Knowledge Check
Situating student learning in time and space
Every morning on the drive to school, my kids and I listen to the trivia podcast Good Job Brain. The hosts start with a few classic Trivial Pursuit questions, then move into themed rounds built around a central idea. Although we started listening for fun, it also serves as a cognitive warm-up for the day—and it made me wonder: why not try something similar with students?
When I was designing a PD session for teachers in Chicago, I realized that I often jump into a key text taking for granted that students have the background knowledge that would support their comprehension. The book we were working with is the picture book Malala’s Magic Pencil. I had read recently that only 23% of people in the United States could identify Iran on a map, and I wondered how many of us could identify Pakistan, the setting for the book.
I’m not advocating for a social studies curriculum that was like mine when I was in the 7th grade. Every week we were given a different map to label and color and then tested on the states/countries/capitals at the end of the week. Chris Hefferman, a 7th grade social studies and math teacher, notes in an article about the importance of teaching geography:
Geography matters today more than ever, but only if we are looking at the right things. Google has changed our world, and geography is included in that. I haven’t given my students a map quiz in years because there isn’t really a need to memorize where countries are. Students can Google any country in the world to find its location.
He then points out the need to learn what he calls, “human geography.” He eloquently explains what students do need to know:
They need to understand the relationships that exist between cultures. They need to see not just the differences in cultures, but the similarities. Students need to know that the kid sitting in a school in Afghanistan today probably doesn’t speak the same language, practice the same religion or live in a home that looks anything like a student in the United States, but they have a lot of things in common. They both love their families, they both want to play and they both want to learn.
Certainly most of the literature we teach, if it is curated with a diversity of voices in mind, can help students to reach a deeper understanding of “human geography.” But I also want them to have a concrete sense of where they are in the world. How do we help students develop this sense of a global geography without a curriculum of rote memorization and testing?
Knowledge Matters
If you’ve read my previous articles, you know that recently I’ve been learning more about the “science of learning.” A decade ago, my colleague Liz Remington at The Learning Alliance, an organization dedicated to the “science of reading,” introduced me to cognitive approaches to reading through books like The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham and Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. Having been trained as a secondary-level literature teacher, many of these ideas were new to me. Since then, thanks to Holly Korbey at The Bell Ringer, my reading has broadened to include more at what now is commonly referred to as the “science of learning.”
One of the principal ideas to come out of this movement is that knowledge learning is critical not only for reading, but for learning in general. Willingham writes:
The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.1
Natalie Wexler warns us, however, that “Education certainly shouldn’t end with facts.” This point is one that I think is critical. The potential danger of the “science of learning” movement is that we go back to a time when we plodded our way through textbooks. We can all probably remember a class in which we were given a textbook, read a chapter every week or so, and then were tested (often with a multiple-choice test), on the facts we had memorized (usually hurriedly the night before). And yet we do need to teach students content. Wexler then follows up on her above statement, “But if it doesn’t begin there, many students will never acquire the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive both in school and in life.”2
In this week’s article, I’ll offer a quick and simple strategy I’ve developed, the Knowledge Check, that we can use when we teach any text or concept in the classroom.
