Shannon and Mary are joined in by Linda Rhyne in the Reading Teachers Lounge. They share a deep dive of information from the book, The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. This episode is full of information and strategies to increase your student's knowledge helping them dive deep into comprehension and knowledge building. Linda Rhyne is a returning guest to the show and shares her expertise in guiding professional discussions to help educators meet their student's literacy goals.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES AND ONES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
Shannon and Mary are joined in by Linda Rhyne in the Reading Teachers Lounge. They share a deep dive of information from the book, The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. This episode is full of information and strategies to increase your student's knowledge helping them dive deep into comprehension and knowledge building. Linda Rhyne is a returning guest to the show and shares her expertise in guiding professional discussions to help educators meet their student's literacy goals.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES AND ONES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE
6.10 Building Knowledge with Linda Rhyne
Shannon Betts: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Come join the conversation with other curious teachers as they discover teaching strategies and
resources to reach all of their
learners. I'm Shannon.
Mary Saghafi: And I'm Mary, and together we bring an honest and experienced point of view to the topics we cover to shed light on best practices.
Whether you're a new teacher seeking guidance, a seasoned pro looking for fresh ideas, or a curious parent, our community offers something for everyone. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and cozy up in the virtual lounge with us and eavesdrop on our professional conversations. Listen, learn, and
immediately add to your bag of teaching tricks.
Find what works for your students with us in the Reading Teachers Lounge.
Shannon Betts: Welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Mary, we have a special returning guest with us today, our friend from [00:01:00] Instagram, Linda
Rhyne.
Linda Rhyne: Hey, y'all. Glad to be here.
Mary Saghafi: It's so good to see you again.
Linda Rhyne: I'm excited to be welcomed back.
Mary Saghafi: No, of course you're welcome back. The Reading Teachers Lounge is like the perfect place for you.
You have such a way of sharing knowledge and also just like being informal in a way that talks about very formal topics at a, at a reasonable and like Comfortable level. I love, I love our chats with you. This is great.
Linda Rhyne: And so I, I need people to help me talk shop. So,
Shannon Betts: Well, we're both like, we have to talk through our thinking to understand it.
And so we're oral processors. So that's why we have podcasts. So we invited you back because just like last season, where you kind of joined the conversation on Instagram, when we were talking about balanced literacy versus structured literacy and best practices. Science of reading this season at the podcast.
We've been talking about more about comprehension and we have slid into each other's DMS again, chatting more [00:02:00] about the comprehension and we've gotten to talk about building knowledge. And so we wanted to invite you back on the podcast to talk about that specific topic. Talk about the knowledge gap by Natalie Wexler and just what we need to understand as teachers about how to help students building knowledge and where that fits in with all of the other. Pillars of reading.
Linda Rhyne: Yeah, I'm excited to dive into that. It's been a topic near and dear to my heart. And so I'm excited to see where this conversation goes today.
Shannon Betts: And I will apologize in advance to, to listeners. Mary and I are both fighting colds or something. And so if we have to meet immediately,
if you have to mute, cause I get in a coughing fit, I will.
We're going to also stay quiet a lot so we can let Linda talk. But if there's some awkwardness, it is because of our health.
Mary Saghafi: So it is the winter months of the time in our lives where our children bring every sickness home. And if it's not our children, it's another child who we're working with gives us our sicknesses too.
[00:03:00] Hey, that's real life y'all. It is. It's real. So
Shannon Betts: I'm sorry, Mary. So Linda, remind everybody who you are, if they didn't hear you last season and tell us what you've been up to in the last year.
Linda Rhyne: Sure. So hey, I'm Linda Rhyne. I I'm an independent consultant long time educator. And what I do is I serve schools and districts in thinking about two pillars.
They're literacy systems and how are all of the. together so that we can have successful outcomes for kids. As well as a lens of instructional coaching as well. Because I really believe in the power of ongoing professional development with experts in the building. And so where I've been Knowledge building has always been an interest of mine.
I, you know, like I'm a content person. I'm a literacy girl, first and foremost, right, but I can't help but be fascinated by continued learning and subjects and our world and science. So when I had the opportunity to dive into the knowledge gap, it [00:04:00] really solidified for me, kind of where things needed to go in this science of reading journey.
So I've been spending time kind of collecting all of the things related to that. And so I'm excited to be able to talk about it today. I
Mary Saghafi: totally. Let me let me rephrase from totally I am really thankful for the chance that I had to kind of dive into this book with your resources and the ways that you have gathered and the first message I sent Shannon when we started to develop this episode together was, this is a treasure trove, there are so many great resources that are all that she has kind of like linked all together for this book, and it's nice.
To have sort of a capstone for our journey of talking about comprehension this season, especially. And of course, we're going to weave in all of our continued topics, but I, I was so pleased because you provided us with a lot of different [00:05:00] Options for listening to different podcasts for listening to different articles or having a YouTube channel that had a specific topic that was kind of correlated with this book and it made our professional learning so great for diving into the content and topics of especially.
What it means to be teaching today, or even a couple of years ago, and and what that journey looks like currently what it's looked like in the past, how the reading wars have kind of impacted what balanced literacy looks like, why this movement of moving to science of reading is Something that we can't really argue about.
It's science based and it's less politicized, even if it tries to become big politicized. But yeah, this is, this was a really great journey for us. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about how can we build knowledge with our students? How do we change our professional development to make sure that we are actually [00:06:00] helping our kids.
Develop deep learning strategies that are not just finite strategies that are really like lifelong knowledge building strategies.
Yeah, something I've really appreciated in thinking about knowledge building as it relates to literacy is it really explains the goal of what we do as educators. Right. Like our goal is to help the children that we serve learn, um, and they need to learn something.
Linda Rhyne: Right. So for me, it's like spending time thinking about the work that we're doing in comprehension is in service of knowledge building, right? Like we need knowledge to beget. Knowledge, and we know that we become better readers when we read, right? So it just all feel it just makes [00:07:00] sense to me. And it's just so intertwined so that when we start really kind of peeling back some of the understanding that is outlaid in that anchor text for me, and we really start seeing what are all of what are all of the other researchers out there?
Yeah. also saying about knowledge as it relates to comprehension and their, and reading. Yeah, it just, it just makes sense. Like, it's like, yes, that is the goal of comprehension, right. Is to learn and to become knowledgeable, whether that's. Also learning through a historical fiction novel right to better understand a worldview or to learn about a community that is not our own so that we have a better understanding of the world, whether it's understanding a science concept so that it sets students up to really theorize about what they're learning, right?
Like all of that is a part of it. And I just it's really exciting.
Mary Saghafi: It is exciting. I think one of the first things that [00:08:00] struck me, and I know that we've talked about this before, but when we talk about building students background knowledge, the first piece of building students background knowledge, I think back to what did it look like in my classroom and I would always start the discussion with, okay, have you, have, does this resonate with any of you?
Do you have any You know, applications. Have you ever seen? Have you ever been to this country before? Have you? And what struck me was how those conversations often get derailed, and you spend so much time talking about so and so's experience with this topic before you've even allowed the rest of the class to come join you.
Or you say, Okay, that's great, but we're time bound, and we have got to keep going. And we're just going to rush right on through. So even though you're important to me, it's not that important because I have to get to what this bullet point says next on my lesson plan. I think that when you are able to [00:09:00] Build knowledge along with the entire class and then actually talk about connections after your lesson.
That was such a powerful statement for me. It, it didn't occur to me because in my Whatever curriculum I was using or however it went, that wasn't the, that wasn't the way that it was laid out in my lesson plan. So that, that's my first like aha moment of, hey, wait a minute, there might be a better way to even begin my knowledge building with
students.
Linda Rhyne: Yeah. And, you know, I'm, I'm learning too that something I hadn't really thought of previously when, when I was doing this work in the classroom was the difference between activating prior knowledge and building background knowledge, which is such a key difference that I, I don't think it was like such an aha moment for me in thinking about the difference between can I read from Nancy [00:10:00] Hennessey's Reading Comprehension Blueprint, the difference?
Okay. So just so, so I'm quoting, I'm quoting Nancy here, but she explains the difference between prior knowledge and background knowledge. So listeners, let us know if you have this same aha, as we define these, but prior knowledge has been defined broadly within education as the knowledge, skills, or abilities the student brings to the learning process.
Okay, so that's prior knowledge. Background knowledge differs from prior knowledge in that it is specific to the situations, problems, and concepts Presented in targeted texts used in an academic setting, right? So said differently, prior knowledge is similar to what you were just describing, right? Like we're asking students, what experiences have you had that relate to this topic that I'm presenting?
And building background knowledge is an intentional instructional strategy that teachers use to, to teach students the background knowledge that they need to [00:11:00] better understand the text. That, for me, was like, like, you know, like, that's huge.
Mary Saghafi: Same. Yeah, I was, I was like, oh, that was not, I'll tell you why it wasn't on my radar as a teacher.
And I think that this is also very true. My intention is to get to the heart of the lesson and to make sure that I am Really focusing on that. So the introduction, while it's very important. It was just a piece of the introduction to me and I am so focused on plowing through the material that I am required to plow through.
And so I think that in so many ways that Is an aha moment for a teacher because it's not where you really kind of like shine the flashlight on where the most important part of your lesson is and so where you shine the flashlight is really where you're going to put your most effort. So yeah, I think that that was a really big aha moment for me at the beginning.
Linda Rhyne: Well, yeah. And, and why would we spend time building knowledge about a text that we're going to read for one day. [00:12:00] And we're going to move on to another topic of focus or apply this strategy that we're learning today to a text of, you know, it doesn't matter what the topic's on, right? Is kind of how we were told to be teaching comprehension strategies, right?
Applicable across texts, which is true, right? But then when we, when we really start to think about the role that. Knowledge and understanding of vocabulary plays in being able to apply those strategies to a text, right? It makes sense that we want to be spending time with topics and text sets. And when we do that, then spending the time building background knowledge makes sense for us in the classroom and in practice.
If we are continuing to change topics, Over and over and over again, it makes it more difficult to see the value in building background knowledge with a text. For sure. Yeah. [00:13:00]
Shannon Betts: One thing that struck me I think it was in the middle of the book, but she said, and she didn't name which researcher that said this, but Natalie Wexler said that one researcher said we should rename reading is like word solving.
Like the whole subject of reading should just be called word solving and then basically the rest should be content and not even spend time. Doing the other things that are kind of in the reading standards, and I think she also in the book, like, really shows the difference between that, like, math is skills focused, and so the standards can be broken down into a set of discrete skills that build on each other and help the students be able to solve these things, but that reading is just can't be simplified in those terms, that there's just so much more that goes into it You know, and she highlights it with that really famous baseball study where, you know, the students who knew a lot about baseball, even though they weren't strong readers, were able to understand the passage.
And then students, [00:14:00] you know it just depended that the success of the coverage on the passage depended more on their background knowledge of baseball than it did on their reading ability. And that a lot of what we see on reading test scores is, Are they really able to just know the knowledge that's being assessed?
Or are they actually strong readers and reading skills? And, and, and just the terms of even as reading skills, what we should be spending our time on.
Linda Rhyne: That even, you know, I, I've had my own experience with that. You know, anytime that I'm trying to read a manual about a topic that I'm less familiar with, this happened to me with Stanislas Dehanye, the reading, reading in the brain.
It was such a, such a text that for me, so much of the vocabulary was. And I didn't have enough background knowledge to really engage with what that text was trying to teach me. Right now, I have a very different experience as a reader when I'm tackling that text because [00:15:00] of the amount of time and energy that I've spent on.
Building my knowledge and understanding about the what he was, what he was discussing in the text. Right. So I'm better able to walk away with an understanding. I'm not having to spend the same amount of hours, you know, pouring back over a complex sentence to really say to myself, like, all right, do I even like get what he's trying to say here?
And I think that that is the experience that many of our students have when they're faced with a text and they, Don't have a deep understanding of the vocabulary being used and then can't apply context clues, right? We talk about that all the time. It's like they can't apply context clues if they don't understand what's being discussed in the text or presented from the author.
In the text.
Shannon Betts: So another thing with this book, and I'll just be frank, like I parts of a it rubbed the wrong way.[00:16:00] And I don't know if it's because I was reflecting on my own practice. And what I did kind of the first 10 years of my career versus the second 10 years of my career. She also like. She criticized some practices of like some authors that I really respect, the authors of Mosaic of Thought, that book really helped me learn how to teach comprehension strategies, but then maybe I did too much with comprehension strategies and not enough knowledge building.
Although, I, what I also realized is that I learned, what I did in my own classroom is very different than what everybody else did down the hall and what everybody else did in the whole realm of education and so I can't, just because I did it doesn't mean it was a widespread practice. I've always been interested in art and history and music.
And so I've always layered in a lot of background knowledge. And if I had blank stares about something and I knew my students didn't understand about it, I would show a video. I would read a little article. I would give them enough knowledge to be able to like unpack what we needed to from the passage.
And I just did that [00:17:00] instinctively, but I realized that not everybody has done that, but I will say, I just, some of her descriptions of some of the teaching that she observed, I found her. To be pretty judgy and disdainful of some of those teachers, and I'm not surprised that that one teacher asked her not to come back because she could probably have seen like when that when she was when Miss Wexler was sitting in the classroom taking all those notes and like, there's like a There's expressions, you know, like, you know, when you're being evaluated by somebody and it's not going to be a good evaluation and you're being judged.
And like, I have a feeling that that teacher probably felt that. And then, then you sort of like start to freeze up and you start to make mistakes as a teacher because you're like so caught up in like, how is this being received and things like that. When I was my student teaching supervisor just gave me, she just gave great advice.
Like, when she. So when she would go and observe us [00:18:00] as student teachers, or when she observed the supervising teachers, you know, which they might have only been out of college like five or six years. So they weren't that much more experienced than us. But she said no matter who it was that she was going into when she crossed the threshold of that classroom.
She said she was crossing the threshold of an expert teacher's classroom, and she did that so that they would see her as a support role and not an evaluator role, and I definitely didn't get that from Natalie Wexler, but you helped me understand her tone after we talked through this, but I will say a lot of the parts rubbed me the wrong way, and also I guess now that I know that she wasn't an educator herself, there were just so many parts when she was describing some of the lessons that I'm like, man, if the teacher had just tweaked this one little thing, it would have been an effective lesson.
She's saying it's like a failure of a lesson, but if she had just done just a few different things and asked the questions a little bit different way, the students would have come away with a lot more learning. And I wish she would have given some of that [00:19:00] feedback, but she was more just a fly on the wall describing those
classrooms.
Linda Rhyne: Yeah. And I I, you know, I think that's why even like knowledge building about this text is important. You know, like who's Natalie Wexler, who's the author, right? What is the context of reading instruction at the time that this book is being written? Right. Like that's something that we want teachers to do when they're introducing.
Any text, we want students to understand. Okay, like, what was the historical time period, what was happening in society at this time, right? So so when we think about the knowledge gap, right, Natalie Wexler. Like Emily Hanford is a journalist, right? They take time to delve into what could potentially be a controversial topic.
And they have, they are able to give a different viewpoint because they are not [00:20:00] Entrenched in education and therefore have, you know, what we would maybe bring as an educator bias, right? Which is why I think it's such a helpful part of knowing why, kind of why this text was written, right? She takes a very strong stance.
Even just in the cover page, right? I was mentioning it before our call, before we started hitting record. Like it's the hidden cause of America's broken education system and how to fix it, right? Like she's very clear on, on her stance for knowledge building. And, and I think that that's important for us to, to consider too, right?
Some of what's happened as a information. About this is helping us pay attention to it. Right? Like, and we, it can be difficult to translate [00:21:00] research into language that feels easy to read, right? And educators do have a lot on their plate and they have sometimes their brain capacity for diving into a really dense text is gone, right?
So how important It is to have a text that feels like you're reading a novel and yet is making you think about your practices in the classroom, right? So while it may be easy to read and feel judged, by the author. I think that leaning into that feeling and asking yourself, why do I feel judged?
And why is this hard for me to read is, is the, is the path forward. for you, right? Because it, it is the way that you begin to reflect on your practice, right? Like let the judging happen, [00:22:00] be mad about it, but then ask yourself, like I'm feeling judged because this is making me ask some questions about what I'm doing in my classroom.
I'm going to spend some more time learning about the answers to these questions that I now have as a result of reading this. Go ahead,
Mary. .
Mary Saghafi: It makes me think our discussion with Kionna Squires too. So Kionna is da literacy lady on Instagram, and she often works with teachers who are third to fifth grade and, and really working on this right now.
And the first thing that she always talks about when we start a discussion about science of reading or, or any of this controversy about shifting the way that we are teaching students is get mad. But then get busy because I think that that is really what it comes down to and it does bring up feelings of inadequacy for me to and frustration.
And I think that's compounded because teachers have these evaluations put on them and some have had [00:23:00] lovely experiences and some have had not so great experiences and I fall into both of those categories depending on which school I was at the time. And so I think that The support that you have and how confident you are in your ability to shift your instruction and then shift your, your style, is really important. I didn't have the exact same feelings that Shannon feels, but I also have a different life experience now because out of the classroom for five years now, I have done a lot of watching other teachers teach and I do notice that there are a lot of different teaching styles, and I can appreciate pieces of each of them.
But I did not know that when I was teaching in my classroom with the door closed and, you know, just kind of doing the very best I could depending on what the day was bringing for me. And I think that That's a very real reality for a lot of teachers, especially just in our current state post [00:24:00] pandemic.
I feel like teachers are stressed, stretched more than before, so it's easy to have that. And I think that if you just pay attention to the message boards, there's a lot of like quick responses back that are a little bit of a zing or a push, and that's because teachers are frustrated. But I also think that like shining the spotlight on an area where.
Maybe teacher prep is to blame. Maybe the curriculum is to blame. Maybe, you know the role of the administrators and how teachers are supported in the classroom is to blame. It's not just a one sided problem. And I do think that the positive in this book is that it condenses a lot of information about the science of reading and where we have come from in In a short and readable place.
And so that part I do think is is really valuable about this book. I also think that she does a really great job of breaking down some big pieces of information that we have commonly talked about [00:25:00] throughout this season, all of the six seasons, actually. And so much of that is like, When you feel like you're not doing the very best that you can do, you sometimes dive right in to try so hard to okay, I'm going to improve this and then I'm going to try to improve this and you're hard on yourself.
Because we all want the same thing and that is to make sure that our students are learning and that they're, they're thriving. But it's, it's not an easy road to go down. So I think that Shannon's point in bringing this up is really real. And I think that thinking back about Kionna about like, get mad about it.
And then get busy because that's really where like, but let's get busy doing it smartly. What's the, what's the smartest way? What's the most efficient way? What's the way that will really help me find balance in my life. And as an adult who can only control this small classroom that I'm, I'm teaching it.
Okay. Kind of long winded things, listeners.
Linda Rhyne: Yeah, I think I think it's very [00:26:00] easy to, when you're in that state of anger, right? About like, I didn't know this. What, you know? And we, we find ourselves wanting to play the blame game, right? But it doesn't serve our students to do that, right? We, we can't just keep spinning our wheels on where we were.
And what led us here, unless you're hoping to move forward and take action or reach out to your teacher prep program and ask them some questions, right? And say, I'm, I'm learning this, like, what are you doing about it? Right? Like, we, it can't just be that we're lamenting about the past. It's, it's more about how is this Striking a match and lighting your way forward, right?
Like, let, let that fuel your questions. Fuel your, your research, your reading, your learning. And you know, find somebody else. Who is as fired up as you and let [00:27:00] each other right support that let you support each other in the questions that you have, and so that you can also commiserate in how you're feeling about it, right?
Because we like we, we feel some type of way.
Shannon Betts: Well, and one of the she references another author in the book, and I highlighted one of his quotes, because I definitely want to get his book Doug Lemov, but I think he just phrased it in a less judgmental way. So I just appreciated that. But he says, when you grow up with knowledge, you can't really see the role of knowledge, the reverse knowledge gap for people on the privilege side of the achievement gap is that they have no idea how they got there.
And I think that's definitely true for me. I've mentioned that I was. I was educated by, you know, professor parents, I also had the privilege of being able to travel abroad when I was a child. And so I actually like visited the tower of London and all these places in France where, like, when I learned about the Revolutionary Wars, I could picture it because I had been there, you know, and I sometimes.
[00:28:00] Assume everybody's got that knowledge and they don't, you know, because I had that. And so I definitely did had to like, kind of feel the feelings and then kind of process through it. And then some of the takeaways I'm, I definitely got from this book is that like, we need more knowledge building curriculum, like, I've never been in a school district that had a fully knowledge based curriculum.
Although I have since used CKLA on my own, Core Knowledge Language Arts just on my own with some of the activities I do with students. And then also I, I, I'm familiar with Wit and Wisdom Curriculum, but I haven't purchased it. But I have purchased and used the geodes decodables that go along with it.
So I am kind of familiar with all the knowledge that's built in that, you know, in those resources. So we definitely need more knowledge based resources, but then if you're a teacher that doesn't have that, You know, like, is there things that can be done? Like, if we can't really change the school system right away, we can't really change the curriculum we use right away.[00:29:00]
But how could we, if we know that knowledge is more needed, what can
we do?
Linda Rhyne: So I think one of the easiest things, like, you're low hanging fruit as a teacher who's ready to start thinking about this, is to begin developing text sets. around the topics that you are presenting, right? If you have an anchor text whether it's in your literacy block, right? Or within your literacy curriculum, or in some of your other content areas, if there was an anchor text, you can begin to think about what other texts can we begin referencing?
What other videos, images, cartoons, right? Like listening sounds, all of those things can be a part of developing a tech set that then helps us be intentional in building [00:30:00] background knowledge about the text that we want students to engage with and walk away with deep understanding. And so, you know, thinking about what are the multiple ways that I am exposing students not only to this topic, right, but knowing that by spending time with this topic develops exposure and repeated practice with vocabulary, and then potentially complex sentences, right, like all the things that we want students to engage with in a complex text, we can get.
Create access for them by spending time building knowledge. And I think the way that we as teachers can identify, like, what is it that we need to build knowledge about, whether that is the topic or as Nancy Hennessey puts it, the enduring understanding within which we want to kind of, what, what is it that we want students to walk away with?
When we read that anchor text, we want [00:31:00] to ask ourselves, Where is the author expecting me to make inferences as a reader, right? And what knowledge is that author assuming I have in order to pair it with what the author states in the text? That to me is the, the like key piece to understanding what is it that I need to build a text, build knowledge about, right?
Because they're authors, right? Text would be boring if authors just told it straight. Right? It's way more interesting to read text that assumes that we come with some knowledge. But we all know what happens when we assume, so we got to help each other out here.
Linda Rhyne: Hello, listeners. It's Shannon here,
and I want to take a quick moment to tell you about one way I'm giving into my health this year.
I've started making green chef meals again, and my family and I
are loving them.
The food is delicious
and easy to prepare.
There's tons of
sauces [00:32:00] and spices and other ways to add flavor to the meals. There are also tons of gluten free options for me each week. I use the app a lot. It makes it easy to make changes to the menu choices and pause a week if needed.
The great news is they've given me free boxes to give away. So if you're interested in trying Green Chef, head to the show notes for this episode to get the link. Or you can visit www. readingteacherslounge. com Backslash quick links and click on the button for Green Chef. Happy cooking! Watch our stories on
Instagram to see some of the meals I'm making.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, I, I really like that. And I think that One of the really nice things that you were able to do with diving into this text with Shannon and I was actually you were able to pair some of these texts for us so that we could actually really build it. And so I love people who teach by example. I think that that's so impressive.
I really do. And [00:33:00] I think that it's hard to do sometimes especially from the standpoint of teaching teachers. So I. really appreciate that. And I think that for me, I was like, Oh, I've read this before, but now I'm reading it in context with the Wexler book. And, oh, wow. What a, what an amazing connection.
And I think that When you are able to provide that for your students, that's where that like aha moment comes or like the magic at the kidney table when they really are making those connections. I started a new text with my, I have a third grader and a fourth grader. Both of them got their map scores back and they were really struggling in the comprehension areas.
And so, I'm like, alright, well, this is now my opportunity. I've done a lot of phonics instruction with them. They are really able to decode. Are they fully at the end of their phonics lesson? No! But like, let's dive into some text. And so I [00:34:00] have actually, as I'm using a bookworm set right now which is another core knowledge curriculum.
And I'm So excited about it, but I'm not as excited as the boys are to do the reading about it, which just it, I'm like really looking forward to each tutoring session with them now because I, I was reflecting on my practice here and it's like in tutoring, who says that I have to keep teaching these finite skills again and again, I don't if they are ready to move forward and they've had a lot of multi sensory phonics instruction, they're ready for really strong comprehension instruction.
Who am I to say that I'm not the one who's able to do that? And so I do think that that often gets you know, Lexia doesn't, Lexia can fill in a lot of the gaps for them while they're at school. And now this is my opportunity to really like work one on one with them. So yes. Thank you for all the things that you shared.
My tangents, maybe this sickness is getting to my head. My tangents are going.
Shannon Betts: Bookworms is a good choice. I think that one was developed by Walpole McKenna, [00:35:00] right? Yeah, and they have good phonics resources too. So like, they do set the stage for that. Another thing that struck me from this book, and this is another takeaway that I can do right now is another book part that I highlighted in this book was somebody had said that standard 10 is the heart of the Common Core which, let's face it, I know that, like, other states have, like, renamed their standards, including Georgia, but it's basically the Common Core, like, word for word, so I still go back to my Common Book all the time to reference the standards. I just wrote the little Georgia changes in print on it, but if I look at Standard 10, it says, read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
And if you look even more in the fine print, they said that, like, it should be like 50 percent in nonfiction. And when I look at my own reading with my students, I don't know if I'm always following that 50 percent guideline. We like our little books, our fiction, our elementary teachers, we like our little [00:36:00] cute fiction books that we read with our students and we want to keep doing them.
But we need to be you know, using more nonfiction books and articles like from Newela LA and things like that because it builds that content. At the same time as it's working on the strategies and things
Linda Rhyne: well and you know and thinking too about how does nonfiction pair with fiction, right, we often think that historical fiction is the place for that and that's true, but there's so much that we can understand about when we, especially when I'm kind of like what I was saying about understanding what was going on with the author, and, you know, like, if we understand the author, then we might Build a better understanding of the perspective with which they were writing that fiction text, right?
What was happening for them in their lives at the time that inspired them to write this story? Heck, we can do it with Taylor Swift lyrics too. I mean, let's, let's be real, right? Like, you know, just speaking as a, speaking as a Swifty [00:37:00] here. But I, I think too, like, it's, it's, when, when we think about what is, what does our children come home?
And say, when we talk about like, what did you work on today? What were you learning about? Right? Like they don't come home and say, Oh, I, you know, I learned how to do context clues. Right? Like the learning is the knowledge. And the con like the strategies are the way with which we access that knowledge.
And so I feel like that's the reframe for us. In terms of comprehension is really understanding the the outcome of trying to get through what what standard 10 is like trying to help us do is access knowledge, right? And you know, super super mental is, is, you know, speaking about this especially In the work of the knowledge matters campaign and trying to highlight the [00:38:00] need for paying attention to knowledge.
And how are we kind of bringing that to the forefront and letting us center that in the work that we're doing with comprehension and teaching students you know, making sure like the knowledge that we have. Influences the vocabulary with which we can, like, interact with the text, right? So, no, and knowing that vocabulary is such a key component to understanding a text and being able to comprehend.
It just, it goes back to why paying attention to this just makes sense.
Shannon Betts: I, so I had a lot of thoughts when you were talking and one of the things was just like almost like an imitation when you said like I got you didn't even say it explicitly, but I got this implicit invitation of like taking my favorite fiction books that I'm kind of stuck on and want to do with my students and then like finding nonfiction to go with it.
So, like, two in particular that I thought about was I posted on Instagram last summer, I'd found [00:39:00] The Little House, like, which was like, I received that book in like 1983. Okay, I was really young. And it was felt so familiar to read that book. And I read it to my niece. And it's a fantastic book. But honestly, if you think about the plot of that book, it's all about like the Industrial Revolution and urbanization.
And there are so many places where I could pick. Some topics and find some nonfiction to build some background knowledge where the plot of that story as simple as it is, is more understood. I am bringing that knowledge. So I understand how that house felt when that community changed, but maybe my niece didn't.
She just saw it was like a house that was frowning or whatever with broken windows. And then I was even thinking like Charlotte's web. I understood Charlotte's web very well. Cause I grew up on a farm. In a rural community, but I read that book to my, you know, urban Atlanta students, and maybe I assume they have knowledge that maybe they didn't have.
Like, what does a [00:40:00] stable smell like? It smells horrible. What does the chicken coop and a pig pen smell like? Oh, my gosh, it's horrible. You know, what does it feel like to be at a country fair and, like, smell the fried food and all that sort of stuff? And they don't have any of that. sensory knowledge. They don't have any of the background knowledge.
So then like, how could we build some of that background knowledge to understand more about farming, to understand and build a, you know, a, just a richer experience of that book.
Linda Rhyne: I think that That statement, a richer experience of the book nails it right. It's not that students won't be able to read and engage with that text and walk away with understanding, but it will be very surface level.
Right. They won't be a, they, again, because the author is assuming. Right. That the knowledge that they're bringing to the text is going to deepen their experience and, you know, commiserate with, with the idea of like, Oh my [00:41:00] gosh, like what were you about to do to Wilbur? Right. Like what? And it, you know, and so that is a very, that is a very pivotal part of the text that if you don't have the background knowledge to really understand and engage with that, you as a teacher might be saying what was about to happen.
Right. And your students. have nothing because the text doesn't prepare them for that. The author is assuming that they have the knowledge to start making those connections.
Mary Saghafi: And I think in conjunction with that, we can also talk about how, um, one page sort of just comprehension text where you're going to circle the answers can immediately kind of turn kids off.
They know exactly what's going to be asked. They know that the order of the questions they're going to say the 1st answer is B. It's always B. They might think that and I think that. The secondary part there is knowing your students really well and getting them prepared for the text. So a richer experience is probably with more [00:42:00] knowledge or a longer setting, a longer character development, a story that really You know, develops and has meat to it.
Like we would assume that a novel would have or even a historical fiction piece or something. When we talked with Molly Ness, the big takeaway, we love Molly Ness so much. Her big takeaway from read alouds was really making the invisible visible for kids. And Shannon and I often talk about what that metacognitive experience is and, and knowing.
Helping kids to know what they are learning and what their brain needs next or how to develop that. And I think that that's been a little bit, I don't know, graywashed, I suppose, like when we when we only give our kids a sheet of paper that has the you know, wrote questions. It's going to, well, we're preparing you for your test.
I just automatically see like a little [00:43:00] switch kind of dim a little bit in, in the kids. And that was the actual reason for me to switching up my curriculum because I knew I needed to teach comprehension strategies. But I saw anytime I would bring out a passage that wasn't my decodable passages. It was a, it was a let's work on visualizing passage.
And the switch would just kind of dim for them a little bit. So I think that, you know, one of the questions in this book that I kind of grappled with, too, was how much am I teaching the metacognitive process? Am I giving too much information to the students where they are just learning to take the test?
Or are they really diving into the knowledge? And I think that that is a big balance and a big shift that, that teachers are, are really grappling with too, because we want teachers to make the invisible visible as much as possible, no matter what text you're presenting them with. Because some kids need it.
Some kids need that [00:44:00] push to really try to do it a little bit on their own. And why finding that balance I think is so tricky. And it is one of those like, Art, slash science pieces of being a good
teacher.
Shannon Betts: Wiley mentioned that in our discussion too, because he said, Tim, Tim Shanahan, was telling him that we don't want to give away all the knowledge that the students are going to find in a passage, because then what's the point of reading that passage.
So we want to give them enough where we can make it a richer reading experience, but also activate their curiosity. for having me. To then want to have more knowledge to then have that, you know, knowledge stick to. So we want to activate that curiosity and give them enough to understand and have an enriching experience, but not leave them with where they don't need anything
else.
Linda Rhyne: Yes, that's exactly right. Right. Like we want to identify those pivotal points in the text. That if students cannot [00:45:00] understand what was being said here, right, then the rest of the text may be lost. That's where we build in the knowledge that they need, but it doesn't have to be that we become experts. on ancient Egypt to understand this fiction text about a mummy's experience or something, right?
Like we don't have to go like, so, so for me, like that, my takeaway, if I'm a, if I'm a listener, right. Is just get started, like, start thinking about this and think about where are the opportunities for me to. Yeah. Build in some knowledge. Am I seeing that in this text? Maybe it's not a, maybe it's not something I'm doing beforehand.
And maybe it's I, I've just experienced this with my students last week. They had a really hard time understanding this section of the text, which leads me to understand we could spend some time learning about [00:46:00] X knowledge, right? Spend some time learning about it and bring it back and dial it back with your, with your students and ask them, like, what do we, what do we now understand about this text, knowing what we know, right?
I did that for the for Stanislaus Dehaene's, Dehaene's book, right? Like, I, I was like, I read it and I was like, well, wow, like this, I'm not ready for this, right? I had to go do some learning and then come back to it. And I was like, okay, like now we can, all right, now we can learn together.
Shannon Betts: I think it's more like a different approach to lesson planning. You mentioned this earlier in saying that like we need to peruse those texts and see where the author is assuming that we might have some prior knowledge or might need to make inferences. So I think a traditional approach to lesson planning is you're thinking, okay, what skill am I going to teach or what skill is going to be assessed on Friday or next week?
And so, okay, what activities am I going to do to practice that skill? They might be guided practice, they might be independent practice, but [00:47:00] how am I going to get the students. to work on this skill. And the last choice you make is the resources to get the kids there. But this is a switch where you're really looking at the resources and making very thoughtful resource choices.
And how are you going to use those resources to build the skills in the students, to build the knowledge in the students. And you're spending more time actually perusing those resources and doing like Molly Ness said with like don't ever go in and do a cold read aloud like again, like, which I've been guilty of, you know, but then it's not going to be as enriching of an experience.
And so, but I'll be honest, like when I had to write like sometimes seven or eight pages of lesson plans for each subject each week. That's hard to do is to like take that thoughtful time to look at those resources.
Linda Rhyne: Well, you know, that's another plug for some having some curriculum [00:48:00] in place right to support a teacher and being able to do that.
Let's say that the text is already identified by the curriculum that you're implementing right could certainly do that work and start thinking from a lens of. The text as the center of what you're doing, right? There's a great resource that I will send y'all to to offer to your listeners is called placing texts at the center from achieve the core.
And it's fantastic for helping us think through the importance of that. And when you can do that and pair it with what's kind of being addressed with knowledge building. It's like chef's kiss for our students.
Mary Saghafi: Think I, I'm so glad that you're going to offer that as a resource. I think that's exactly what we need to, to do kind of to work forward. I think my next big
question [00:49:00] is, what is your impression of how we can like really move this forward without help without making teachers feel so overwhelmed, like, Oh, no, here comes the pendulum again.
We've got another big swing coming. Get ready for some professional development. That's, you know, Not exactly great. I think the one part that I really took away and kind of like recalled back to is that I love the Lucy Calkins professional development. It was like exciting. It was fun. It made me excited about teaching the content and I know that that was like the big hook that got so many districts to buy into it.
And so many teachers still really love teaching that way. And it gives teachers a lot of Autonomy and also creativity in the classroom. I know I've shared this before, but it's just sometimes I think because of my early training as a teacher, I got the impression that. [00:50:00] Direct teaching can be boring and it can be like exhausting or just not interesting.
The kids don't like it. The teacher doesn't like it. I did give some, this is some brave pushback to my when I was getting my master's degree. One of my professors was talking about the importance of direct instruction, especially with students in special education and his response. I said, what do you mean?
I just paid for a whole elementary education degree. And you're saying now that I am not capable of creating my own curriculum for the kids and I'm not, I'm not capable of doing this. I need to go back to direct instruction. Now, I had only spent two years in the classroom before I made that very bold statement.
But he says, well, how can I prove that your instruction is effective? And I think that that lends. It's the one piece that really made me shift. I want to have an effective instruction. How, how can we be maybe better [00:51:00] consumers of what this is? How, how can I like kind of take back the authority that I feel like me as a teacher?
I've kind of lost a little bit, especially with so many curriculum changes.
Linda Rhyne: It's certainly hard to feel the same level of autonomy, I think especially depending on how something is being implemented or the expectations around the implementation goes back to our fidelity versus integrity talk, you know, but I, I think what we're asking folks to consider here is, You know, in the, even though that professional development may have felt good and we enjoyed the way that we were treated as professionals, does not mean that that approach to instruction was actually effective.
Right. And so then my, my [00:52:00] question to someone who's grappling with that is, how do you continue to think from that lens? And apply it to what we now know is effective, right? So if your view of direct explicit instruction is a lecture or that sage on the stage idea that many of us were told, like, don't ever find yourself being the sage on the stage.
Some of that is true, right? Like we, when we are providing direct and explicit instruction with our students, it's true. It's true. It's an opportunity for us to ask, what is our approach to doing that? And how are we ensuring that students are engaged in that part of the instructional lesson plan or instructional sequence?
It's not that we, we don't want to be the Charlie Brown voice imparting knowledge to our [00:53:00] students, but we do want to be developing knowledge with our students. Right. So that would be my question for the folks who are thinking about, like, where do I go from here is let's say that you're going, you've got, you are going to look at a text and you're going to think about what additional texts can I bring into a text set here, then the next layer is.
How am I engaging students in learning about this alongside me, right in the classroom? Maybe you are centering yourself as an expert for a short amount of time. Maybe you and the students are exploring you know, primary photograph, primary source photographs about a time period that helps you activate and build knowledge about that time where the teacher comes into that might be.
Maybe you might have to help provide the caption. That explains the historical relevance of that photo, right? Like sometimes we, it can't just be that we're looking at the photo and like making sense of it. We have to [00:54:00] understand within which that text took took place to on. So for me, that's what it is.
And, and, you know, I think it goes back to what we're learning about with phonics instruction to, you know, there's this idea that explicit and direct phonics instruction was boring and road and kids like nobody wanted to do it. And that is not often the case. Right? So if you think about how excited our young students get when they realize that what the teacher just taught me helps me make sense of the sound that this letter represents, and I can put that together to actually read what's on the page.
And they're like, I did it. I read the cat sat, right? It's like, Oh, my God. Like if we have to read the cat sat one more time, right? Because it's hard for us as adults. We get it. We understand it. So I think we have to take ourselves out of it and also start paying attention to where are our students dialing in?[00:55:00]
What is getting them excited? And if they're giving us the feedback that the way we are teaching is boring. Listen to that and reflect on how you change, not what's wrong with the curriculum or the text or you know what I mean, like it's not, that's not always what it is.
Mary Saghafi: Yeah, I think that was so well stated.
I feel like I kind of put you on the spot with that question. That's sort of like a devil's advocate. So I apologize. But honestly, you were amazing in the way that you explained it. And I think that you are the perfect person to have in the reading teacher's lounge for this reason, because that is exactly right.
And our listeners know that Shannon and I are very strong advocates of best reading instruction, not just phonics, not just one area, not just comprehension. But I think that the way that you explained that really layers it all in together to make reading what it truly is. And it is that experience of how, and it brings us back to the original point of the conversation we started.
What do we do as [00:56:00] teachers? We are trying to get our kids. To have knowledge and to learn and to build knowledge and to expand their minds to whatever topic they're interested in.
Shannon Betts: So yeah, I, thank you so much for that really great very good specific things that I can already see as an Instagram bullet pointed list that we will be putting to go along with this episode, but also I think important thing that you mentioned a few times in there was paying attention to the students, which is definitely one of my soapboxes is just more paying attention to the learning instead of the teaching and what feedback they're giving us and what misconceptions they have one thing that.
I felt a little like a memory of when I was reading the Knowledge Gap, they had mentioned, I think, early on that, like, the students thought that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were friends, and I remembered that moment in third grade, like, my colleague and I realized that it was probably like well, I guess it was when my son was young, so about 12 or 13 years ago we were, you [00:57:00] know, teaching all those historical figures, and we had that realization but we did something about it, and so what we ended up doing was something that I brought to my new school as well.
And we made a big timeline in the hallway so that it didn't just help our students, but it helped everybody in the school. And that we had a sentence strip for like each hundred years. And then we would put all those pictures of the primary sources on that timeline so that they could see that like, there is no way that Frederick Douglass even knew Martin Luther King Jr.
Like. Hundreds of years separated them, you know what I'm saying? And I ended up doing that in my second grade classroom outside my class and it really, really helped as well because I had to teach all the way from the Creek and Cherokee Native Americans all the way to Teddy Roosevelt and all these other people in the, you know, in the 20th century and things like that.
And so it really helped the students get my framework. It was, it was like somewhere where that knowledge could stick. And then make them curious to know more. They were always excited when we would learn new historical figures and like, oh, where are they going to go on the [00:58:00] timeline and things like that.
Mary Saghafi: And I do think that comes right back to making the invisible visible. It's noticing what, where are those gaps. So yeah, I love that. And I remember similar things. Go ahead, Linda. I know you have more to share.
Linda Rhyne: Well, just, you know, I think what you're talking about here is exactly what we're seeking to do when we build knowledge for students.
Right? Like the only way that they can begin to store things in memory and gain an understanding is by making those connections with what we already know or with, you know, that's how we, that's how we learn vocabulary and make meaning of things, right? Is by making Oh, blue. Okay. What are the ways that I know the word blue?
How does it show up for me? What are the different contexts within which it can be used? Right. And so like all of that is, is what we're seeking to do when we're reading. I have to share, cause I, I would be very upset if we ended and I hadn't shared this quote. So another author that I love. is [00:59:00] Goldy Muhammad.
Her book Cultivating Genius is fantastic. It's an equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. And there's a quote that I want to read related to this, which is literacy was viewed. This is thinking about black literary societies. So that's the context literacy was viewed as the means of building reading and writing skills and knowledge, as well as the means to shape their identities and critical understandings of themselves, of communities and of the world.
And isn't that the point, right? Isn't that the point
of, of what we are trying to create for our students as readers? Right. Impart them and give them the skills of reading and writing and give them the knowledge to better understand themselves, to better understand our world, right. That's the whole point.
And you know, I think it's important to, to consider historically how literacy has been a gatekeeper [01:00:00] to knowledge and possibly continues to be. So if this feels like a difficult topic to engage with, um, you know, asking ourselves why, why, why keep knowledge from our students, right? Why might giving them access to knowledge through text be important?
Shannon Betts: It's, it's that right there. So. Going back to my uncomfortable feelings with Natalie Wexler and her tone you know, she definitely, like, at the end of each chapter, she's comparing and contrasting sort of one classroom that does use a knowledge based curriculum versus one that doesn't, and I mean, and they're kind of similar ages, you know, and so I think what she's trying to do there is to show us the difference between like these first and second grade students that one some of them are debating about the book about the cupcake or about the peanut butter and jelly becoming friends and then the other ones are debating like which battle strategy was better in [01:01:00] this ancient civilization to keep kids you know to keep the civilization from access to water and that they're the same age and that they're able to have this much more knowledgeable nuanced debate and then if we like, it doesn't mean that there's not a place for the books about the cupcakes and the peanut butter and jelly and things like that.
I definitely can read them on their own and for a fun day reading or things like that, but that shouldn't be all that our curriculum is, that it needs to be much more have much more depth so that we can prepare the students for the world.
Linda Rhyne: Well, and certainly when we present our students with complex concepts, understandings, and texts, they typically rise to the occasion, right?
So give them the opportunity to show us what they can't handle versus us deciding
for them.
Shannon Betts: It's a good place to stop. We don't want to stop talking to you, but we [01:02:00] also can't take up our listeners time anymore and your time.
Mary Saghafi: This was a great conversation and I can't say enough about the really nice guidance that you gave us as we were kind of going through this book.
It was really helpful.
Linda Rhyne: That brings me so much joy, you know, as a, as a practitioner supporting adults. It's so helpful to have feedback that the thinking that you're putting forward makes sense. That's what, that's what we want, right?
Shannon Betts: Thank you for
sharing it with our audience and joining us in the Read Teacher's Lounge.
We,
we love
you, Linda.
Linda Rhyne: Thanks for having me. I love y'all.
Mary Saghafi: We'll have another reason for you to come back. Don't worry.
Linda Rhyne: Perfect.
Mary Saghafi: Sounds great.