wanted to solve, which is: Why did things seem to be getting better in elementary school—which everybody told me was the bright spot, and the scores were rising—but at high school it all seemed to fall apart? And, when eventually I stumbled—I would like to say I figured out the answer to that question all by myself, but I didn't. It was explained to me by a veteran educator that ... I mean, she didn't put all the pieces together for me, but she told me, "Elementary schools are really not trying to teach any content. They're focusing largely on these reading comprehension skills." And I hadn't realized that. I'd been in all these elementary school classrooms, and I think like many people, I assumed they were trying to teach content. And when I put all these pieces together and I realized that what we're doing in elementary school really plants the seeds of what we're seeing happening in high school, in terms of failure, I decided somebody had to write a book about it.

Susan Lambert: So here you are.

Natalie Wexler: So here I am.

Susan Lambert: So ... you say the word "content." What exactly, for our listeners, do you mean by content? Can we define that a little bit? I think it's assumed that we know what that means.

Natalie Wexler: Sure. And of course when kids are reading, they're reading content by definition, but the focus has not been—certainly in the elementary and sometimes middle school grades—on the content. It's been on a skills like finding the main idea or making inferences and the content basically has been secondary and hasn't really been thought to matter. But when I say content, I mean staying on a topic for at least a couple of weeks and, you know, having kids think about it and, you know, maybe you'd have them at "find the main idea of the passage," but it wouldn't be that we're just practicing finding the main idea and it doesn't really matter what the topic is; it's, "We're learning about this topic, and in service of learning about this topic, we will talk about what the main idea is of this passage we just read." So, for parents, that would be like parents that have elementary students, assume, "Hey, they're going to learn things about science and things about history and things about the arts."

Susan Lambert: And so those are the things that you say are really missed in elementary school.

Natalie Wexler: Especially history, I would say. And you know, social studies has really been marginalized. And even when social studies was more of a presence at elementary schools, it was often done at a very superficial level. And kids were not learning much about history, because it's been thought it was developmentally inappropriate for young children. And there is no evidence for that. And I've seen first, second graders get very interested in historical topics.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. So have I. We'll talk about that later. So how do you think we ended up in this place, in this country of "Wait a minute, we're not teaching content; we're overly focused on skills; things aren't developmentally appropriate"? Where's all this come from?

Natalie Wexler: Well, there are some deep roots. And there's ... the dominant educational pedagogical philosophy for a hundred years now in schools of education has been what used to be called progressive education, and is now often referred to as constructivism in education. And the basic tenet, or certainly one basic tenet of that, is that it's better for kids to discover or construct knowledge for themselves than to have a teacher stand up in front of a classroom and just pour facts into their passive receptacles of brains. And you know, there is some truth to that. Because obviously if you're going to know—really understand something—know something, you have to be a participant in the process. But it's become seen as, "Kids really need to discover information for themselves." And especially kids who are coming to school without a lot of knowledge of the world, without a lot of knowledge of history, science — for them to discover information for themselves is a tremendously inefficient process at best. But the way it ties into this emphasis on reading comprehension skills rather than content is that teachers can feel, "Well, I'm not just dumping a load of facts on them that they won't really understand; I'm giving them the tools to acquire knowledge on their own, through their own reading down the road."

Susan Lambert: Yeah. I remember even in my undergraduate program ... and you know, I'm older. I'm hearing, "Well, we have the internet now. People can Google things to learn things. We don't really have to teach kids anything. We just have to teach them about strategies or how do they think, so metacognition." And how would you respond to that now?

Natalie Wexler: Yeah, you know, and that actually predates the internet era. Before "You can just Google it," it was, "You can just look it up." And that really is a misunderstanding of what goes on when we read. And Daniel Willingham, who is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, has written and spoken about this. But if you have to stop and look things up, every few words or every few sentences, that imposes a tremendous cognitive load on you. You lose your train of thought; you lose the sense of the passage. Even if only 2% of the words and phrases in a passage are unfamiliar, some studies have shown comprehension begins to suffer. And then of course, if you try to Google something or look something up, you may not understand the definition, if you don't have the background knowledge. Or you may get the wrong definition or inaccurate information. And if you don't have the knowledge to evaluate it, you'll be in trouble.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And so, going back to just this idea then of background knowledge, what you're introducing in this book actually isn't new. And you say that, and we'll talk a little bit about why we think it's gone kind of crazy in the media now. But why do you think it's been so overlooked?

Natalie Wexler: Well, I think, you know, it starts with a lot of the way teacher training is done and the kinds of things that you were just mentioning. And that knowledge is sort of devalued in institutions of education, teacher training. And I think that has to do with a divergence between schools of education and the rest of academia. They've developed along separate tracks. And so, what cognitive psychologists on the same campus as the school of education, what they have learned about the reading process and just the science of learning in general has not penetrated schools of education. So that's certainly one basic problem. But I think there is this widespread feeling that, you know, knowledge is going to be boring for kids or maybe too difficult for young kids. And I think that yes, it can be. I mean, you can make anything boring. But you can also make almost anything engaging, even for young children. And kids actually love to learn stuff. They love to feel like they're experts. It does wonders for their self-esteem. Not to mention their chances of future success.

Susan Lambert: So one of the things you did for a year was you were actually in classrooms where you observed sort of this knowledge base using Core Knowledge Language Arts. You observed this instruction happening. What did you see about students engaged in the topic or in the content?

Natalie Wexler: It was fascinating. I mean, I remember I was just thinking about how I said to a group of people, you know, "You could not believe what the second graders are doing." And of course, this was a classroom of all low-income students of color. And somebody said, "Yes, that's part of the low expectations that we have for kids in disadvantaged communities." And I said, "No, no, I mean, any second graders ... you would be surprised that any group of second graders could do this." They were having very high-level discussions that they were very engaged in, about things like, you know, strategy at the Battle of Thermopylae or, you know, fairness in ancient Greece and the birth of democracy, and you know, just all sorts of things that I had not. ... You know, I did assume that kids were learning something of substance, but frankly what they were learning in this classroom was beyond my expectations, and really beyond what I saw my own kids, who went to a fancy private school, what they were doing in second grade. And these kids were, most of them, from non-English-speaking families and they were acquiring this amazing vocabulary, you know, painlessly. And they were actually enjoying it. It wasn't like they were memorizing lists of vocabulary words, but through repetition, through hearing the same words in different contexts, having them embedded in stories that the kids were really interested in. Greek mythology, they absolutely loved. And they were learning words like "labyrinth" and "opponent" and "revenge." And, you know, speaking of Greek ... this wasn't the classroom I followed, but another school. This was in Reno, Nevada, where the kids were also—the school had adopted CKLA. The teacher there ... and again, this was all low-income kids, all from Spanish-speaking families. They loved Greek mythology so much that they incorporated it into their playground routine, so that they—and the teacher who was telling me, he tells me, you know, "Our kids really don't have games with rules at recess. It's a free-for-all." But they had organized themselves into groups of Greek gods. And so a little girl might come up to one group and they would say, "No, we already have an Athena. But if you want to be an Artemis, you can stay with us, or if you want to be Athena, you can go to that other group, because they're looking for one." And that was so powerful in convincing the teachers that this made sense. They had never seen what was going on in the classroom carry over into children's play in this way.

Susan Lambert: That's very exciting. And then, so going back to why, why do you think your book at this time about this issue of the knowledge gap is gaining so much attention? I mean, every place I look, you're on a podcast or I see the book someplace, and maybe that's because of the world that I'm in, but it seems like it's gaining a lot of attention. Why do you think that is?

Natalie Wexler: Well, it's wonderful to see the amount of attention it's getting. And I think there are a lot of teachers out there who have felt that what they were doing wasn't really working, but they weren't sure why. And they didn't know what else to do, because all of their training, their materials, their supervisors were all telling them this is the way to improve comprehension, especially for the lower-achieving students. And if you just do this, everything will be okay. And then they can see that it's not necessarily working, but there's no alternative that's obvious. I also think there's a general ... I mean, beyond just teachers, there's been a general disillusionment with education reform. It hasn't seemed to work. And I worry that this book was going to come out too late to bring it to people's attention or keep it on education. It's not that education can't work as an engine of social mobility. It is that what we've been trying hasn't worked and there is this other thing that we could relatively easily do that could make a huge difference. And I say relatively easily, compared to some of the things that people are now beginning to focus on, like ending poverty and racism and things like that. Of course we want to do that, but we shouldn't wait for those things to happen before we make this change in education. And making this change in education can actually lead to a lessening of those other things in society that we are so concerned about.

Susan Lambert: You've talked about being sort of involved in this ed reform community in Washington, DC, and seeing these other things that have been tried. Inside the classroom has not really been a focus of education reform. Why do you think that is?

Natalie Wexler: Yes, that's a very good question, and one that I wanted to try to figure out in writing this book. And I think, you know, I think that policymakers, reformers, philanthropists have kind of trusted the education experts to figure out what to do in the classroom. They've really looked at outputs like test scores, and to some extent inputs like teacher quality, and, you know, sort of trusted that if you tinker with those things at either end, what goes on in the middle will improve. But in fact, some of those things have made the situation worse. For example, putting all this emphasis on reading test scores has just resulted in more of this skills-and-strategies instruction, which has really, you know ... we've really undermined our own efforts to achieve more educational equity by doing that. So I think that is one reason. And I think, as I mentioned, the education experts that outsiders or policymakers or reformers have relied on, obviously they want to improve the situation for all kids too, but they are working on incomplete and in many cases, inaccurate information.

Susan Lambert: That's really interesting. So why don't we just, like, dive, then, into the classroom. And one of the things that you talk about is—and we know from the Science of Reading—is that, you know, kids really need two things. They need to be able to decode and they need to have sort of this language comprehension, which is where this background knowledge plays into it. But talk to me a little bit about what teachers are doing in the classroom and how they've maybe become confused by what they're supposed to be doing with those two things.

Natalie Wexler: Yeah. So, of course there are two aspects to reading, and one is decoding and one is comprehension. And you know, this was an observation made by a cognitive scientist named Mark Seidenberg that I thought was really insightful. Teachers and cognitive scientists have come to opposite conclusions about how to approach each of these components of reading. Cognitive scientists have amassed a mountain of evidence showing that the best way to teach the foundational skills—decoding, matching sounds to letters—is through direct, explicit instruction in a set of skills. Teachers, on the other hand, have often ... it's changed to some extent, but certainly a couple of decades ago, the thinking was decoding is something that will arise naturally if you just surround kids with books. And to some extent, that is still a belief that's very widespread—that you don't need to teach decoding explicitly. Comprehension, on the other hand, cognitive scientists see as something that grows more or less naturally along with knowledge. You expand kids' knowledge and they will be able to understand text better and find the main idea and all of that. But teachers have seen comprehension as the part of reading where you do need to teach these discrete skills directly and they will be generally applicable. And that is really not what the evidence from cognitive science shows.

Susan Lambert: Where do you think that teachers have gotten that misconception, outside of, you know, maybe the way that they were taught in college? But we have things like the National Reading Panel report. Wasn't that put in place to try to help us understand that?

Natalie Wexler: Yeah, so the National Reading Panel report is one of many things I've come across that that, you know ... the intent was great, but the results were not. It was really a blue-ribbon panel set up to resolve what was called the reading wars, which was really about how to teach decoding. And the panel came down very strongly on the side of phonics. You have to teach phonics systematically, to enable many, if not most, kids to decode well. But they also endorsed certain reading comprehension strategies. They found evidence that these strategies would boost kids' comprehension. And there are a couple of problems with that conclusion. One is that the panel's report failed to mention that these strategies will only work if you have enough background knowledge about the topic to understand the text, because the strategies they endorsed really consist of asking yourself questions as you're reading. You know, "How does this relate to other things I know about the topic?" Or you know, even just, "Am I understanding this passage?" But if you cannot answer those questions, the strategies won't help you. The other thing is that these studies that the panel endorsed lasted at most six weeks. And, you know, Dan Willingham, who I mentioned earlier, has looked at the data and said, "Really, it looks like after just two weeks, there's really not much bang for your buck from teaching these strategies. And we teach these strategies month after month, year after year." And finally, I would say ... well, two more things. One is that the panel endorsed a handful of strategies that they found evidence for. Most of the skills and strategies that teachers focus on in American classrooms were not endorsed by that panel and have no evidence behind them. And the other thing is, even if teachers are using the strategies that were endorsed by the panel, studies put complex text in the foreground and strategies were brought in as needed in aid of getting kids to understand that text. That is not the way most American teachers use them. They put the skills and strategies in the foreground. There's a "skill of the week" or whatever. And then they bring in texts that they find to be well-suited for demonstrating the skill or strategy. So instead of harnessing skills and strategies to content, they've got the cart before the horse.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. I can imagine ... I can imagine if I'm a classroom teacher and I'm listening to this, and this is what's happening in my classroom, and this is new information to me, or I'm hearing this in a way that I've never heard before ... what would you say to that teacher, who this is either new information for or they're hearing it in a different way and they're feeling a little defensive?

Natalie Wexler: Yes, absolutely. I mean, as I think I mentioned, some teachers will embrace this message wholeheartedly and say, "Why did I not know about all of this before?" But from talking to people who are working with teachers, maybe 50% of teachers have some level of resistance. And that's understandable. I mean, for one thing, their training is that this is not the way to do things. But also, emotionally, it can be very difficult when you've been doing something for years in the belief that you're helping kids, and then somebody comes along and says, "Actually, not only are not helping them, you may be holding them back," that is a very difficult pill to swallow. And, there's something that psychologists call confirmation bias, which inclines people to embrace evidence that, accords with their deeply held beliefs and to reject evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. And so, sometimes that is going to be an obstacle to getting teachers to embrace this. And then if you do embrace it, there's often a lot of guilt. But I do think, you know, there probably is gonna be some ... there's some teachers who may never come around, but I think a lot of other teachers, the most powerful thing is to show them what this looks like. If you can find a school that has been doing this for a couple of years, because the first year of implementation of anything can be rotten, right?

Susan Lambert: Yeah.

Natalie Wexler: They've been doing it for two or three years; they've been doing it well, implementing some coherent content-focused curriculum. And then you can bring other teachers there to see what it looks like in action and to talk to the teachers to see that the teachers actually really like this much better, that the students also seem to like it much better. They seem to be learning a lot. Parents are happy. I mean, you know, I think that's going to be more powerful than especially, you know ... I think one approach is to say to teachers, "Well, you know, this is evidence-based," and one thing I've discovered is that some teachers are very suspicious of that label, "evidence-based," because they've had lots of initiatives thrown at them, many of which have the "evidenced-based" label on them, but they're not actually really based in evidence. So they become kind of skeptical, even of that label.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I know that you've had a chance to interact with lots of teachers and talk with lots of teachers and you must have a good example of a teacher that was skeptical or didn't know what the problem was, started to build a content-based approach in their classroom ... do you have an example of one of those teachers you could describe their experience?

Natalie Wexler: I'm trying to think. Yeah, you know, the teacher I followed most closely was somewhat skeptical, but she hadn't really ... she'd never taught in the skills-and-strategies mode. And she came from a preschool background. And I think her initial reaction when she was teaching CKLA to kindergarteners was, "These kids are still learning English. Do they really need to know or can they learn words like 'deciduous'?" I think it took her a little while, but she began to see that actually they could handle it, and they were so proud of knowing. And in fact, the principal of that school had a video on her phone of one of the kindergarteners who was from a Spanish-speaking family talking about deciduous trees! So, you know, another teacher at the same school, who was a first-grade teacher, she came around pretty quickly, but she talked about how other teachers at that school and to some extent herself were like, "I don't know—War of 1812 for second graders? Really?" So I think there is a lot of that. But, you know, I think once teachers try it and they see what can happen—and I saw this in Reno, Nevada, where I went to report for the book—they'll say, "You know, this was not an easy transition, but I'm never going back to what I was doing before CKLA."

Susan Lambert: Very interesting. And then, so if you think about that one teacher in one classroom impacting a group of students' work for one year, it seems to me that in order to really solve the knowledge gap issue, it has to be beyond just an individual teacher in a classroom. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Natalie Wexler: Yeah, I think that's really important. It's one of those lessons I took from this Reno case study. You know, knowledge building is a cumulative, gradual process. There's only so much that one teacher is going to be able to do, even in one school year. Not saying there's nothing a teacher can do, but to get the maximum benefits, a curriculum should build from one year to the next in a logical way. And if kids switch from one school to another, which often happens, especially with a low-income population, it would be nice if they were not just gonna get the same thing repeated, or get gaps in their knowledge, but that there is the same curriculum going to also be in place at this school that they moved to. And in Reno, what happened was, it was more of a grassroots movement where teachers discovered that really what would make sense was to build kids' knowledge. And unfortunately, although they had maybe half of the elementary school teachers in that district, maybe a thousand teachers at some point came into contact with this idea and started adopting it, to some extent, the central office of the district wasn't really behind this. And there were all these competing new initiatives that came in and basically the effort kind of fell apart as an organized effort. So I think you need both. You need support of the district or the central office or the school administration, certainly the building leadership, but you also at the same time need teachers to understand why this is a good idea and how to implement it. So it's gotta be a multipronged effort.

Susan Lambert: You also talk about in your book, which I found fascinating, this sort of a multifaceted approach to the benefits of a knowledge-based curriculum, beyond the classroom. So let's use professional development for an example of that, and maybe talk a little bit about how professional development hasn't worked in the past and how when you have a knowledge-based approach, we could approach professional development in a different way.

Natalie Wexler: Yeah. well, professional development has essentially not really worked. <laughs> There's a TNTP report, I think it's called The Mirage, which concluded that something like the $18 billion a year we spend on professional development really hasn't made any difference. And one problem with most professional development is it's what they call "drive-by professional development." It's disconnected from any particular content. And it's really the same problem when you see an elementary education where there's a focus on these disconnected skills. "Okay, we're gonna teach you how to foster critical thinking in the abstract!" And what really needs to happen is, "Okay, you're teaching the myth of Daedalus and Icarus? Here's how to get kids to think critically about that particular content." Or whatever it is. It's not this, just, transferrable thing. And I also think teachers need sustained professional development—really, the kind of model that was accidentally pioneered by these teachers in Reno, where a group of teachers came together. They talked about trying something new. They went back to their classrooms and tried it and then they came back in two weeks, talked about how it had gone, the lessons they had all learned from what they had done, and then they discuss something else new, and the cycle repeated. And that turned out to be very powerful.

Susan Lambert: It sounds like the Japanese lesson study model, where you're talking about the lesson and the reactions of the students—

Natalie Wexler: Yeah. And I think that kind of collaboration between teachers is really crucial, and teachers are often isolated in their classrooms, and it holds everyone back.

Susan Lambert: Yeah. And it must be frightening as a second grade teacher to teach the Civil War when you're not even sure if you have the background or the information to be able to appropriately teach that.

Natalie Wexler: Yes. But you know, a good curriculum can go a long way in educating educators, educating teachers as well as students. And, it's funny you mentioned the Civil War, because one day the CKLA classroom I was observing, it was actually the module or domain on the Civil War and a student teacher who was in the classroom was teaching this lesson—was doing a read-aloud on the Civil War—and she did a good job. But I asked her afterwards, "How did you feel about that?" She said she was really terrified, because she didn't really know this material. But you know, the first time you teach material you're not familiar with, I think you really need a script. Teachers do not like the idea of a scripted curriculum. But if you're teaching—and not just the Civil War, but like, the War of 1812, there aren't too many adults who really know much about the War of 1812. So having that read-aloud is really important. But after you've done it once or twice or three times, you're going to be much more comfortable with the content and then you may be able to deliver it in a different way. And if you know what's important, and the example I use in the book—it's kind of in passing, unfortunately; it's one of the things I wish I had been able to spend more time on—but a first-grade teacher who was teaching CKLA that I observed was teaching about Mesopotamia. And she had done this read-aloud a couple of times and she found it didn't really grab the kids. So she decided to teach the same content in a more experiential way. And she created the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers on the floor of her classroom using blue construction paper and told the kids, "We're going on a journey, a time-travel expedition." She had them pretend to paddle down these rivers to Babylon, where she had this huge poster of Babylon, and she sort of led them through this journey through Babylon. And they were mesmerized.

Susan Lambert: That's lovely. I bet they were. So, speaking of those classes, the classes that you observed for a year in the book, have you done any follow-up? Do you know how they're doing now?

Natalie Wexler: Well, I wish I knew more. I don't really know what happened to the two skills-focused classrooms I observed. One of those schools is no longer actually in business—it was a charter school. It's now been taken absorbed into the DC public education system. The classroom that I know more about, the kids I know a bit more about, are those CKLA kids, that class. And from what I hear, they've gone on to do great things. I don't know. I don't think that their initial third-grade test scores were as maybe as high as I might've hoped. But you know, with testing it's kind of a crapshoot, because those kids knew, I can tell you, they knew Greek mythology backwards and forwards. They knew about the War of 1812. But who knows what the reading passages were on the tests. And they may not ... a lot of them still coming from a non-English-speaking families, et cetera, they may not have had yet that critical mass of background knowledge and vocabulary that would enable them to understand anything that was thrown at them. But I will say, I did hear anecdotally that the middle school, at least one middle school that's part of that network that I was following, the classroom had the highest test scores for middle-school grades in the city. Interestingly, higher than what is considered to be the best, you know, in the affluent neighborhood, the best middle school in town.

Susan Lambert: Interesting. So, one other question. This isn't really the first book that you've written about what's happening inside the classroom or even about content. You wrote another one or coauthored another one that connected writing. Can you talk a little bit about the connection between content and writing? And I know you're really passionate about this one.

Natalie Wexler: Yeah. I coauthored that book with a woman named Judith Hochman, who is a veteran educator. She's actually the one who explained to me what was actually going on in the elementary classrooms.

Susan Lambert: Or not going on, maybe. <laughs>

Natalie Wexler: Not going on. And she developed this method of teaching, really teaching writing and content at the same time, over a period of many years. It was largely a process of trial and error, but it turns out to accord with a lot of cognitive scientific evidence. And so, there really is a close relationship between writing and knowledge. Obviously you cannot write about a topic you don't know something about, so you need some knowledge in order to start writing. But the writing process itself then builds and deepens knowledge, because when you're writing, first of all, you're having to retrieve things from your longterm memory or things that you have somewhat forgotten. And that is a very powerful way that cognitive scientists have found of boosting retention of information. You're also putting things in your own words. Again, scientists have found that's a great way to really understand something and to get it into your longterm memory. The problem with writing, though, is that it is so difficult. It is probably, I would say, the most difficult thing we ask kids to do in school. And we have really underestimated how hard it is. We haven't taught it explicitly. And we haven't started at the sentence level with kids. We've asked them to write at length from the beginning. And for an inexperienced writer, that is often such an overwhelming cognitive task that they neither learn how to write well, nor do they have enough cognitive capacity available for them to use writing to build and deepen knowledge.

Susan Lambert: Hmm. Interesting. What's the name of that book again?

Natalie Wexler: Oh, The Writing Revolution.

Susan Lambert: Great! We'll link our listeners in the show notes to that book as well. We've really, really enjoyed this conversation. I'm so happy that you've brought this to the forefront for our students as a matter of equity for all students. As we close up, and you think about the one thing that you want our listeners to take away from this, what would that be?

Natalie Wexler: Well, if I can have two things...?

Susan Lambert: Sure. I'll let you have two.

Natalie Wexler: At a minimum, I would like people to understand why what we've been trying has not been working and what might work. But to get this into the conversation, I think the other thing that I'd just like to mention is to think about the damage that our current system unintentionally does to many kids self-esteem and self-concept. Because we are telling these kids just do this and you will become a better reader; you will become a better student. And they do it diligently and then it doesn't work, and they may feel they have no one to blame but themselves. And that is extremely damaging. And what I've seen and what I've heard from teachers is that the students who blossomed the most with a knowledge-building curriculum are the students who would be considered under a skills-focused system the "low achievers." The kids in the lowest reading group, they are able to offer some really valuable insights in a class conversation, and they're able to feel like full members of a classroom community.

Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's very powerful. Well, thank you so much for your work and thank you again for being here.

Natalie Wexler: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Susan Lambert: We're so grateful to our amazing guests today and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast, and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading: The Community, or send an email to SOR Matters@amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert from Amplify Education.