KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 43: The Knowledge Gap. A Conversation with Natalie Wexler.
This week, Kaity and Adriane chat with Natalie Wexler, an education writer and the author of "The Knowledge Gap," about the root causes of the pervasive knowledge gap, the unintended consequences of modern education, and actionable solutions for closing the achievement gap and igniting a love of learning in students.
Episode 43 also explores:
🔥 the significance of explicit instruction, guided practice, and frequent retrieval practice
🔥 the link between screen time, family dynamics, and academic success
🔥 the importance of having a good curriculum
🔥 the systemic challenges that teachers face
🔥 and so much more!
So, don't miss out on this insightful conversation and learn how to improve student outcomes in education!
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
🔑 Building knowledge is crucial for student success, particularly in reading comprehension.
🔑 Writing instruction can reinforce knowledge and develop analytical abilities.
👤 ABOUT THE GUEST 👤
Natalie Wexler is an education writer and the author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System—and How to Fix It (Avery 2019). She is also the co-author, with Judith C. Hochman, of The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades (Jossey-Bass 2017) and the host of "Reading Comprehension Revisited," a six-episode series for the Knowledge Matters Podcast. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and other publications. She is a senior contributor to Forbes.com, and she has a free Substack newsletter called Minding the Gap.
Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast:
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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It's been said that knowledge is like mental Velcro, which I think is a great metaphor. So the idea is that knowledge sticks to other related knowledge. Other kids are coming in with less of that other half of the Velcro. They're reading simpler books. But even if there's some new vocabulary in the books they're reading, they're less likely to be able to retain it because they probably don't have anything for it to stick to. And so this gap between these two groups of readers gets bigger every year that goes by. Gap between these two groups of readers gets bigger every year that goes by. The better readers are acquiring yet more knowledge and vocabulary and becoming able to read yet more complex text and kind of maybe zooming ahead. And the other ones, every year that goes by, if they're not acquiring that knowledge, they are falling farther and farther behind.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling, the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 3:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Kindle podcast, Adrienne. How's it going? You look a little tired.
Speaker 3:Shh, I'm not tired. When someone says you look tired, it usually says, hey, you look like C-R-A-P, you know you look tired. It usually says, hey, you don't. You look like CRAP, you know, if they say that you look tired, so hopefully you're not telling me.
Speaker 1:I look, look like that, but I am a little tired because I have.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I have a new baby in the house. It's a baby puppy, it's a baby dog Amazing. Yes, her name is Harmony because our other dog's name is Freedom. So we went on chat gpt and asked for names that would go well with Freedom. Because the kids immediately thought what do you think name came up immediately with Freedom, I don't know what, liberty.
Speaker 3:So they were gonna do Freedom and Liberty and chat. Gpt said Harmony, we that, and we had just spent a whole week in harmony, pennsylvania, with my family. So we felt like that was you know, we missed our family, so we named her harmony and she's the cutest little thing in the entire world. Maybe in the show notes we can put a picture, because she's that cute.
Speaker 1:She's a mini.
Speaker 3:Aussie doodle. She's a mini Aussie doodle, so she's not going to get as big. Our other Aussie doodle is about 50 pounds. She should be less than 15 pounds, but she's a newborn baby. She likes to get up in the middle of the night, so, yes, I am a little tired. Thanks for noticing.
Speaker 2:Oh, you know that I think you always look great. If I could, if I could just have your eyelashes, adrian, I'd be set for life. Okay, let's get to our guest, adrian. Who are we talking?
Speaker 3:to today. Okay, so we are talking to Natalie Wexler. She's an education writer and author of the Knowledge Gap the Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and how to Fix it. She's also the co-author with Judith C Hotchman, of the Writing Revolution, a Guide to Advanced Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades, and the host of Reading Comprehension Revisited, a six-episode series for the Knowledge Matters podcast. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the American Scholar and other publications. She's a senior contributor to Forbescom and she has a free sub-stack newsletter called Minding the Gap. Okay, let's go talk to Natalie, can't wait, let's do it. Welcome, natalie, to the Kindled podcast. We're so excited to meet you. Well, thanks, adrienne. I'm delighted to be here, absolutely so can you start off by just telling us a little bit about your background and how you came into the work that you're doing, and really, what is your big why and why you're doing this work in the world?
Speaker 1:Sure, Well, you know it started maybe in the world. Sure, well, you know it started maybe, oh, 14 years ago or 13 or 14 years ago now. I had some background in journalism, among other things, and I got interested in education in Washington DC, where I live, where there was a lot of education reform activity going on and it just it seemed incredibly important, you know, and I was particularly interested in what has sometimes been called the achievement gap, the gap essentially in test scores and other education outcomes between kids at the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and it just seemed like we really needed to figure this out and I decided to start writing about it as a journalist. I hadn't been doing journalism in a while, but it's a good way to learn about. You know, I was. I thought it was important, I was curious, I wanted to find out what the what the story was here.
Speaker 1:So when I started, I thought the problem was high school, because that's what I was told by experts and I, you know, I volunteered to tutor some kids in writing in a high poverty high school and I discovered there were some serious problems, and not just with writing but with reading comprehension, that these kids first of all, they weren't being given writing assignments that I could help them with. So I started bringing in things for them to read that they could write in response to, and I realized they didn't understand a lot of the stuff I was asking them to read because they were missing pieces of background knowledge. This was a pretty high poverty high school. But then eventually and I didn't really understand why I remember asking a teacher who I'd gotten to know, who was an English teacher, and these were 10th graders, and I said I don't understand, what have they been doing for the last 10 years? And he said we ask ourselves that question all the time. Been doing for the last 10 years? And he said we ask ourselves that question all the time. So that was really not much help in figuring out what the problem was. But then eventually it was explained to me that the roots of the problem were in elementary school and had to do with our failure to start building kids' knowledge early. And so when I realized that that was, I was shocked when I it took me a while to wrap my mind around this, because I had been writing about education for several years now as a journalist and I thought I knew a lot about education, but I'd never heard this before and I'd been in a lot of elementary school classrooms.
Speaker 1:But I realized I didn't, had not understood what I was looking at. So it seemed to me like somebody should write a book about this. And so I mean, people had written about this, definitely, but it was in a very dry, academic way and so really wasn't getting into the public conversation about education and I just this issue has just such enormous ramifications. It just seemed to me that I couldn't live with myself unless I tried to get it out there, and so that's what led me to write the book.
Speaker 3:Wow, what do you mean by building knowledge? What exactly are you talking about with that? Because isn't that what kids go to school? I'm just trying to think of what a parent would think when they hear that, well, that's why they're going to school they're building knowledge all the time. So what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I had the same reaction you did, in fact, when somebody a veteran educator who I've learned a lot from explained this to me and she actually I was on the board of a charter school at the time. My kids were already out of elementary school, but this was a charter elementary school and her name is Judith Hockman, and I ended up co-authoring a book with her about her method of writing instruction. But I had come across this method of writing instruction and I thought this would be great. Wouldn't it be wonderful if my charter school that I was on the board of could adopt this method of writing instruction? So I asked her to look into that and she came back to me and said well, the problem is that this method only works if it's embedded in content, and your school isn't teaching any content. And I said I don't understand. It's a school Like what are they doing?
Speaker 3:What are they doing for eight hours a day?
Speaker 1:while these kids are in the classroom. Yeah, and I mean I was on the school performance committee, so like I should have known. But it turns out and again, I don't think this is necessarily obvious unless you kind of know what you're looking at and know what to look for. But elementary schools sometimes middle schools first of all, the curriculum has always been dominated by reading and math. But since the advent of high stakes reading and math tests, like 20 some years ago now, reading and math, but since the advent of high stakes reading and math tests, like 20 some years ago now, reading and math has taken over even more of the elementary school day, and so things like social studies, science, they are marginalized or sometimes even eliminated from the school schedule, and it's particularly likely to happen in schools where test scores are low, because the idea is well, we want to get those reading and math scores up, we need to spend more time on reading and math. And so I looked at what are they doing for reading, and I mean, first of all, there are two basic components of reading. There's just deciphering the individual words that are decoding, and then there's reading comprehension and so most of what the time that schools are spending on reading, certainly after second grade, is on reading comprehension, and what that means is having kids practice skills, reading comprehension skills like finding the main idea of a text or making inferences and the theory is it doesn't really matter what they're reading or whether they're gaining any particular, you know, substantive knowledge from it, as long as they're practicing the skill on books that are basically easy enough for them to read on their own, because they go off and they, you know, choose a book from that's at their reading level and they practice the skill, and so they're not learning anything much about social studies or you know science for maybe eight years. You know they're really spending all their time, the bulk of their time, on these reading comprehension skills. But the problem with that is and cognitive scientists have known this for decades reading comprehension skills aren't like decoding skills or like riding a bike. It's not just like you practice them and then you master them and then you can just it doesn't matter what bike you're riding or what word you're decoding, you can do it With reading comprehension.
Speaker 1:Whether you can apply a skill like finding the main idea of a text is going to depend to a large extent on how much relevant background knowledge you have about what you're reading. I mean it could be knowledge of the topic that's really helpful, or it could be just general academic knowledge and vocabulary. But how do you get those things through learning about a lot of topics? So the problem is that kids are getting certainly they get to high school and they haven't been able to acquire a lot of academic knowledge outside of school.
Speaker 1:At home. They are at a real disadvantage. They are just through no fault of their own, they are not equipped to access the high school curriculum at the level that the high school curriculum assumes, because they just they don't know some very basic things about the world. And it's not that they can't learn these things, but they just haven't been taught any of this stuff in a way that will stick. So they may not know things like the difference between a city and a state or a country and a continent. They may not be able to find the United States on a map of the world or their hometown on a map of the United States. And they may not know anything much about history. But we expect them to read a textbook on world history and understand it, and that's probably not going to happen?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm wondering too, like how much does the role of the parent at home play in this knowledge building? I'm sure in some of these areas that you have worked in, a lot of this is not happening at home, so they are dependent on schools, whereas in other, higher socioeconomic areas, a lot of this knowledge is probably being filled in at home. So I'm curious about that balance too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that is at the root of a lot of what goes into this gap in test scores that kids from, and it's not so much a matter of just income as a parental level of education, but of course that's highly correlated with income in our society. And it's not that these parents are necessarily like trying to build up their kids' knowledge deliberately. It's just you know, if you're surrounded by adults who are using more sophisticated vocabulary and talking about you know more sophisticated things, you'll absorb that. And maybe your parents take you to museums or they even take you to Europe or wherever, and just sort of there's more opportunity yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I will say that I have heard from educators that in recent years, even kids from higher socioeconomic status families are coming into school with less vocabulary, less knowledge of the world and are not necessarily acquiring it even after they start school from outside school, perhaps because we're all on our phones so much. There's not as much you know. And what's really key here reading to your kid that's important and everything, but what's really key is a dialogue between adults and children back and forth. What's really key is a dialogue between adults and children back and forth. And if kids and parents are staring at their phones all the time there's going to be less opportunity for that kind of dialogue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's an interesting kind of like peer culture that's been going on for the last, I'd say, like 40, 50 years, where once a child is, say, 8, 9, 10, they're spending a lot of time with their peers who have the same level of knowledge about the world and the same vocabulary. And you know, there can't be any advancement in those skills unless there's kind of this hierarchical like relationship, right, where, like, if I only talk to someone who only knew the same words as I did, or the same ideas or same concepts, I would not be able to expand my knowledge, right, but we are spending less time together as adults and children. Like there's not as much of this dialogue going on. Yes, we're distracted and just like the the way that family life has changed. You know we have lots of parents that work all day long, right, they're not home till six. And then we have homework, that where we need to be focused and heads down. We're not talking about the ideas and we're not having these discussions. There's not as much space and time in our modern life for those things. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Dig into your book, the Knowledge Gap. Okay, so in your book you say that there's pretty much three questions that drove your research here. One, why is there a large gap in test scores between students in the upper and lower ends of the socioeconomic spectrum? Two, why do any improvements that we see at the elementary level like rarely carry over into high school? Why don't they matter? And then all of the dollars that we spend, the billions of dollars in education reform, why don't they seem to make a difference? So I just kind of want to go into each of those. Maybe just we'll start with, like, the achievement gap, and I would just love to hear what you've learned and how your thoughts have evolved through your research.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah Well, I mean, I did you know, kind of allude to that that some kids are coming into school with more of that academic knowledge and vocabulary. And that means in this system that we have, which is, you know, a combination of just focus on these sort of supposedly abstract skills and strategies comprehension skills and strategies plus leveled reading, and so kids are assigned a reading level and then they are directed to books that match the reading level, and so the kids who are coming in with more of academic knowledge and vocabulary are more likely to be put in the high reading groups because they are already able to understand more complex text. But then what happens is it's not just that having academic knowledge and vocabulary helps you understand what you're reading, it also helps you retain new information and new vocabulary from your reading. So those kids are reading more complex text and they're retaining new vocabulary because they have something for it to stick to, so they are then able to read yet more complex text. Meanwhile, the other kids who it's been said that knowledge is like mental Velcro, which I think is a great metaphor, so some kids are coming in with less of that other half of the Velcro. So the idea is that knowledge sticks to other related knowledge. Other kids are coming in with less of that other half of the Velcro. They're reading simpler books. But even if there's some new vocabulary in the books they're reading, they're less likely to be able to retain it because they probably don't have anything for it to stick to.
Speaker 1:And so this gap between these two groups of readers gets bigger. Every year that goes by, the better readers are acquiring yet more knowledge in vocabulary and becoming able to read yet more complex text and kind of maybe zooming ahead. And the other ones, every year that goes by, if they're not acquiring that knowledge, they are falling farther and farther behind. So I mean, that's really that explains two things. You know why this happens so much has become so obvious at the high school level. Because you know if the gap keeps growing it's going to be very wide at the high school level and then much harder to narrow, which is why it's so important to start building knowledge early. So important to start building knowledge early. And you know it really explains why kids are not able to access the high school curriculum at the level that is expected and you just can't make up for all of that missing knowledge quickly.
Speaker 1:And that I think one of your other questions was. You know, my questions, I suppose, was why don't gains that you see in elementary school carry over to high school? Well, I mean, a large part of the explanation for that is that the texts we ask kids to read in elementary school don't assume a lot of academic knowledge and vocabulary. I mean they're simpler so it can look like kids are getting better at finding the main idea. It's easier to boost those test scores at least a bit because the passages on the tests don't assume as much academic knowledge and vocabulary. But then when kids get to middle school, or certainly high school, and the texts and the tests do start assuming that kind of academic knowledge and vocabulary, if they don't have it, they hit a wall. So when we're building knowledge in elementary school, we need to be thinking not just about what kinds of vocabulary do these kids need to understand, what they themselves can read now. We need to be thinking what vocabulary are they going to need, you know, 10 years from now, to understand what they're going to be expected to understand then? And how can we get that information to stick in long-term memory so it'll be accessible to them at that point?
Speaker 1:Now you also asked about, like, why have education reformers not been able to solve this problem?
Speaker 1:And I think a large part of the explanation was that they were looking at all sorts of things but not at, like, what taught, what is the curriculum and how is it being taught?
Speaker 1:Those are two really crucial questions. But they were looking at things like choice and charter schools, governance, structure and teacher quality, and not that those things aren't important. But if you don't have a good curriculum, they're really not going to move the needle. And actually the way to make a good teacher into a great teacher is to give that teacher a really good curriculum and training and how to use it, and that's what really could make a difference. I mean, you know there are incredibly gifted teachers out there who can maybe do anything, but you know we have four million teachers in this country. Only a small percentage are going to be incredibly gifted, so we can turn good teachers into great teachers through curriculum. And that's something that ed reformers just I don't know if it didn't occur to them or they just didn't want to go there because you know they thought well, the teachers know what to do, they're the experts on that and we'll just deal with, you know, the sort of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic kind of thing. But that's essentially what happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fascinating, this idea of the funds, the way we spend money, just never making it making a difference. I am shocked. I talk to many education policy leaders and legislatures all over the country all the time and we're never talking about what kids are learning, right, it's like that. That isn't the conversation. And when I go to very long school board meetings and listen and like they're not talking about what is taught at all, like that is not the focus of the funds, it's not the focus of people who are making these decisions, it is kind of left up in the air. And then I hear teachers on the. This is kind of the other side of the story. Teachers that are teaching in our schools are really saying that they feel constrained by those things. Like they can't allow a child to like ask questions. They have to stay on track. They feel there's a lot of pressure for them to keep up with that curriculum and that schedule. So how, how do you see that like those tensions right from the teacher's perspective?
Speaker 1:And well, I mean, if the teacher has a skills focused curriculum, it's going to it's. This is none of this is the fault of individual teachers, and I really do want to emphasize this. This is a systemic issue and teachers, you know, if they are told okay, well, first of all, their training has led them to believe that this is the way to teach reading or comprehension. And of course we have. We don't haven't even gotten into the problems with how they're trained to teach the decoding part of reading, which are equally serious are not trained to do that. But they I mean, I've sat in on some ed school classes and for when you get to comprehension, it's all about strategies before reading, strategies during reading, strategies after reading, strategies. In fact, I have heard an ed school professor say well, you don't, you know, you don't need to worry about kids remembering names and dates and things like that, because they can always Google those things. And actually Googling those things is very inefficient. You may not understand the Google definition. It's going to take mental energy away from just understanding what you're trying to read.
Speaker 1:But so if teachers are given that kind of training and then a curriculum that guides them to focus on these skills and have kids practicing the skills at their individual reading levels.
Speaker 1:You know it's very hard to sort of buck that system, but there are curricula out there now we haven't really gotten to the solutions to this problem yet, but there are curricula out there now that elementary literacy curricula that do take a knowledge building approach, that are focused on content and having kids actually learn about topics in history and science as well as literature. You know, because it's all connected and so those teachers are in a much better position to really have their students be successful. And of course, you know teachers are only going to feel successful when their of these knowledge building curricula but also provide support for teachers, training, coaching, opportunities for collaboration. But I've talked to many teachers who have made this switch and you know, even though it can be challenging, they are very glad they did and they've seen amazing changes in their students and they repeatedly I hear you know these kids are capable of so much more than I thought they could do. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So what is the best way to build this knowledge? You talk about curriculum, but what does that look like? Because you know most kids that I know reading from a textbook yes, we're like giving them lots of facts is not the actual best way for them to build that knowledge. So have you kind of looked at that? What's the best way to build this knowledge?
Speaker 1:to build this knowledge? Yeah, definitely, and I mean I was actually just writing an email to an education journalist who's a friend of mine, who had asked me you know what are the most like the three most important things for parents to understand about? Like the science, cognitive science, the science of learning, and one thing I said was well, I think a lot of parents think the problem with school is that there's too much memorization, but actually memorization is not the be-all and end-all of learning, but it is where learning needs to begin. I mean we might want to call it retention of information. Retaining information in long-term memory is the key factor in reading comprehension and in learning. It's easier to learn about something you already have some information about. That's going to make's easier to learn about something you already have some information about. That's going to make it easier to learn. So having kids retain information is really crucial. We also want them to think about it, analyze it, all of that, but you've got to retain the information first to really do a good job of thinking about it. So what is the best way to build kids' knowledge? It's not just having them read a textbook, necessarily. I mean that could be part of it, but especially when learners are new to a topic, I mean explicit instruction by a teacher is going to work best, rather than having them try to learn through inquiry or discovery or whatever. And before kids are themselves fluent, proficient readers, what's going to be most efficient is for the teacher to read aloud from an engaging text and have classroom discussion lead whole class discussion about that text. So why is it important to read aloud from texts?
Speaker 1:The language, the syntax, sentence structure and vocabulary of written language is almost always more complex than the kind of vocabulary and sentence structure we use in conversation. They have to get used to it and so it's important to read that aloud. So language, the kind of language comprehension you need for reading comprehension, isn't just the ability to understand spoken language, it's the ability to understand written language when it's read aloud. And we know that kids on average through about age 13, their listening comprehension exceeds their own reading comprehension because somebody else is doing the work of decoding those words and figuring out where to put the emphasis in that sentence, and all of that burden is lifted off of your cognitive capability and then you can pay more attention to just figuring out. What does this mean? Class discussions, because the way to transfer this new information, this new vocabulary, to long-term memory, where it can help you in the future. A great way to do that is to talk about it, to use the vocabulary you've just heard. That's what's going to help you remember it. Then, once kids have not they've acquired this knowledge of a topic that's new to them through listening to read-alouds, through discussion, they are probably going to be able to read about that topic at a higher level and also write about that topic at a higher level, although writing is much harder than reading and we could talk about that. But so that's, and you know there's a lot.
Speaker 1:If you walk into a lot of classrooms elementary classrooms you know kids are sort of they're all reading different books. A lot of classrooms elementary classrooms you know kids are sort of they're all reading different books. So the teacher can't lead a group discussion about content because they're all reading different content. The kids can't have discussions among themselves really about content because they don't know about what the other kids are reading. So we really have to get away from the typical structure of an elementary school day, which is very little time for whole class instruction and discussion, lots of time for these rotating through centers where kids are. You know there'll be a small group working with directly with the teacher for 20 minutes, but the rest of the time kids are in you know sort of supposedly teaching themselves either. Sometimes they're at computers or screens, sometimes they're doing worksheets. This doesn't work that well, especially with younger kids. It's going to be a much more meaningful educational experience for those kids to have direct interaction with the teacher for a longer period of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so okay, I remembered my thought before I was teaching. Uh, I volunteer substitute teach. I had this class. It was like a mixed group of of ages, like ninth through 12th graders, and we were just having a discussion about what mastery was and I just wanted to know, from their perspective, what it meant to them. And I got crickets. And then, uh, one of the 10th graders looked at me and she's like I got you and I got crickets. And then one of the 10th graders looked at me and she's like I got you and she pulled out her phone and Googled mastery. I'm like I know what the word mastery is. I don't want you to Google, I don't need, I don't need you to Google the word, the definition of the word mastery, but like the, the, the, that, like, can you just Google stuff not being sufficient, right?
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, it's, it's a really good it was, it was very. She thought you didn't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's like they're not used to having this discourse with adults where we talk about our thoughts and what we think and like our experiences and stuff. They just thought that I wanted the right answer to the question when I was trying to engage them in a dialogue and they they are not used to that, so I definitely see that gap.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and you know having discussions where I think I think the discussion needs to ensure that kids have a literal understanding of what has been taught, because I think teachers often assume the kids have understood stuff when a lot of them don't actually. But if you just say, okay, any questions, you know nobody's going to raise their hand. But then beyond that, so you want to ensure literal understanding but beyond that you want to ask questions that don't necessarily have one right answer or one wrong answer. You want kids to be thinking critically and you know it's a real art to asking good questions that get kids thinking and exchanging ideas. But that is, you know, the heart of teaching. So I think you know teachers should get better training in that. That's another way in which teacher prep has kind of failed us and it's important that we build this knowledge.
Speaker 3:but also, as you're talking, you know, I'm going to push back a little bit about the direct instruction explicit versus you know inquiry, because I feel like you know, or at least what I've seen, and I have neurodivergent learners, so they don't fit in the traditional system at all. So them sitting and being taught by you know direct instruction by a teacher did not work. They did not feel safe in their brains and bodies and but I see this there has to be interest too, right With. I'm just curious, like what you've seen, like if a child's not interested in a topic at all and they're being forced to and forced might be a really strong word to learn something, to build this knowledge, but they have zero interest in it. Where, what do you see there in the classroom?
Speaker 1:You know, I think it the answer kind of depends on the age, because I think, with younger children, that if you present something to them in an engaging way, and and that you know, I think we need to use the power of narrative. So the human brain is hardwired to take in information more easily when it's presented in a narrative form, a story. It doesn't have to be fiction, it could be a true story that you know kids can get interested in just about anything if you present it engagingly. And there's some. A narrative should have like some suspense and some conflict, and you know. So I think you know, one problem is that, again, teachers don't get great training in how to present things engagingly, and direct, explicit instruction does not mean lecturing, I mean, in fact, yeah, break that down for me.
Speaker 3:I would love to know what you mean by that. Well, I mean this is coming out of.
Speaker 1:Of course, a phrase like direct instruction or explicit instruction is going to. People are going to use that to mean different things, but I'm using it based in what cognitive scientists have found about how learning actually works. And you know, yes, people are all different, but the way we learn is pretty much the same, the basics of it, basics of it. So it works best when learners are new to a topic. As I said, you know to have teachers explain things directly, explicitly. But then you want to very frequently check for understanding. You want to give and take. You don't want to just talk for 40 minutes. That's not going to work very well for most students. So and there are, you know, as I mentioned. So having information retained in long-term memory is really key to critical thinking, et cetera. And to help kids retain that information, you want to engage in something cognitive scientists call retrieval practice, and the more you practice retrieving an item of information, the more likely you are to be able to retrieve it when you need it. So you might do things like have frequent low stakes quizzes, because just the act of recalling the information, even if you get it wrong, you should get feedback immediately. But even just trying to recall it is going to help strengthen those sort of pathways, neural pathways. So there's retrieval practice, there's other things like distributed practice, space practice. I won't go into all of the variations, but basically the idea is like guided practice, so explicit instruction, guided practice, and then, when kids are doing something independently, lots of feedback and so it's very interactive. So this is not to say that kids should never engage in inquiry, discovery, hands-on learning, and I mean inquiry, is another one of those things that depends on how you define it. I think having kids ask questions or, you know, setting a question that kids okay, this is the question that we're going to answer together today that's a form of inquiry.
Speaker 1:But this study that I came across was done in England and it was about it was 10 and 11 year olds and they were learning about natural selection using the example of an insect called the peppered moth. So they were divided into two groups, so they got two different kinds of instruction. One of them got the story of the peppered moth, delivered by the teacher with the help of a PowerPoint, and the story of the peppered moth is this there are two varieties of peppered moth One is all black and one is peppered or speckled, it's light colored. So in the 18th century these moths they like to hang out on white birch trees. So the lighter colored ones were harder for the birds, who were the predators, to see. They picked off the black ones. So in the 18th century these lighter colored moths were more common.
Speaker 1:Then what happened was the Industrial Revolution and what that brought was pollution. The pollution made these white birch tree barks darker and at that point the birds could see the lighter colored moths more easily. So then the black ones became more common. And then we got pollution controls, less pollution. The bark of the trees got lighter again and at that point the birds could see the black moths better and the lighter colored moths became more common. So one group got that story and then they wrote about it. The other group. They did a hands-on activity where they pretended they were bird predators and they got fake moths in two different colors and they put them against two different colored backgrounds and they saw how many birds moths they could pick off with tweezers in a given amount of time.
Speaker 1:And teachers thought that that moth hunting activity was great because the kids were having a wonderful time. They were highly engaged. But when the researchers tested what the kids had remembered. They found that the kids who got the PowerPoint from the teacher and then wrote about it afterwards they understood the content much better. So and the point is, you remember what you think about and if kids are thinking about how much fun they're having hunting for 10 moths, that's what they're going to remember.
Speaker 1:But what you could do is after you give them a PowerPoint like that and talk and have some discussion, and writing is an excellent way to really get information you know cemented in long term memory. Then you could have them engage in that moth hunting activity and that's going to make all of this more memorable, you know, because and they'll have an understanding of what they're doing. So it's not that you can't do hands-on activities or have kids engage in that kind of discovery learning. It's a question of what order you do these things in, and it's going to work much better if they already have some basic information about the topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wonder what the results of the study would have been if, if the groups had each engaged in, if they just switched the order, so if you got activity and then story versus story and then activity, like if we did both, I'm just curious what would have happened.
Speaker 2:You know, I wonder too, like when we we have this kind of straw man built up about what direct instruction or like, like you're saying, like lecture, looks like, and then you've contrasted that with story, which is very different than in the 1800s there were white moths and black moths, there were trees, and then in this year they, you know, like we could have told that story in a very like dry, disengaging way, but instead we did it as a story, right, and that story was engaging, like we were curious our. The way that that was presented led our minds to naturally ask the question why, what happened to them? And when the child formulates that question and their natural curiosity is a part of that direct instruction. That's where we get the engagement, I think, and story is such a powerful player in that that I just don't think that we're fully utilizing.
Speaker 1:I think that's right. I think we did more of that in the past, but in any event we need to do more of that. So these curricula that I'm talking about, they do rely a lot on reading aloud and reading aloud a series of texts, often about a topic, or it could be one longer text you know it could be a novel, but that kids do. Their curiosity is sparked, they want to read more about that topic, they want to read more by that author. So this is a way and we have a real problem with kids not reading for fun anymore. I mean, I was just looking at these statistics.
Speaker 1:Last year there was a survey that is done by the government. They asked a bunch of 13-year-olds how much do you read for pleasure? Only 14% said they read for pleasure almost every day and that's way down from what it used to be. 31% said they never or hardly ever read for pleasure, and I think that has a lot to do with the way we've been approaching teaching reading comprehension, as here's a passage on some top, like maybe a paragraph on some topic you don't know anything about, and here are three or four comprehension questions to answer about that passage, which looks like a standardized reading comprehension test. The idea is that that's going to prepare kids to do well on those tests.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't, and the other thing is it makes reading a pretty joyless activity. So if we want kids to see reading as something you do for fun and also you know you might learn something, we need to get away from that and get back to reading whole text, partly for enjoyment, because it can be fun. And that's as kids will discover. And I think that's also where reading aloud is very helpful. Helpful because if you're still struggling with decoding and just fluency, it might not be that much fun to read. But when somebody is reading to you, you see what the possibilities are.
Speaker 3:There's also a competition of technology and things that are just way easier for the brain to consume and get that dopamine hit, whereas having to read, it's low dopamine producing, and so then we have the issue of not being engaging in school, whereas having to read, it's low dopamine producing, and so then we have the issue of not being engaging in school. And then, on top of that, we have all this other competition of allowing kids to just be on their devices all day long. We're on our devices all day long, and so I think that's part of the problem, too. We just flew back to Pennsylvania, and I have a 14-year-old, 11-year-old and a 7-year-old, and we did no devices at all, no tablets, no iPads, no anything.
Speaker 3:They built Legos and they read books and they enjoyed it, and what happened is, when we landed, I did not have dysregulated kids. I did not have, you know. So I think that's part of it too. Is it's so hard to compete with technology? I think that's a piece of this, as is it's so hard to compete with technology? I think that's a piece of this as well. And then, katie, you are going to say something about an episode that we have recorded.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we did an episode about this and I am a strong advocate for all the approaches that you're advocating for. As far as literacy education goes, we did another episode called Our National Illiteracy Crisis. So we did another episode called our national illiteracy crisis and we talk a lot about this.
Speaker 2:This balance to enjoyment versus like like teachers don't want to go super deep into phonics because they think it's boring. The same thing happens when it's like we have a very skills focused approach. Where it's like just the get, find the main idea, like you just have a task assigned to you, right. One of my mentors and heroes is Marlene Peterson, and she tells a story about how, if I invited you over for dessert and I put out some cocoa powder and some vinegar and some salt and baking soda and said like enjoy, you'd be like no, I'm not, I'm not doing any of this, right. But if we put those things together, mix it into a chocolate cake, you're like yes, this is enjoyable now, right.
Speaker 2:And so when we piece out the skills of reading into things that are not palatable, kids are like oh, I don't want to come to this table, right. But if we feed them lots of chocolate cake and the analogy there is read stories out loud to them, help them fall in love with language and literature and develop their background knowledge and their concept of the world. Then when we're like, here's phonics, here's the skill, they'll be like oh great, you're teaching me how to make this chocolate cake that I already really love and enjoy and understand, and I'm eager for these skills now because it has to be both right. We can talk about the reading wars. It's just been this battle of like whole language versus phonics, and it's like folks, there's more, there's there's multiple parts to the equation of literacy and we just have not been fully embracing and like executing on delivering those to kids. So I'd love to hear what your thoughts about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think the the, the reading wars are sometimes called, you know, this sort of it's. It's been very much focused on just the decoding aspect of reading and the whole language. People had this. You know, it was a movement in basically the 80s 90s. They had this idea that reading, actually learning to read, was a natural process, like learning to speak, and so you didn't have to teach most kids explicitly how to decode words, they would just pick that up. How to decode words, they would just pick that up and they did. They believe in, you know, reading aloud and surrounding kids with great literature, which is fine, but they didn't so much believe in systematically building knowledge. But it's, you know, surrounding kids with great literature, that's fine, but they're not going to learn how to read that literature, most of them, unless you explicitly instruct them in phonics. So it's really two separate things here. And then we got balanced literacy, which was supposed to be sort of a combination of the best of phonics and the best of whole language, but didn't really turn out that way.
Speaker 1:I think that the leaders of balanced literacy came out of the whole language movement, so they retained their skepticism of systematic instruction in phonics, and then what happened was? Well, it's complicated. I won't go into all the details, but you've got this, something that whole language did not emphasize, which was this focus on teaching comprehension skills directly and having kids practice them for years. So that's what brought us to where we are now. But the thing that we really need to recognize is you need both of these things. You need explicit, systematic instruction in phonics skills and other foundational skills, but you don't really need a lot of explicit instruction in comprehension skills, because it has been found that basically, an hour of that has as much benefit as hundreds of hours of that. We've been doing way too Really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a finding that hasn't been publicized that much, but what? One cognitive scientist looked at meta-analyses of these studies of comprehension strategy instruction and he found that it made no difference whether there was four hours of strategy instruction. And he found that it made no difference whether there was four hours of strategy instruction or hundreds of hours. But I myself looked at one of those meta-analyses that found there was no difference between one hour and 55 hours of strategy instruction. Anyway, we're doing way too much of that and I think now what's happening is there's this so much focus on the problems with phonics instruction and states almost every state has adopted some kind of policy or legislation focused on fixing problems with reading instruction, which is great, but they're virtually all focused on problems with the phonics part of reading instruction and it's assumed that, oh yes, we should still keep teaching these comprehension skills and strategies, when in fact that is as much of a problem as the problems on the phonics side and it's not being addressed.
Speaker 1:And I think that in some places people are getting the ideas oh well, we have a two-hour reading block, we should spend two hours on phonics, and that is nobody.
Speaker 1:No experts would advocate that you do not need to spend two hours on phonics.
Speaker 1:Maybe 20 to 30 minutes in kindergarten through second grade is all that most kids are going to need, if it's done well and if people are going to spend, you know they're getting that idea and they spend two hours on phonics, yeah, it is going to kill kids' interest in reading, which we're probably already doing with all of this comprehension skills instruction. But you know so, these curricula that I've mentioned that are more recently developed, these literacy curricula that build knowledge, most of them also cover foundational skills instruction and I think that's why it's so important to have one of these curricula in place, because teachers are able to see oh, I spent 20 or 25 minutes on phonics and then I get to read aloud about, you know, greek mythology or whatever, ancient Rome, the Vikings, and oh, my goodness, look how interested these kids are in these topics when they're presented engagingly, and I think that will counteract, I hope, this pendulum swing where it's all phonics, no phonics, you know, it's just we've gone from one extreme to the other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I look at my son's education journey to learning how to read and it went, and he loves to read, he reads actually we have to get the book out of his hands to go and move his body because he reads so much. And so I think back as I'm listening to you talk. And he started in a very traditional environment and it was drill and kill like with the phonograms, like it was. You know, they drilled them every single day, maybe not the kill part, but they. I mean it was very intense. It was not fun for him. However, he learned how to read so fast. He went from and he is twice exceptional, but he went from not even sounding out words to us, literally in weeks, picking up Harry Potter and I was like, oh, do you want me to read that to you? And he was reading it to me. It was so fast, he decoded extremely quickly.
Speaker 3:He's been homeschooled and he has a private teacher.
Speaker 3:She's actually here right now and he's doing Charlotte Mason and through his curriculum because you said, the curriculum is really important it's just reading really rich literature and living stories.
Speaker 3:There's no textbooks and it's amazing to see how he's reading about things that if it was in a textbook in a classroom and there was no discussion about it, it was just a teacher lecturing to him. He would probably not be interested, but he knows how to decode, he knows how to you know, read and to comprehend, and now he's has access to this incredible information and he's just building his knowledge every single day through the curriculum that he's using with his private teacher. So it's really interesting to hear, because his journey is very different than what we're talking about. We're talking about traditional settings, but it's really interesting to hear because his journey is very different than what we're talking about. We're talking about traditional settings, but it's really interesting to see how it's still. Even in homeschool, even in micro schooling, even, like you know, it's still important that we get those foundational skills and then infuse that love of learning and building this knowledge in kids.
Speaker 2:So sometimes I think that we assume that kids are not interested in anything and that they, that they would rather be entertained, essentially, and so we try to create experiences for them that are gamified and very entertaining, and then they kind of become accustomed to those things. It's short circuits, their dopamine like circuit, so then nothing else is enjoyable and that's not really, that's an us problem, right, we're, we're making that assumption, we're acting based on that assumption and I think that what, if we can do this, this instruction paralleled with this knowledge and content delivery, that we'll see that kids actually really want to learn about the Vikings and they really want to learn about all of these things. Right, it's, it's the it's. It is fascinating and I love it too. I'm kind of rediscovering as I learn along with my kids.
Speaker 2:We read a lot of historical fiction and while, like, the story might be fictional, it's like oh, I didn't know about that Egyptian practice or like whatever.
Speaker 2:And then we get on the computer and we have all these questions and then that feels like a very natural inquiry driven experience, right, and they're driving that and they're very engaged.
Speaker 2:But it started because I kind of curated what book you know it's like well, I know my kids have never been exposed to this like Mesopotamia or this period of time or World War Two or something like that, and I bring my adult knowledge like that. I really need them to understand that they live in a world that is influenced by like all of the previous days here on earth and when we we need to curate those exposures. I think that that's that's really important, and what a lot of these content rich curriculums focus on is like what, what are the, what are those pillars? You know that kids really need to understand, to understand the world that they live in, and I think that when we pair that like deliver it in an engaging way, use story and then like that can be a really good base in facilitating the rest of the inquiry process, right? So I don't I really don't see these things as separate at all. I think that they're both necessary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I you know kids. There's a lot of emphasis on choice and having kids choose what they want to read, what they want to learn about, but you're unlikely to choose something that you don't know anything about. Once you've been introduced to it in an engaging way, you often choose to learn more about that.
Speaker 3:So yes, so there's still choice in there. But it's also what you said is we need to take our adult experience. We've lived a lot longer. It's not just that peer to peer we've talked about at the very beginning of the episode, um, to be able to expand our knowledge and our curiosity, because curiosity still is a big part of this. So what would you say? The future of education looks like, like, how do you see the role of teachers evolving in knowledge-rich settings?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I mean it's complicated and I wish that I had a crystal ball, but I mean there are a lot of. I see a trend. I mean I've been very busy going around the country speaking about the book and it's been out for four and a half years. There is definitely growing interest in these knowledge building curricula and I think it does to some extent require a reconceptualizing of the role of the teacher, because another thing that comes out of, you know, standard teacher training, teacher prep, is the idea that a good teacher doesn't actually follow a curriculum. Really only bad teachers are going to do that. A good teacher is going to create their own lesson plans, and that's really unrealistic.
Speaker 1:So curriculum has kind of been seen as like a straitjacket or a script that you're supposed to follow, and imagine if you were an actor you not only had to appear in a play but you also had to write the script. I mean, you know it's a lot to put on the shoulders of teachers, and teachers don't really get training in how to write curriculum. A lot of them are on like websites, like Teachers Pay Teachers or just Googling stuff the night before class to find things, and that's just not fair to them. What we need to do is, first of all, ensure that they have a good curriculum, one that is coherent and you know that makes sense to them, and then that they can use their limited time and energies to figure out how best to adapt this curriculum to their particular students. What do their particular students need to access this curriculum? So I think we need to, and teachers need to see themselves less as curriculum writers and more as experts in delivering that curriculum in the best possible way for their students.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah, I've heard you mentioned teachers pay teachers. I've heard the analogy that this is kind of like asking nurses to like Google how to make morphine. You know like it's like there are different. There are different people making the medicines. We need to know how to apply and use the medicines, and those medicines should be available, made available to you by the hospital. Right, like the school. You shouldn't need to like go do all these crazy things after school to like create, recreate all this stuff. But some people experience a lot of joy in that, right, and, and so it's like how can we create this wiggle room where there's flexibility in how you deliver it? Right, cause there's a lot of joy in that creativity.
Speaker 1:I have seen. So I think the first time you use a curriculum you're probably going to want to follow it. You know pretty faithfully because it's new and you've got to figure out what is it that kids are supposed to be taking away from this, what is it that needs to be focused on. But then you know, once you're comfortable with the curriculum, I've seen teachers become very creative. I remember our first grade teacher who was using one of these curricula and there was a read aloud on they were doing Mesopotamia and it was a read aloud on Babylon and what Babylon looked like, and she had found in previous years that kids weren't that engaged by this read aloud. So I came to this classroom expecting her to be doing this read aloud but instead she had created models of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on the floor using blue construction paper leading to. She had this big poster at the other end of the classroom that was Babylon and she said to kids okay, we're going on a time travel journey and we're going to be paddling down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and we're going to. The kids were mesmerized and but she knew, understood the curriculum well enough that she knew what she needed to include, what vocabulary she needed to include. And I mean she was a very gifted teacher, but that's the kind of thing you could do.
Speaker 1:And I talked to another teacher who was skeptical about a different knowledge building curriculum that his school had adopted but he found he was teaching about the depression. This was an ELA class, english class, but they were reading a novel set during the depression and he was able to bring in a rap song that he had found that kids really loved about the depression. So there are all sorts of things that teachers can do and that guy who was teaching about the depression I mean he said I actually found having this curriculum liberating because it enabled me to focus on these other things. That made it more interesting and more powerful for my students. So I do. That's the other thing I think teachers need to get away from. Is this idea that a script is a scripted curriculum is inherently a bad thing? I mean, if the script is good, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that. Okay, that's so interesting. So what do you think are some of these? We've mentioned knowledge-rich curriculum. Maybe that's the one we want to focus on, but are there other tools that could be in a teacher's tool belt that you see as powerful in reshaping education and like addressing this knowledge gap? Are there other ones, or have we covered them?
Speaker 1:Well, I would like to talk about writing for a few minutes, because I think you know we all recognize that writing is a vital skill, but it's more than that. It is also potentially an incredibly powerful lever for deepening and reinforcing the kind of knowledge we want kids and vocabulary we want kids to retain in long-term memory and also developing their analytical abilities and also familiarizing them with the complex sentence structure of written language. Because if you teach a kid to use something like a subordinating conjunction in their own writing, they're going to be in a much better position to understand that kind of structure when they encounter it in their reading. So I mean, the writing revolution, which is the book I co-authored, describes this method. But the method was created by my coauthor, judith Hockman, and it is designed to be.
Speaker 1:It's not a curriculum, it's a method that's designed to be adapted to whatever you're teaching, any subject, any grade level but you have to have a content-rich curriculum in order to use it because, as I started out by saying, she told me, the method only works when it's embedded in content and if you're focusing on teaching comprehension skills, you're jumping from topic to topic.
Speaker 1:Kids aren't going to have enough information about any one topic to enable them to write coherently about it. But if you do have a content-rich curriculum and I will say not all of the content-rich curricula are out there, I think provide enough of that guided practice, enough of that explicit instruction. But if you combine it with a writing instruction method like a writing revolutions, that writing instruction is going to provide a lot of that retrieval practice, the sort of it's going to uncover misunderstandings, like I was in a third grade classroom a couple months ago where they were doing an activity that called for kids to fill in the rest of a sentence. Wilbur was about Charlotte's Web. Wilbur is different from the other animals but and it turned out a lot of these third graders they were struggling with that how to use but and the teacher might not have realized that unless she had done that activity. So I think there are tremendous benefits to that kind of writing instruction if you have a content-rich curriculum.
Speaker 3:So I'm totally asking for a friend wink what if you have a child that loves to read but absolutely refuses to write? So it's like where do you? You know, how do you, because writing is a really important skill but literally refuses. Will read all day long, will narrate, but will not write.
Speaker 1:Well, writing is really hard, so that's perfectly reasonable to be. You know like it's hard work, but I think the key is to make it less difficult by starting at the sentence level, because it's assumed that kids will know how to construct sentences, but often they don't. So how do you use a conjunction like but. How do you use a subordinating conjunction like although, Various things like that. And then for writing at length, it's crucial to teach kids how to construct clear, linear outlines for paragraphs and essays, because writing at length is tremendously overwhelming for our cognitive capabilities. But if you can offload some of that burden to essentially like a roadmap, which is, you know, an outline, then you have more capacity for the writing itself, so it can modulate that heavy cognitive load that writing imposes. And you know certainly the people. The Writing Revolution is an organization that works with schools and they've seen yeah, I mean they've seen reluctant writers turn into enthusiastic, eager writers once the process was broken down for them into manageable chunks and they were given enough instruction and guided practice.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for that. Yeah, we have even broken it down to like literally a couple of sentences. We're getting there, Hopefully. I still have hope. So this is we're going to wrap up. Thank you so much for this really rich discussion. I have learned so much, and so this is a question we ask all of our guests who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, your curiosity, motivation or your passion?
Speaker 1:Well, there are lots of possible people. I could mention my parents among them, but I think, with regard to what we've been talking about, I would name Judith Hockman, who is the founder of this organization called the Writing Revolution and the creator of that method, and she, as I said, she was the one who first explained to me what was actually going on in these elementary classrooms, that I thought kids were learning something substantive and just the. We are now working on a second edition of Writing Revolution 2.0. And the more I understand the method, the more I think about it and you know with her, the more I am in awe of its possibilities and the way it could unlock the potential of so many kids. You know untold numbers of kids. I am convinced that there is an enormous amount of potential out there that we just haven't allowed kids to show us, and I think writing is one of the key ways, one of the keys to unlocking that door?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Okay. So how can listeners learn more about your work?
Speaker 1:Well, I have a website, nataliewexlercom. I have a free newsletter called Minding the Gap, and I could mention, you know, so they're obviously the books, but I also hosted a podcast for the Knowledge Matters campaign, so it's called the Knowledge Matters Podcast and it's six, you know, basically half hour episodes. So it might be easier for people than plunging into a book, but I also found that to be, for me, a really fascinating educational experience. I interviewed various educators and district leaders and they had some really interesting stuff to say, so people might want to check that out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great. Well, we'll get all those links and post them in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the Kindled podcast. I've loved this conversation and I've learned so much from you. Thanks, natalie. Well, thank you, katie.
Speaker 1:I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Natalie.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Adrian. That is it for today. Katie, what's your biggest takeaway from our conversation?
Speaker 2:with Natalie. I just love that this was such a balanced conversation, because I don't know if you've been listening to the Kindle podcast, like you know. Like some of the points that Natalie was making, we talk about student autonomy and choice and voice all the time, and inquiry. We're huge fans of these things, but I find that it's so refreshing and grounding to hear a perspective that kind of pulls me back a little bit, Because what I'm seeing with my kids and all the kids in front of like yes, this is, it is absolutely. It's just so important to have a balanced approach to this and I think we can still do inquiry and student choice and voice.
Speaker 2:And I mean, just to tell a story, very early Prenda days we started off with a completely inquiry, like we need to go back and listen to our conversation with Travis diving into inquiry and I think I think that these conversations are really interesting side by side.
Speaker 2:But we used to use a very free inquiry method around things like social studies and history and things like that, and the kids just didn't know.
Speaker 2:They're like, well, I don't know what I'm interested in, I don't have any questions, and so then we realized like, oh yeah, kids can't ask questions unless they have some background knowledge, and so we started building curriculum that was meant to act as kind of like the provocation, the first step in the inquiry method. So you know, we're helping them understand what happened in history or in science or some of these other topics, and then we're curating content for them to go gain background knowledge and exposure and then asking them to to use that that gained knowledge to act in the real world. I think that's really been a beautiful approach that keeps kids engaged and keeps teachers or guides in the loop and part of that facilitation process in a really engaging and beautiful way. So I think there's a lot to be learned here and a lot of yeah, just good perspectives to bring to the table when we're building educational environments for kids. What did you think?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was thinking I mean part of me when certain things were said. I'm like but no, and then I was like okay, adrian, have an open mind. So I think it's really important to know that, just because one person's saying this is how it should be, that goes for Katie and me, that goes for Natalie, it goes for Trevor, it goes for whoever we have on the podcast and we say this is how it is Really, we have to step back and go okay, what is the best for that unique individual child? And yes, let's look at the research, let's look at the cognitive science and the way the brain learns. That was really insightful for me to listen to. That part of like okay, we got to get back to how the brain actually retains information in that retrieval process.
Speaker 3:I was taking an online course on how I think it was a Carnegie Mellon and how the brain learns, and so that brought me back to that which I think is really important too. Or I just saw an Instagram reel on you know an account I followed. It was like this is the way you need to speak to kids, and it was using assertive language and I commented. I was like this doesn't work for every child, though, like this is great and this would be a great tool, but you know, I have a child with demand avoidance and if I spoke to him like that, he needs declarative language. So we have to just have an open mind of there's just not one particular way. Um, I hate saying that there's no right way or wrong way, cause.
Speaker 3:I do think there are wrong ways and I do think there are right ways, um, but we kind of have to step back and go okay, how is a child learning what, what is benefiting them, and and look at it all with an open mind, instead of this very closed mind, which I definitely can start to do. So it was really eyeopening for me.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that makes me think of a word that I don't think we've talked about on the podcast before, but heterodoxy. Um, this means, like evaluating different opinions and thoughts, and I don't think this is a thing that our brains do well, because our brain likes to team, right. It's like, oh, we're on this team or that team, or like we you know, these people like us do things like this or believe things like this, right, and so it can make us uncomfortable sometimes when we're like, oh, that doesn't like sit, like, that's not my experience or something like that. But it is so necessary that we, like the adults of this generation that are raising the coming generation, that we set really strong examples of heterodoxy and being able to sit in the discomfort of like, yeah, this, this, this doesn't match my experience or what I would typically agree with, but when we keep an open mind and we stay curious and we stop our from from doing that kind of like polarizing tribalism, um, like behavior that it likes to do, that is it's just so, so important, and I feel like this conversation really helped me do that because, um, I think sometimes we look we all look at the world like in a certain way, like we kind of create a straw man out of, like conventional education right, but like every single classroom looks so different and feels different and is serving a different purpose, and so it's just important and like, looking at the other side of the spectrum, like student-led learning and students like child-centered learning isn't just all like playing in the mud all the time and doing whatever kids want to do all the time, like there's straw men being made on both ends of this argument, and I think it's just really important that we like explore the messier middle and assume that it's not just one or, you know, it's not a light switch, it's like it's more like a dimmer or something like that.
Speaker 2:I don't know, it's just a lot more nuanced. And when we stay curious and ask questions, um, I think we all grow. So I've loved this conversation.
Speaker 3:And it's important for us to have self-awareness about these thoughts that are happening in our minds and to be able to talk about it and normalize it instead of. You know, just I we could have just kept quiet, uh, you know, and not talked about this, but I think it's really important to bring to light, right and be authentic. Okay, so if this episode was helpful to you, please like, subscribe and follow us on social at Prenda learn. If you have any questions you'd like us to address, all you have to do is email us at podcast at Prendacom. You also can join our Facebook group, the Kindle collective, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at the Sunday spark.
Speaker 2:The Kindle podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the things we talk about here on the Kindle podcast. If you want more information about guiding a Prenda micro school, just go to Prendacom. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling. Thank you.
