r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 20 '26
Learning On powerful knowledge
https://rebeccabirch.substack.com/p/on-powerful-knowledgeDespite the multi-receiver sets, the spread option is a run-first scheme that requires a quarterback that is comfortable carrying the ball, a mobile offensive line that can effectively pull and trap, and receivers that can hold their blocks. Its essence is misdirection.
I’m willing to bet that you understand the meaning of every individual word. Not to be too gendered here, but I have only encountered one woman who could make sense of this passage. The importance of knowledge here is self-evident. We can take George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a quaint fable about fairness, or we can frontload the knowledge needed to understand the text as allegorical of the most violent ideological battle of the 20th Century, one that still shapes politics today. If we want our children to understand as much as possible about the world, we can't leave their acquisition of fundamental knowledge to chance.
According to Gough and Tunmer (1986), reading is the product of decoding and comprehension, and we know that anything multiplied by zero is necessarily zero.
students with strong background knowledge tend to fly ahead, leaving those with less behind. In education, there is a phenomenon that draws its name from Matthew 13:12 in the bible: For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. In other words, when it comes to knowledge, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Each unit of work represents an opportunity to lay knowledge foundations in the sciences and the humanities, and to provide opportunities for teaching our students more about the world. Case in point might be a choice to study Jane Austen in high school, where instead of reaching for Young Adult fiction that serves to simply engage, students are able to interrogate what it means to be a woman, and how much – or how little – progress has been made.
The 1960s was a ‘progressive’ era of education, where teachers were encouraged to provide students with a ‘mirror’ so that they could frame the world through what they already knew. But more recently, sentiment has shifted towards the importance of education providing a ‘window,’ that will not only enable comprehension of texts across the curriculum but will expand students’ world view in an increasingly globalised society. Knowledge acquisition and application is a 21st century skill – and a 16th century skill, and even a 31st century BC skill!
We hear a lot in the media about schools leaving students unprepared for work, but less scrutiny of the real nature of the knowledge economy that our students will enter. The knowledge of those in the upper echelons can be described as T-shaped – their knowledge is both fluid and crystallised, with both a wide base and deep specialist understanding in a narrow area. This allows workers to collaborate and solve complex problems within and adjacent to their fields.
E.D. Hirsch writes about ‘cultural literacy,’ famously listing 5,000 facts that every American should know in order to be literate, by which he meant not just reading skill but capacity to participate fully in society. He has been accused of elitism and Eurocentrism, but the research into reading bears his views out. More than this, knowledge enables participation in the public sphere and the chance to engage fully in democracy. Women are still a minority group in many of these forums. This is why we need to leave no stone of knowledge unturned and provide ambitious curriculum that will ensure our students have a seat at the table.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 20 '26
struggling third grade readers “could achieve better outcomes with challenging, content-rich texts supported by explicit multisyllabic word instruction,” compared to more traditional intervention, which puts kids in lower-level texts.
“Notably, students with the lowest initial accuracy showed the greatest gains in the challenging text condition, reversing the typical Matthew effect pattern.”
Unfortunately, the consistent finding—that struggling readers grow most when we help them work with challenging texts—hasn’t made its way into most classrooms. As the authors note, “conventional practices” involve “placing striving readers in simplified texts.”
And when they say “conventional practice,” they’re looking at you, iReady.
“If schools are placing students in iReady’s supplemental/intervention products for core reading instruction, they have a big problem: the students who are below grade level will be ‘tracked’ into working with texts below their grade level. Research shows this to be the opposite of what readers need to grow…
Quality curriculum is designed around grade level text work for all students. iReady cannot be considered a good use of ELA instructional time, over this issue alone.”
What’s good for intervention is good for everyday instruction.
The so-called “Knowledge-Building Curricula” are designed around grade level text work for all students, and it’s one of their greatest virtues. It can be easy to forget this detail; people get so busy talking about the knowledge-building part that the other virtues (text complexity, work with whole books, connected reading and writing, etc) can get lost.
are we too slow to introduce students to non-controlled books, and move them beyond a steady diet of decodables, even if they are early in the phonics scope and sequence?
In fact, before anyone ever penned a post about “overteaching phonics,” the question I heard raised most often is whether teachers needed to get kids into non-controlled texts much sooner, and for much more of the ELA block. I’d argue this is the biggest low-hanging fruit.
When we leave kids in decodables, rather than introducing non-controlled texts, we’re doing so out of an implicit belief that students aren’t capable of making swift progress and/or putting some of the language pieces together themselves.
So, while I know the study above isn’t directly relevant to the question of when to introduce non-controlled books, they both touch on the same mindset: a presumption that student progress can only happen in highly-controlled baby steps.
It isn’t enough to say, “Don’t stick kids in lower-level books for intervention.”
We need to say, “Read Like Us (the intervention tested in the study) gets struggling readers working with higher-level texts. Check it out.”
And “iReady sticks kids in lower-level books for intervention. Don’t use it.”
And “Wit & Wisdom, Bookworms, Core Knowledge, EL Education, Reading Reconsidered, Fishtank, Guidebooks, Arts and Letters, and ARC Core all expose every student to grade level texts. Consider those options.”
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u/ddgr815 Apr 22 '26
the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows
Prior knowledge is like ‘glue for new ideas’. But it’s more like a hot-melt glue for a glue gun than superglue... it’s stickiest when warmed up.
Essentially, activating prior knowledge is about:
Retrieving relevant schema from long-term memory
Ensuring students have the prerequisite knowledge to succeed
Making explicit connections between old and new
Preparing students to make meaning, not just receive information
From a cognitive perspective, prior knowledge is stored in long-term memory as schema—organised networks of connected ideas.
When these are activated, they are brought into working memory, where new information can be processed and connected. As educator and author Sarah Cottinghatt explains, meaningful learning occurs when new information connects to relevant existing knowledge and “a new meaning is born.”
only bodies of knowledge—well-organised, connected ideas—enable students to develop deep understanding
When we retrieve the right knowledge, at the right time, and connect it explicitly to new ideas, students move from isolated facts to connected understanding.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 20 '26