My Beef with Background Knowledge

 

The texts and topics we put in front of our kids are challenging. Through these texts, students are learning about topics as wide-ranging as issues of water access around the world, Native American boarding schools, and the ratification of the 19th amendment. The vast majority of the time, students enter a module of study with very little background knowledge about it, and the vast majority of the time, our response is to build some background knowledge before students engage with the texts.

Pre-loading this background knowledge can look like showing videos, reading additional articles, or leading classroom discussions before we engage with a text, and it is done with the very best of intentions.

But I argue that doing this - giving kids background knowledge about the texts before they have the chance to read it for themselves - actually does a disservice to our students. 

If, as Doug Lemov writes in Reading Reconsidered, "... our responsibility as reading teachers is to ensure that students can create meaning directly from reading on their own..." (my emphasis added), then giving them our knowledge before they read makes them more dependent on us and moves us farther away from that goal of independence. Our goal is for them to - at the end of the year or the end of school altogether - be able to approach a brand new, really difficult text, and make sense of it all by themselves ... whether or not they have background knowledge about it beforehand.

Now, you may be thinking, "But what about all the research pointing to the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension?" And you'd be right. There's research going back to 1932 that shows readers use their knowledge to understand text, and it's why we know that teaching social studies and science content, reading meaty texts, smart consumption of educational media (think more PBS and less Minecraft), and the like are all no-brainers. 

But as Tim Shanahan writes, in literacy instruction, our goal isn't immediate comprehension of today's text; it's to build independent readers. If I'm always giving them background knowledge, instead of helping them develop the habits and behaviors they need to build knowledge from a text themselves, how do they ever learn to tackle a text on their own? Especially when they don't have a lot of relevant knowledge? 

I also dispute the claim that readers can't understand texts unless they already know a lot about them. If that's true, how does anyone ever read Shakespeare? Or a college text on chemistry? Or the directions to reset the low tire pressure light on my car? I've been able to make sense of all of those, even without a lot of background knowledge. It wasn't easy, but I called on the behaviors and habits I'd been taught when I grappled with hard texts in a classroom to make sense of them on my own.

I'll also argue that it's this ... this ability to make real sense of a text even when I don't know much about it ... than can level the playing field for our kids. Our students from historically underserved populations - our students of color, students from poverty, students with disabilities - will not come to the table with the same breadth of knowledge as their more affluent peers. But if I can teach a student to make sense of a text even when they lack the background for them ... well, that's a game changer. They can build that knowledge for themselves. It's why Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) calls reading "a vaccine against populism, racism, and nationalism." 

Reading is more than finding information in texts that adds to or agrees with what I already know. In fact, we might do well to teach our students to question their prior knowledge, because research shows that knowledge can actually contribute to miscomprehension. If we really want them to learn from a text, they need to be able to set aside misconceptions they hold, approach a text with a sense of intellectual humility, and be willing to change their thinking with new knowledge from a text in hand. 

So, instead of pre-loading background information, I encourage you to (as a mentor of mine calls it), let the text do the teaching. Because, as it did for the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, reading well allows us to live beyond where we are and independently build knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. And that can change everything. 

5 Strategies for Active Engagement During a Read Aloud

 

I'm a big believer in beginning with the end in mind, and when we think about what we want our students to be able to do at the end of the year - and at the end of their education, really - independently reading really complex text is key to that. So, we want our instruction to include lots of opportunities for students to independently read and grapple with complex texts, and I've written in another blog post about ways to release the reading to the students.

At the same time, a part of our job as teachers is to be the expert in the room with them, to guide them through knowing how to make sense of the text and analyzing it to the depth that's called for by the standards. And we should be asking kids to regularly work with texts that are too complex for them to make sense of independently right now. That means that there are times when we put a really tough text in front of our students and it is most appropriate to read it - or portions of it - aloud to them.

The problem that we encounter a lot is: How do we keep kids engaged, even when the text is being read aloud? How do we make sure they are truly "minds on," so they can get what they need from the read aloud and then take it into their own, second reading of the text?

If that sounds familiar, here are some ideas you can try that can help press for strong student engagement during a read aloud:

1. Read it all the way through without stopping. This is especially true of a first, gist read. The purpose here is not to teach vocabulary, ask questions, or make note of connections or things you're thinking. The purpose is for readers to begin to get a picture of the whole piece - to get the lay of the land, so to speak - so that they are better able to deeply parse chunks of the text on a second read.

2. Read with appropriate fluency. Read alouds are incidental fluency instruction, so don't miss this opportunity! Be sure you are altering your pace, chunking phrases together, using volume as appropriate, attending to punctuation, read with good (though not overdone) expression, and the like. A boring, rote reading will lose them every time.

3. Circulate. Project the text on the board if you need to, but also have a copy in hand that you can use as you walk the room. One strategy I love for circulating is Teach Like a Champion's "Break the Plane," and you can read more about circulating a classroom here.

4. Give them a purpose or question for reading. Either establish a purpose ("We're reading this article so we can learn more about this type of frog and add it to our notes for our book") or pose a question ("Who were the Loyalists and what did they believe?"). Every time. It's easy to skip, but it becomes glaringly obvious how important this is when I'm in professional learning, am asked to read something, and I have no idea why.

5. Establish a "student do." Should they track the text with a finger or a pencil? Should they whisper read the text with you? Should they underline text that supports the purpose or question they're answering? There is a time and place for simply listening to a read aloud for pleasure, with no ask of the student other than enjoyment. I would argue that instructional time isn't it; make sure there is a clear "student do" during the read aloud, that students know what it is and how to do it, and that you're circulating (see above) for accountability.

It can be hard - especially if you're early in your career - to juggle teaching content and monitoring engagement at the same time. (Or maybe it was just me.) Try inviting your coach in to observe and note student engagement, or record a lesson and watch it to see what your students do during a read aloud. If engagement could use a boost, try the above and see how they work!

Here's to simply teaching well,