Thank you for asking the question I've often wondered: why would understanding metaphors or character development be more important than, say, understanding how a man like Abraham Lincoln's "character" changed over the course of the Civil War? Or if not his character exactly, his views about slavery. And understanding his use of the biblical metaphor, "a house divided cannot stand."
Why would fictional stories be more important to read than stories about things that really happened? Don't get me wrong--there is an important place for the study of fiction and poetry. But it's a big wide world out there, and students need to know other things too.
Children that age should be reading interesting well written stories and first rate fiction. Their subject area studies should naturally centre around substantive, well written and informative non-fiction texts & occasional fiction accounts. Not so difficult really?
Thank you for mentioning the Fordham study on social studies. Here's Susan Neuman's recommendations from my post on contextualizing comprehension instruction (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?r=5spuf), which she commented on today ("Terrific post...you've summarized the existing literature well!"). Really hope we can work towards making her recommendations a reality.
From: Susan Neuman, Professor of Childhood and Literacy Education, New York University, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum: The Next Frontier in the Science of Reading? Panel Discussion, 2023
What we’ve done is very simple:
"Look at the content standards of fourth grade and up in math, and science, and social studies, and art, and physical education.
We say, what do children need to know in order to be successful in those content areas?
And that has become the content that we think is absolutely essential that kids need to learn.
So, much of these other topics are very important. But the child will not be able to read the content text of science if they don’t have this background knowledge in place by fourth grade and beyond.
And so that’s how we define the content: What is the content you are actually teaching? And our answer is, content standards."
Love citing Guskey's model of teacher change! It was enfolded into the original work of the Targeted Reading Intervention, which has demonstrated efficacy for struggling readers in low-income, rural communities for 20 years. Lots of PD and school change aims to change the teachers' beliefs and hearts first. A no go.
Thank you for stating something I came to realize many years ago as an elementary social studies teacher…. I was not just teaching social studies, I was teaching informational reading!
That reminds me of a post I read recently by a reading interventionist who realized that if she wanted to enable students to understand texts, she also had to teach social studies! You can find it here:
On the topic of teacher development I don't find Guskey's model to be entirely convincing on its own. While Lewin's 1940s model is linear and simplistic, the first stage of 'unfreezing' does have significant merit, particularly for school leaders involved in supporting and leading development of teaching. I think people need to look at Helen Timperley's work on Teacher Professional Learning and Development Cycles from 2007, which I have found to be excellent.
No matter how successful the teaching or curriculum development might be, there is ground work to be done at start of an development. My personal experience is that the vast majority of teachers want their kids to learn more and will do whatever it takes to help their students achieve that goal. The first step has to be to show them a gap between the success of current practice and what they hoped for. That gap creates a cognitive dissonance, which is the invitation to exploring new practice. Once you have that people will do the work of changing their practice. Don't forget, when you ask a teacher to change practice you are asking them to give up something they have become accustomed to doing, for good or bad. The new required more effort (cognitive load anybody?) so you have to support that, including making initial success easy. Start small, provide consistent support, feedback and evidence of progress and good things tend to happen.
The fatal flaw in this idea is that it fails to recognize the proven actual purposes of high-stakes testing in the US.
High-stakes testing regimes are intentionally designed to manufacture failure, punish under-resourced public schools, and divert public tax dollars into privatized, for-profit education models.
Driven by multi-billion-dollar corporate testing industries, testing ultimately narrows the curriculum, harms vulnerable student populations, and damages traditional public education.
Organizations like the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) and the Institute for Democracy, Education, & Access (IDEA) advocate for completely rethinking accountability. They propose replacing high-stakes exams with holistic evaluation methods—such as classroom-based assessments, performance tasks, and school portfolios—that actually foster learning rather than punishing schools.
See THE CAMPAIGN TO DESTROY PUBLIC SCHOOLS Diane Ravitch in NYRB
Great food for thought. Knowledge is essential, no argument there.
However, my experience in intervention is that poor comprehension rarely comes down to one reason. In my limited sample of struggling students, it's rarely a knowledge gap.
It's often an underlying core difficulty (or several). I wonder if better diagnostics that separate decoding load, text clarity, inference generation (versus filtering), knowledge gaps, and anxiety-driven response suppression etc might help target the underlying difficulties and therefore appropriate remediation, rather than just targeting knowledge?
Are you aware of any research into supporting multiple underlying comprehension difficulties? Perhaps my view is being skewed by working with a specific sub-group of students?
No, it’s rarely JUST content knowledge, although content knowledge can compensate for gaps in other areas. And “knowledge” should also be seen to mean things like familiarity with complex syntax, which can be a big barrier to comprehension. Being able to draw on both kinds of knowledge can also reduce stress, which is itself a burden on working memory.
But yes, more granular diagnostics would help a lot.
Thank you. I think I was viewing 'knowledge' through too narrow a lens. I definitely struggle with complex syntax, so I know that gap from personal experience :-).
Yes!!! Thank you for highlighting Guskey's model of teacher change. It drives much of our work. Of course, it's pretty disheartening that nearly all theories of literacy change in the US are focused on changing teacher beliefs AND sharing an enormous amount of information that is at least partially disconnected from classroom practice (LETRS).
Lovely. Essentially since reading and writing are domain specific, they should be tested in specific domains. A simple concept yet so so hard for folks to grasp.
In other words, just revert to the 1950's style of teaching, where we all learned to read, write and calculate without madness and anguish. I'd bet my grade teachers had no idea of 'cognitive function', but they had been taught how to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. And we started History in Grade 2 and a second language in grade 4, while the State system ran a carefully constructed central curriculum for all children in public schools. No dramas.
Thank you for asking the question I've often wondered: why would understanding metaphors or character development be more important than, say, understanding how a man like Abraham Lincoln's "character" changed over the course of the Civil War? Or if not his character exactly, his views about slavery. And understanding his use of the biblical metaphor, "a house divided cannot stand."
Why would fictional stories be more important to read than stories about things that really happened? Don't get me wrong--there is an important place for the study of fiction and poetry. But it's a big wide world out there, and students need to know other things too.
Children that age should be reading interesting well written stories and first rate fiction. Their subject area studies should naturally centre around substantive, well written and informative non-fiction texts & occasional fiction accounts. Not so difficult really?
Thank you for mentioning the Fordham study on social studies. Here's Susan Neuman's recommendations from my post on contextualizing comprehension instruction (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?r=5spuf), which she commented on today ("Terrific post...you've summarized the existing literature well!"). Really hope we can work towards making her recommendations a reality.
From: Susan Neuman, Professor of Childhood and Literacy Education, New York University, Knowledge-Rich Curriculum: The Next Frontier in the Science of Reading? Panel Discussion, 2023
What we’ve done is very simple:
"Look at the content standards of fourth grade and up in math, and science, and social studies, and art, and physical education.
We say, what do children need to know in order to be successful in those content areas?
And that has become the content that we think is absolutely essential that kids need to learn.
So, much of these other topics are very important. But the child will not be able to read the content text of science if they don’t have this background knowledge in place by fourth grade and beyond.
And so that’s how we define the content: What is the content you are actually teaching? And our answer is, content standards."
As a history teacher, I fully endorse this!
Love citing Guskey's model of teacher change! It was enfolded into the original work of the Targeted Reading Intervention, which has demonstrated efficacy for struggling readers in low-income, rural communities for 20 years. Lots of PD and school change aims to change the teachers' beliefs and hearts first. A no go.
Thank you for stating something I came to realize many years ago as an elementary social studies teacher…. I was not just teaching social studies, I was teaching informational reading!
That reminds me of a post I read recently by a reading interventionist who realized that if she wanted to enable students to understand texts, she also had to teach social studies! You can find it here:
https://scienceofreadingclassroom.substack.com/p/im-a-reading-interventionist-but
Lernen muss gelernt werden und der Lehplan passen für jedes Kind, individuelle Zeit, investieren in die ersten Jahre
On the topic of teacher development I don't find Guskey's model to be entirely convincing on its own. While Lewin's 1940s model is linear and simplistic, the first stage of 'unfreezing' does have significant merit, particularly for school leaders involved in supporting and leading development of teaching. I think people need to look at Helen Timperley's work on Teacher Professional Learning and Development Cycles from 2007, which I have found to be excellent.
No matter how successful the teaching or curriculum development might be, there is ground work to be done at start of an development. My personal experience is that the vast majority of teachers want their kids to learn more and will do whatever it takes to help their students achieve that goal. The first step has to be to show them a gap between the success of current practice and what they hoped for. That gap creates a cognitive dissonance, which is the invitation to exploring new practice. Once you have that people will do the work of changing their practice. Don't forget, when you ask a teacher to change practice you are asking them to give up something they have become accustomed to doing, for good or bad. The new required more effort (cognitive load anybody?) so you have to support that, including making initial success easy. Start small, provide consistent support, feedback and evidence of progress and good things tend to happen.
The fatal flaw in this idea is that it fails to recognize the proven actual purposes of high-stakes testing in the US.
High-stakes testing regimes are intentionally designed to manufacture failure, punish under-resourced public schools, and divert public tax dollars into privatized, for-profit education models.
Driven by multi-billion-dollar corporate testing industries, testing ultimately narrows the curriculum, harms vulnerable student populations, and damages traditional public education.
Organizations like the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) and the Institute for Democracy, Education, & Access (IDEA) advocate for completely rethinking accountability. They propose replacing high-stakes exams with holistic evaluation methods—such as classroom-based assessments, performance tasks, and school portfolios—that actually foster learning rather than punishing schools.
See THE CAMPAIGN TO DESTROY PUBLIC SCHOOLS Diane Ravitch in NYRB
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/02/01/the-campaign-to-destroy-public-schools-diane-ravitch/?utm_medium=email
Great food for thought. Knowledge is essential, no argument there.
However, my experience in intervention is that poor comprehension rarely comes down to one reason. In my limited sample of struggling students, it's rarely a knowledge gap.
It's often an underlying core difficulty (or several). I wonder if better diagnostics that separate decoding load, text clarity, inference generation (versus filtering), knowledge gaps, and anxiety-driven response suppression etc might help target the underlying difficulties and therefore appropriate remediation, rather than just targeting knowledge?
Are you aware of any research into supporting multiple underlying comprehension difficulties? Perhaps my view is being skewed by working with a specific sub-group of students?
Many thanks for an excellent article!
No, it’s rarely JUST content knowledge, although content knowledge can compensate for gaps in other areas. And “knowledge” should also be seen to mean things like familiarity with complex syntax, which can be a big barrier to comprehension. Being able to draw on both kinds of knowledge can also reduce stress, which is itself a burden on working memory.
But yes, more granular diagnostics would help a lot.
Thank you. I think I was viewing 'knowledge' through too narrow a lens. I definitely struggle with complex syntax, so I know that gap from personal experience :-).
Yes!!! Thank you for highlighting Guskey's model of teacher change. It drives much of our work. Of course, it's pretty disheartening that nearly all theories of literacy change in the US are focused on changing teacher beliefs AND sharing an enormous amount of information that is at least partially disconnected from classroom practice (LETRS).
Lovely. Essentially since reading and writing are domain specific, they should be tested in specific domains. A simple concept yet so so hard for folks to grasp.
Precisely
Make that the 1950's... though it felt like a system that had been there since time began :)
In other words, just revert to the 1950's style of teaching, where we all learned to read, write and calculate without madness and anguish. I'd bet my grade teachers had no idea of 'cognitive function', but they had been taught how to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. And we started History in Grade 2 and a second language in grade 4, while the State system ran a carefully constructed central curriculum for all children in public schools. No dramas.