“We are in the business of planting seeds” was the number-one metaphor I used when discussing my efficacy as a middle school ELA teacher.
I viewed my job as planting seeds of strategies and skills that would be watered throughout the rest of my students’ academic careers. I came to this metaphor out of necessity. When teaching reading comprehension, I found it difficult to measure my own effectiveness. This contrasted greatly with my experience as an interventionist and dyslexia specialist. I could easily see if my students could or could not decode print text. If they struggled with decoding, I could teach explicit strategies and principles of the English language in evidence-based ways that would, eventually, result in their proficient reading of text. I knew that their ability to decode would help them to, eventually, comprehend what it was they were decoding. When it came to teaching straight-up comprehension, however, I did not know what to measure. Could my student come up with the main idea of a text? If they could, how did I know if that was the “correct” main idea? What if what I found was most salient in the text differed from what they believed the main idea was? What if it all came down to a difference of opinion?
In the past few years, the ambiguous set of skills referred to as “reading comprehension” has come under scrutiny. Comprehension questions are asked and assessed on standardized tests, but a new body of research posits that the results have more to do with the amount of connected or background knowledge students have than with transferrable/generalized “comprehension” skills.
Natalie Wexler seems to be the main researcher focusing on the impact of prior relevant knowledge. In a recent newsletter on knowledge-building texts, she asserts that we must “adopt an approach to comprehension that prioritizes building students’ knowledge. That approach would include bringing in whatever skills or strategies are likely to help students understand the particular text or topic being taught.”
Wexler serves on the board of the Knowledge Matters Campaign, which supports educators and administrators in understanding what goes into knowledge-building curricula. Through reading her work, listening to the Knowledge Matters Podcast, and reflecting on my own experiences as a classroom teacher, I am starting to see how comprehension skills (e.g. finding the main idea, etc) don’t necessarily transfer from content area to content area. Knowledge-building means we’re building on the knowledge students already have. Knowledge that is interdisciplinary and transfers/is reinforced across content areas and contexts is high-leverage for our students. Comprehension, then, is the result of all these other strands rather than a strategy in and of itself.
Components of Knowledge-Building Texts
At Storyshares, we focus on creating scaffolded decodable and high/low texts that build upon and reinforce the knowledge students already have while teaching new knowledge that can support them in accessing grade-level content. We also build in opportunities for students to draw on background knowledge in the curricular content we create to pair with these texts. We do that in a variety of ways that I am summarizing below:
We connect fiction and nonfiction so that we can engage readers as we build on their knowledge. Our informational text companions build on information presented in the fiction texts they pair with. For example, each fiction book in our Dream With Us series pairs with a nonfiction decodable text that zooms into a topic the main character explored in the fiction counterpart.
We select interdisciplinary topics. When we choose topics for our knowledge-building decodable and high-low books, we ensure that they are relevant in multiple content areas. Our new knowledge-building decodable text collections expose students to a variety of career paths and the people who pursue them, all while building phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary skills.
We provide high-leverage vocabulary support in the form of words defined in context and vocabulary guides in our educator companions and teacher materials.
Want to learn more about knowledge-building (also referred to as knowledge-rich, informational, and content/topic-rich) texts and curricula? We are sharing some professional learning resources below:
- Listen to the Knowledge Matters Podcast.
- Sign up for Natalie Wexler’s Substack: Minding the Gap.
- Read this EdWeek article on using knowledge-building to boost literacy.
Visit our online store to shop for Knowledge-Building Decodable Texts for Upper Elementary and Middle School.