On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti recently interviewed Natalie Wexler, an education journalist, novelist and historian, about problems closing the achievement gap in education today. The focus was on how schools are hyper-focused on teaching skills to students rather than building a knowledge base. This is a very complicated issue and the discussion left me with more questions than answers but here are several points, made by Wexler, that stood out to me as I listened to this interview:
1. There will never be a national curriculum that is agreed upon, due to political reasons. Curriculum is largely locally controlled. Therefore, standardized tests will never be able to test students on a body of knowledge. So, standardized tests will always focus on what skills students have mastered.
2. Unlike explicitly teaching decoding, the skill of matching letters on a page with sounds, reading comprehension is something that cognitive scientists have researched and agree that it is a skill that comes naturally. It is something that is mastered by a student's background knowledge and vocabulary. Students who come from families with highly educated parents often have higher reading comprehension levels because they are exposed to more advanced content and vocabulary.
3. When teachers use content rich curriculum, students learn academic skills and have a deeper understanding of content through the lens of a theme. When teachers isolate skills, like finding the main idea of a passage, they use watered down content and students find it boring and they don't build a base of knowledge. Students can and prefer to learn about topics.
4. Building a foundation of knowledge in elementary school helps students to better understand the same content later in high school because they have been exposed to vocabulary early on and can think deeper about the same content instead of learning new vocabulary.
5. Skills should not be prioritized ahead of content. Rather, skills should be in service with content.
6. Social studies and science tend to be subjects that fall lower on the priority list because standardized tests focus primarily focus on math and reading.
7. Our country's educational experts and leaders are NOT in sync with the latest cognitive scientific findings. It seems there is a disconnect between research and widely accepted teaching practices.Teacher preparation programs are presenting what educational leaders think is the best way to teach, not necessarily what academic researchers find to be the best way to teach.
My reactions:
To being with, I don't know which is better: content rich curriculum or skills based curriculum. Kids need skills when they go out into the real world. But they also need knowledge. Does it have to be an all or nothing approach?
Next, no wonder our students don't like school! They aren't learning anything of substance! Kids like to learn stuff! They love to rattle off facts and show off their knowledge about topics. Let's feed them with knowledge.
It's no wonder our students don't have a basic knowledge of our globe; social studies falls low on the totem pole of time spent on subjects. How can we expect the average Joe on the street to know where Somalia is on a map, let alone understand the challenges that this nation is facing?
Furthermore, we can and should entrust knowledge to our kids. They want it. They crave it. We can raise our expectations of what knowledge our students can handle and they will be better for it in the long run.
Finally, and most importantly, WHY IS THERE NO CONNECTION BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND TEACHING PRACTICES? This was by far the most shocking piece of information I learned. What cognitive scientists agree as the best way to teach is not how we're teaching our children. How can this be? And this has been the case for years?! Are we resistant to change? Are we worried that a new approach may yield bad results? How can we NOT try a different approach when our students' abilities rank lower than students' abilities in most other developed nations? Educational leaders, let's stop burying our head in the sand and recognize that we need reform.
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