Science of Reading: The Podcast

Unlocking reading: Comprehension strategies vs. knowledge building, with Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert welcomes back researcher and author Daniel Willingham, Ph.D., to discuss reading comprehension. With only so much instruction time in the day and research supporting both comprehension strategies and knowledge building, it can be tough to know what to prioritize in the classroom. Daniel holds nothing back in outlining exactly where educators should focus their time. Together, he and Susan explore the limitations of comprehension strategies, the place for critical thinking skills in relationship to knowledge, and recognizing when messaging around knowledge has gone too far.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“Your brain is really good at only bringing out the information from long-term memory that is relevant for the context. All of that's happening outside of awareness.”  —Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

“When reading is really humming, when it's really working well, it's like visual perception. You're just enjoying the view and you're oblivious to all of the cognitive machinery in the background that's letting you see.”  —Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

“Expecting that knowledge-rich curriculum is going to solve all problems… that's [not] what a reading program is. No, a reading program is multifaceted and needs to have lots of components.”  —Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

“Knowledge accrues slowly and it's going to take a while. You need to be patient.”  —Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
2:00 Introduction: Who is Daniel Willingham?
05:00 Knowledge and reading comprehension
08:00 What it takes to be comfortable reading
10:00 Academic or disciplinary knowledge
11:00 Comprehension strategies
20:00 Applications of knowledge that can be difficult to appreciate
25:00 Inferences can be automatic
26:00 Taking the “knowledge is important” message too far
31:00 Critical thinking and knowledge building
32:00 How to decide what knowledge is important to teach
36:00 Book: Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking
39:00 Final thoughts and advice
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] Daniel Willingham: When I talk with teachers about it, it rings true and it resonates that, yeah, when children don't know anything about a topic, it's very difficult for them to do any of the things we really want them to do. What our real goals are.

[00:00:16] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today's episode is an ode to knowledge and knowledge building. I'm joined once again by Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. And on this episode, he not only makes the case for why knowledge is so key, he also details how knowledge is often critical in ways that are difficult to appreciate.

[00:00:45] Susan Lambert: He explains why patience is so important when it comes to knowledge building, and he talks about when and how to appropriately use comprehension strategies. I promise this is a rich conversation packed with [00:01:00] useful information that you won't wanna miss. Without further ado, let me welcome back Daniel Willingham. 

[00:01:09] Susan Lambert: Dr. Dan Willingham, it's so exciting to have you as a guest on our podcast, again! Thank you for joining us.

[00:01:15] Daniel Willingham: Happy to be back.

[00:01:15] Susan Lambert: I would love if you could reintroduce yourself to our audience in case folks don't know who you are, and maybe talk a little bit about your work and how it relates to reading development.

[00:01:26] Daniel Willingham: Sure. So by training, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. And for about the first 10 years of my career, I studied pretty technical questions in memory, mostly related to the question of whether there are anatomically separate systems in the brain for handling different types of memory. And about 10 or 12 years after I had my Ph.D. and had been doing that work, I got interested in education largely by accident.

[00:01:55] Daniel Willingham: And about five years after that really switched all of my time [00:02:00] and attention to trying to translate what scientists know about how the mind works, and to a lesser extent, how the brain works for educators — what principles of memory have scientists uncovered, what principles of attention, motivation, and so on that can be useful in classrooms.

[00:02:19] Daniel Willingham: And so I spent all of my time doing that, and my interest in reading is very much a part of that. Obviously reading is central to so much of what children do in school, and I, of course wanted to turn my attention to reading. So I've written several articles and two books about reading.

[00:02:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Can you remind me the titles of those books that you wrote about reading? 

[00:02:42] Daniel Willingham: Oh, I'd love to. And they're available anywhere fine books are sold. And people can also contact me for merch. I've got baseball caps.

[00:02:49] Susan Lambert: Yay.

[00:02:50] Daniel Willingham: I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Sure. Yeah. The first book I wrote is called, Raising Kids Who Read, and so that was really directed to both parents and teachers.

[00:02:57] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmmm. 

[00:02:58] Daniel Willingham: And covers motivation as [00:03:00] well, and the more cognitive aspects of reading. And then the second book is called, The Reading Mind. And that's really an explanation of how reading happens in the mind, at least insofar as scientists understand it. And it focuses in particular on someone who is already reading well.

[00:03:18] Daniel Willingham: So it's not about the process of learning to read, though, obviously knowing something about how advanced readers do it is useful when you're trying to help children learn to read. 

[00:03:28] Susan Lambert: Great. Thank you for that. And we can link our listeners in the show notes to both of those books. And everybody needs a reading mind t-shirt, don't you think? Maybe you should go into the business of merch. 

[00:03:39] Daniel Willingham: Probably, yeah. It's gonna be a whole new career for me, and in 10 years, I'll be on a podcast, "Dan, how'd you get into clothing?" "Well, you know, it's a funny story, but I was on this podcast." 

[00:03:50] Susan Lambert: That's funny. So you've also, thought and wrote a lot about the importance of knowledge. And you know, there's a lot of conversation about knowledge [00:04:00] building to support reading comprehension, teaching comprehension strategies. What are your thoughts on that sort of topic?

[00:04:07] Daniel Willingham: Yeah. So that's a big topic. And let me and take each in turn.

[00:04:13] Daniel Willingham: So knowledge is absolutely as essential to reading comprehension as knowledge. I'm now writing a book about high-level cognition. So it's about problem-solving and decision-making and creativity. And that's very much a theme in that book as well, that is all of those processes — which are of course the things that we're really hoping for children to benefit in education — all of those really depend heavily on knowledge. And reading comprehension is no different. There's more than one reason that knowledge is important in comprehension, but let me describe briefly, the one that I think is most essential. It's inherent in communication, whether it's spoken communication or written communication, that we omit a great deal [00:05:00] of the information that's actually needed to understand our message. We don't say everything we mean. Writers don't write everything they mean. 

[00:05:10] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:05:11] Daniel Willingham: And so the example I use in the Reading Mind is the following two sentences: Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up to get a rag.

[00:05:20] Daniel Willingham: So the thing that you'll note about that, and I'm sure all listeners immediately perceive there's a causal connection between those two sentences. And indeed, almost certainly the writer would not hope that you understand just those two acts, but that Dan jumped up to get a rag because Trisha spilled her coffee.

[00:05:39] Daniel Willingham: Now, that's nowhere in the two sentences. There's no hint that you're supposed to draw a causal connection, but nevertheless, you do. And in order to understand how those sentences are linked, you need to have information in memory. You need to know that spilled coffee makes a mess. You need to know that people generally don't [00:06:00] like a mess on the floor, and you need to know that rags can clean a mess.

[00:06:04] Daniel Willingham: So your mind is very good at bringing up from memory the necessary facts, the facts that will help you given the context, to connect these sentences which the writer has not explicitly connected for you. So the obvious question is, well, what happens if you don't, you know, if you don't have that information in memory? Can you sort of reason it out?

[00:06:31] Daniel Willingham: Well, sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. I'll also mention that it's not easy work to do that. It's difficult, it's time-consuming, people generally don't like doing it. And so there hasn't been research specifically on making those types of connections, but there's lots of research on what happens when people encounter unknown vocabulary words.

[00:06:57] Susan Lambert: Okay. 

[00:06:57] Daniel Willingham: The way it's usually pitched is. [00:07:00] What percentage of words in a text need to be familiar for reading to be comfortable? 

[00:07:06] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:07:06] Daniel Willingham: And the figure is usually like 97 or 98% of the words need to be familiar. And the reason is , just like with the link that I described, vocabulary, you can sometimes figure it out from the context, but it's not very fun.

[00:07:21] Daniel Willingham: It's hard work and, you know, you're impatient and you only wanna do so much of that. And so if you don't have the right background knowledge, you might be able to puzzle out some of it, but you're much more likely to just quit reading. 

[00:07:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes sense. And it's almost like, as you're going along and you encounter that vocabulary word, you kind of come to a screeching stop sometimes, and sort of lose all sense of the mental model that you've been creating all along. 

[00:07:44] Daniel Willingham: Sometimes you come to a screeching stop and sometimes you just kind of bleep right over it, and hope that wasn't very important, right? Which is what I candidly, what I frequently do. But Walter Kintsch, a wonderful reading researcher, had a great metaphor for this, I think he said, " When you [00:08:00] have all the right knowledge, reading is like seeing," in that all of the work is happening in the background and you're just appreciating the view. 

[00:08:10] Susan Lambert: Wow. 

[00:08:11] Daniel Willingham: And so in the same way, when you're reading, you're not like having to do the work of figuring out, "Well, what do they mean? How did that link to this?" You're enjoying the story. 

[00:08:20] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:08:20] Daniel Willingham: Or whatever information it is that you're getting. So yeah, that's sort of reading at its ideal. So that's knowledge and the role of knowledge Now, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Sue. 

[00:08:30] Susan Lambert: Can I ask a clarifying question with that? That sort of seems like what I would call this world knowledge. You kinda understand that like, you know it's raining and so the author doesn't tell you that. Does that apply equally to things we would call more academic or disciplinary knowledge? 

[00:08:47] Daniel Willingham: Oh yeah, absolutely. So the information that is going to be omitted, is basically whatever the author thinks the audience knows. 

[00:08:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:08:58] Daniel Willingham: We do the same thing when we're speaking. [00:09:00] I speak differently to you than I would to, you know, someone who's five years old. 

[00:09:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:09:06] Daniel Willingham: Right? When I'm talking to a 5-year-old, I'm explaining many things that I would never think of explaining to an adult.

[00:09:12] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:09:13] Daniel Willingham: And likewise, I'm talking to you about reading very differently than I would talk about reading to, you know, Walter Kintsch, or another reading researcher, right? Where if they said, "What do you think is going on with reading comprehension strategies?" I'm gonna assume they know all the literature and so they're asking me to not tell them what the literature says, they know that, they want me to go out on a limb and make some guesses or something. Anyway, you get the idea. So when you ask, is knowledge important in reading academic prose? It definitely is. It's just gonna be different knowledge, 'cause when it's academic prose, the author has assumed you know, a whole lot more.

[00:09:49] Susan Lambert: Right. Yep. Makes sense. Great. I interrupted you, so you were gonna say something next. 

[00:09:54] Daniel Willingham: I wonder what it was. It was probably really good. I know what it was. I know. So you initially way back when... [00:10:00] you didn't know what you were getting into when you closed?

[00:10:01] Susan Lambert: No, I didn't.

[00:10:02] Daniel Willingham: So you asked about knowledge and you asked about comprehension strategies. So comprehension strategies is... there's a ton of research on reading comprehension strategies. And it started in the '90s, I suppose, or possibly even the '80s. The National Reading Panel wrote about comprehension strategy instruction and said, "This is something that we have really good evidence is very effective in boosting comprehension."

[00:10:27] Daniel Willingham: So these are comprehension strategies you tell children, and usually mid-elementary, you tell them... you should be posing and answering questions as you're reading a text. You should try and summarize it. You should create a visual mental imagery, right? So things that can be metacognitive strategies that can be applied to any text in the hopes that you're going to understand it better.

[00:10:52] Daniel Willingham: So the first thing to notice is, wow, I just spent five minutes talking about how important knowledge is. This is sort of sweeping knowledge off the [00:11:00] table and saying like, no, what you need is a good set of strategies and then you're gonna understand it. And I've also just said, yeah, these strategies, there's excellent evidence that they work.

[00:11:10] Daniel Willingham: So, how do we square that if comprehension depends on knowledge and strategies, you don't need knowledge to use them, how come strategies work? So this is something I started writing about in 2006 or something like that, as I think the first time I wrote about it. If you look more closely at these studies, what you find is, and really you need to look at meta-analyses, so meta-analysis is a statistical technique where you can compare different studies. And when there's a big literature, it's very, very useful because you can examine features of the studies that the experimenters didn't necessarily think that they were really interested in looking at. 

[00:11:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:51] Daniel Willingham: So one of the features that has been interesting in meta-analysis is how much time do students spend [00:12:00] practicing these strategies and do you get a bigger benefit with more practice? Now normally you expect more practice is gonna make you better at it, and that's really true if what's being practiced is a skill. And it's very tempting and natural to think of comprehension strategy instruction as working the way a skill works. It feels just like a baseball coach. 

[00:12:27] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:12:28] Daniel Willingham: It's like, a kid doesn't swing the bat the right way. The coach says, "Look, this is the way people who are really good at batting swing the bat. Now here, let me help you and I'm gonna guide you, and then you're gonna practice it a whole lot." And so you expect that initially you're doing it kind of the wrong way, you're introduced to the right way, you practice it, and that becomes automatic.

[00:12:49] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:12:49] Daniel Willingham: And so that's the way you might think of comprehension strategy instruction. Kids are practicing a better way of comprehending. What's inconsistent with that [00:13:00] view though, is if you look at the actual data, the amount of practice that you get in a classroom with comprehension strategy instruction is unrelated to the benefit.

[00:13:11] Daniel Willingham: What you see across all of these different studies is a really big benefit to comprehension strategy instruction that you get almost immediately, like after, the shortest amount of time that kids have practiced it, which is usually like 10 lessons or something like — relatively brief lessons.

[00:13:30] Daniel Willingham: But then if you go on and practice it, say 40 more lessons, there's no improvement. There's no increase to the benefit. So that is consistent with a different view of what comprehension strategy instruction actually does for children, which is that the actual process of comprehension is not really getting any better, and instead something else that can be learned very quickly is improving.

[00:13:59] Daniel Willingham: [00:14:00] One candidate for that is children are coming to the realization of what it means to understand a text, because we have other data showing us that many children's impression of what it means to read something is, "I say all the words aloud." 

[00:14:18] Susan Lambert: Ah. 

[00:14:18] Daniel Willingham: Right? And then I'm done. And if there's a word that I don't know the word, or if the grammar is weird and I can't figure out the syntax, then yeah, then I'm not understanding.

[00:14:29] Daniel Willingham: But as long as I'm understanding each individual sentence. I'm good. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. And what they're not doing is coordinating meaning across sentences and paragraphs. And so comprehension strategy instruction sort of tells kids, that's one of the things you're supposed to be doing.

[00:14:47] Daniel Willingham: And also possibly tell them, " and if you're not getting it, like go back and try again." Other sort of straightforward, I used the word tricks one time, which I realize is the wrong word 'cause it sounds pejorative. It's not a [00:15:00] bad thing at all. It's a wonderful thing because you do get this big boost.

[00:15:04] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:15:04] Daniel Willingham: But it's strategies that can be learned very quickly and applied very quickly, but there's not a reason to continue practicing them. Now if you can stand it, there's one more wrinkle in this that I wanna bring out. 

[00:15:18] Susan Lambert: Oh, please, please, lets wrinkle away. 

[00:15:21] Daniel Willingham: It wasn't really until maybe four or five years ago that I realized that story... that story which I've been telling again since the mid-aughts or something. And since that time there have been many more of these meta-analyses. When I first wrote, I think there were about four of them. There are now something like 14, and they include studies with typically developing readers, studies with children who've been identified as having a specific reading disability and so on. And it's the same story everywhere. More practice doesn't yield any benefit. 

[00:15:52] Susan Lambert: Okay. 

[00:15:52] Daniel Willingham: But all of these studies are using a pretty simple definition of comprehension. [00:16:00] They're all looking at comprehension of the sort that you usually see on a comprehension test in say, mid-elementary through middle school, which is pretty focused on where, when, why, you know basic comprehend... You kind of know what happened?

[00:16:17] Susan Lambert: Yep, yep. 

[00:16:17] Daniel Willingham: What it's not looking at is what we would think of as sort of more specialized and more advanced types of comprehension that are gonna be taught in high school. So when children are in a history class in high school and they're learning, this is how historians read documents.

[00:16:36] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:16:37] Daniel Willingham: Or when you're learning, this is the way scientists write documents and how they read documents and so on. So discipline-specific reading comprehension. Everything I just said may or may not apply to that. My suspicion is it doesn't because this is a different type of reading, and so I think those strategies probably would [00:17:00] benefit from more practice. But as far as I know, that's not known.

[00:17:04] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So interesting. So you're not saying you shouldn't do anything with comprehension strategies. You're saying we should do something with comprehension strategies and once kids get them, then they can apply them to help them sort of extract the knowledge they need to extract from the text that they're reading. 

[00:17:24] Daniel Willingham: They should be. So this is another little wrinkle. Basically, yes. So what I've said in various places, which I think might be right is, I would think about doing sort of like 10 lessons in third grade or something, and then again in fourth grade. Because if the child's not a fluent decoder, they're not really ready for deploying comprehension strategies. All of their attention is focused on decoding, right?

[00:17:51] Daniel Willingham: You have to have some working memory space free to be able to keep these in mind while you're decoding. So yes, that's been my general take. The [00:18:00] second wrinkle, the second thing that you said is then children will be able to use those strategies. I think we are, with the data we have in hand, we're less confident that that's necessarily true.

[00:18:12] Daniel Willingham: In other words, are children now using those strategies in the wild, so to speak, when they're not part of an experiment, they're not in class. I would love to see data that tests whether or not kids who've had that instruction, then as a habit, use it going forward. But we just don't know. And as you can tell from the fact that I raised this issue, I'm a little suspicious that not all of them do.

[00:18:38] Susan Lambert: Okay. Thanks for taking that little bit of a bird walk. When we were on our pre-call, you mentioned a couple of things. One of them is, knowledge applies in ways that are very difficult to appreciate. Can you talk about that a little bit or explain more? 

[00:18:55] Daniel Willingham: Sure. So I think a great example is the very brief example I gave [00:19:00] before, Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up to get a rag. This is the kind of thing people do not notice. "Oh, I have knowledge about how the world works. I have knowledge about coffee and about spills and so on, that apply there. And I would not have really fully understood the author's intent if I didn't have that knowledge and bring it to bear.

[00:19:23] Daniel Willingham: Your mind is so good at this that it's just like vision. It's like most people have absolutely no idea about how they see. And most people, it doesn't occur to you to stop and wonder about it right? And that's true of all the things that we are so good at. It's true of motor control, as well.

[00:19:41] Daniel Willingham: One of the miracles of reaching is that there's an infinite number of ways you can make a simple movement like reaching for a coffee cup. And you know, researchers have been working for around a hundred years trying to figure out how you do it, how you solve that problem. And robotics researchers [00:20:00] are very interested in the same thing, but it's not the kind of thing anybody wonders about.

[00:20:04] Daniel Willingham: And so the role of knowledge in language is the same thing. I mean, language for us, spoken language for us is a lot like vision. It is something we are born to do. 

[00:20:15] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:20:16] Daniel Willingham: We are not born to read. 

[00:20:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:20:18] Daniel Willingham: But reading comprehension piggybacks on oral language comprehension. So the basic process of comprehension of the sort: Tricia spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up to get a rag— and I get the causal connection between those — we're just so darn good at it that we don't notice. I'll highlight one other aspect of this one is that I said like, you know, stuff about coffee and that information jumps out of long-term memory and into working memory to help you understand.

[00:20:44] Daniel Willingham: Another thing that doesn't happen is, a lot of stuff you know about spilled coffee doesn't come into working memory. And that's very important too because working memory could be flooded with information. So you know the example, I can't remember whether I used this in the [00:21:00] book or not, but suppose the second sentence changed and instead of Trisha spilled her coffee, dan jumped up to get a rag, it were Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up, howling in pain.

[00:21:09] Susan Lambert: Oh. There you go. Yeah. 

[00:21:10] Daniel Willingham: Or, Trisha spilled her coffee. Dan jumped up to get her more. So, you know, all kinds of stuff about spilled coffee. And again, your brain is really good at only bringing out the information from long-term memory that is relevant for the context. All of that's happening outside of awareness.

[00:21:30] Daniel Willingham: And so when I say, it's very hard to appreciate how important language is. These are some examples and that's why it's so hard. 

[00:21:38] Susan Lambert: I have two things to respond. I hope I can remember the two things. So that's why I'm saying two things. The first thing is, the more you know about coffee and the more you know about the dimensions of coffee and all the related stuff that goes with coffee, the better you will be at instantly making those connections. Is that [00:22:00] true? 

[00:22:01] Daniel Willingham: Certainly, you can make more connections. I'm not sure it's true, and it's probably not, that , you're gonna be faster, right? So, you know, someone who is a coffee importer or something and you know, drinks coffee, owns coffee shops, and thinks about coffee all day. I think they're probably no faster than you or I would be in unraveling the Tricia spilled her coffee. 

[00:22:24] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I guess my point there is that vocabulary knowledge or knowledge about a thing isn't either-or, right? You have depth of understanding.

[00:22:36] Daniel Willingham: Absolutely. So, you know, the coffee expert wouldn't understand, comprehend more quickly than you or I would when it's information that you and I share. But the coffee expert can understand all kinds of communication about coffee that you and I cannot understand. 

[00:22:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yep.

[00:22:52] Susan Lambert: That makes sense. Okay, now the second thing. Oh, I remembered. I'm so proud of myself. The second thing is, what you're talking about there is an [00:23:00] inference, right? You're also making an inference and I don't know, it was only a few months ago that I had this big aha that inferences can be automatic. And that is related to the knowledge you have, is that correct?

[00:23:14] Daniel Willingham: Yeah, absolutely. And using the word inference is of course accurate, but it can lead a lot of people down the wrong path because we usually think of an inference as, you know, coming from either inductive or deductive logic and it's something that we really need to think about consciously, contemplating it, it's effortful and so on.

[00:23:37] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:38] Daniel Willingham: And that's not the case here. Again, when reading is really humming, when it's really working well, it's like visual perception. You're just enjoying the view and you're oblivious to all of the cognitive machinery in the background that's letting you see. 

[00:23:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, that was a fun conversation about coffee because I'm a coffee drinker, and so thank you for using an example that I have [00:24:00] lots of background knowledge about.

[00:24:01] Daniel Willingham: Perfect.

[00:24:01] Susan Lambert: All right, so in the pre-call you mentioned something else. This knowledge message. Knowledge is really, really important, right? We need to have it, we need to help kids develop it, but you said we have to be careful about not taking the message too far. What do you mean by that? 

[00:24:18] Daniel Willingham: I think it's just the same as phonics.

[00:24:21] Daniel Willingham: You know, it's absolutely right that phonics needs to have a prominent place in reading programs teaching children to read. There are two ways that it could go too far. One is, that could be the only thing that's featured in a reading program. Right? And I've been hearing stories about some districts that are responding to mandates, state mandates, and also some in part, responding to sort of the general Science of Reading vibe that they're getting, and they're having kids do more phonics than is recommended. I forgot, the National Reading Panel said something like 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day or something like that [00:25:00] in a 90-minute, or even in some cases, 120-minute reading block. So there's lots of other things that children should be doing. There should be read alouds, there should be opportunities to speak, there should be opportunities to write, and so on.

[00:25:12] Daniel Willingham: So the same thing is true of knowledge curriculum. Going too far would mean sort of expecting that a knowledge-rich curriculum is going to solve all problems and that's what a reading program is. No, a reading program is multifaceted and needs to have lots of components. The other thing that I worry about with knowledge curriculum is that knowledge builds slowly.

[00:25:37] Daniel Willingham: And so, you know, if you adopt a knowledge-rich curriculum, don't expect that at the end of the year, you're gonna see very much have happened. If very much is, you know, if your outcome measure is performance on state tests or something like that. Yeah. Knowledge accrues slowly and it's gonna take a while. You need to be patient. 

[00:25:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And I [00:26:00] think that sort of echoes the sentiment that, you know, we wanna measure what we're delivering in the classroom, we wanna measure to see if kids are having growth on that. And when you're talking about the word recognition side, those measures are much more straightforward, right? Kids like sort of develop in a progression on that. But when we're talking about language comprehension, language is a big thing, vocabulary is a big thing to gain, and not only is it slowly developing, it's much harder to measure that. Isn't that true? That's hard for kids to communicate the things that they actually know.

[00:26:36] Daniel Willingham: It can be. Again, it sort of depends on what outcomes you're looking for. I mean, in one sense, if there's a unit on whales, you sort of expect children should be better at answering questions about whales than if they hadn't taken that unit right? And that sort of straightforward.

[00:26:51] Daniel Willingham: But when people think about, we want children to be good readers, it seems natural and almost a throwaway [00:27:00] to them that, well, of course they're gonna be good at reading more and learning, you know, reasoning about what they learned about that year. 

[00:27:08] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:27:08] Daniel Willingham: We want more than that. And, you know, my response is always, "Okay, slow down a second and just listen to what you just said." Right? It's like, you and I agree. Of course they're going to be better at reading and understanding and reasoning about topics that they know something about.

[00:27:24] Daniel Willingham: So if your goal is that we want children to be, you know, good general readers, which is not a given, that that's your goal, but it's a worthy goal. And in my experience, that's what parents expect, the kind of reader who, when they graduate high school, they can pick up a serious newspaper and read and understand most of what's in it. If that's your goal, then they need to know at least a little something about a whole lot of topics.

[00:27:50] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:27:50] Daniel Willingham: And basically they need to know whatever it is the writers and editors of that newspaper expect their readers already [00:28:00] know and therefore don't need to be explained. 

[00:28:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And this makes me think about Bloom's taxonomy. So I'm gonna give you a little bit of a story because when I was in the classroom, right, the push was — and I think I hear this still today — is, we want kids to be thinking critically. And so you need to move up on Bloom's taxonomy as fast as you can. Knowledge and facts are not that important. We wanna get kids to be critical thinkers and analyzers. Well, you can't actually get up that far if you don't know the things, right?

[00:28:32] Daniel Willingham: Yeah. So I mean, it's a conundrum. It's a difficult problem because, you know, I'm sympathetic to this impulse. I wouldn't send my child to a school where they say, "Look, we have to stockpile a lot of knowledge and they're not gonna think critically for a few years," or whatever it is, right? First they gotta know a lot of stuff, so there has to be a mix. 

[00:28:54] Susan Lambert: Sure. 

[00:28:54] Daniel Willingham: But you're absolutely right. Getting them to think critically about a topic they don't know anything about [00:29:00] isn't gonna work. I think the reason someone might say, "Get 'em up higher on Bloom's taxonomy right away," is because they feel like you can think critically without knowing a whole lot.

[00:29:13] Daniel Willingham: And thinking critically is a content-free skill, and if you become a good problem-solver, you're good at solving any kind of problem that comes along. So let's solve problems. And the onset of easily accessible information on the Internet makes that sensibility or that impression all the more seductive, 'cause you think, look, information is always easy to get. You just, you know, you go on Google and you can get information. It's the skill needs to be in their head though. So let's practice the skill. But that's a misunderstanding of how thinking happens. 

[00:29:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah. All right, so obviously you can't teach everything. You said readers need to have lots of broad knowledge. You can't teach everything. So which [00:30:00] knowledge is most important? 

[00:30:01] Daniel Willingham: Yeah. So there are two aspects to this that I want to highlight. One is, if your main goal is that children are, really sound general readers, then, in terms of knowledge, you wanna go a million miles wide, but you're fine being just a couple of inches deep, right?

[00:30:21] Daniel Willingham: So like, if your goal is, I want my child to be able to read, you know, the Wall Street Journal, what do you need to know about Picasso? The answer is not much. You need to know that Picasso was a famous painter and maybe you need to know that he's associated with cubism or roughly when Picasso lived.

[00:30:39] Daniel Willingham: But you don't need to know anything else, right? But you just need to know a million factoids like that. That's one goal for schooling. You can have others like, you know, if you want your child to eventually be a doctor, you also want them to have a really sound understanding of biology. 

[00:30:57] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:57] Daniel Willingham: And one of the absolute [00:31:00] cornerstones of biology is theory of evolution. And one of the things we know is that most students have a pretty shallow understanding of theory of evolution. 

[00:31:08] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:31:08] Daniel Willingham: So those are not necessarily completely conflicting knowledge goals, but it's not obvious they're compatible either, because if you wanna understand something deeply, you need to revisit that, you need to really get into it, right? And everything that you learn in biology is probably gonna somehow relate to the theory of evolution. That's not the same thing as a million miles wide and a couple of inches deep. So the first thing you need to, when you're asking yourself what knowledge, you need to ask yourself, "Well, what are your goals here?"

[00:31:37] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

[00:31:39] Daniel Willingham: In the same way, the second part to this question is, well, what type of content? And when you bring up knowledge-rich curriculum, people's minds usually go to the most controversial aspects of a curriculum, like, so which authors are they gonna read in English class or something. And they're sort of there with a pencil and paper waiting for you to make a [00:32:00] mistake, you know, because they've got their favorite authors and how dare you omit this person, whatever. There's gonna be controversy, right? There's gonna be difficult choices. Not everybody's favorite is gonna end up there.

[00:32:11] Daniel Willingham: What's clear to me is that we don't want what we have in the case of most state standards, which is, we've got a committee, they do horse trading, "I've got my favorite, you've got your favorite. The easiest compromise is for me to say, look, I'll vote for your favorite to get in there if you'll vote for my favorite to get in there."

[00:32:29] Daniel Willingham: And this is one of the ways committees tend to lead to these very swollen standards. And most teachers in most states that, when I talk with people about this, they say like, "Yeah, we can't possibly teach all of the standards." Right? So that's no way of doing it. People also get very antsy when you start talking about having a real curriculum, because a real set curriculum means, "I might not get to teach everything I've been used to teaching and I've got this fantastic unit for this topic, [00:33:00] and now you're telling me it's not gonna be...," you know, in that sense, there are gonna be sacrifices.

[00:33:04] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:33:04] Daniel Willingham: But I think the current situation is not working for us. I mean, what it really ends up meaning is that the curriculum is just haphazard. So yes, there are gonna be tough choices, but if you just avoid those choices, then you just end up with a curriculum that's random. And in other words, failing to make a choice is not like you're not choosing. You're just leaving things to chance. 

[00:33:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. So this whole discussion came about because recently on your social media, you highlighted this book called, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The knowledge Revival. And, what do you find helpful about this book? Why did you decide that you were gonna highlight this in your social media?

[00:33:47] Daniel Willingham: I think because since a large group of researchers, some from the states most from Europe, and, you know, very broad knowledge and people who — we've got former [00:34:00] national leaders of education and we've got experts in formative assessment and experts in cognitive psychology and so on — so a number of different perspectives. That's one thing I found very helpful about the book, but it's sort of a roundup of the evidence that a knowledge base, a knowledge-rich curriculum— and again, I keep saying — I wanna emphasize too, it's important that it be sequenced too. It's not just that it's full of stuff, it's actually carefully sequenced. That really matters as well. So this is sort of a roundup of all the evidence that we have, that this is going to help children think, help children read, and help children excel.

[00:34:41] Daniel Willingham: And the other thing that's amazing about it is that it's freely downloadable. These authors decided, and I don't know the details of this, but I've heard a couple of them refer to it in different contexts. This costs them money, this project. They're not far from making money, you know, and sort of plugging their books so they [00:35:00] can make money. They paid, and my guess is quite handsomely, the publisher to make it freely downloadable because they felt this was a very important message that needed to get out to the public.

[00:35:12] Daniel Willingham: So yeah, that's why I support the project. I think it's a terrific thing that they did. 

[00:35:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And for our listeners, we're going to link you in the show notes to how you can download this freely. I went to the place of who I am as a book collector and actually purchased the hard copy of it so that I could read it in hard copy.

[00:35:33] Susan Lambert: What I love about this is they were careful with their references. So for people that really wanna dig a little bit deeper, go a little bit deeper with just what you were saying, the reference section related to each one of these chapters is, very, very helpful. And I think it's got some Dan Willingham work in there too when we're talking about representations of memories.

[00:35:53] Susan Lambert: So a little bit of Dan Willingham in there. That's pretty cool.

[00:35:56] Daniel Willingham: Yeah, well, nevertheless, I recommend it. 

[00:35:59] Susan Lambert: [00:36:00] Oh man. This has been a really great conversation. I know we've talked about knowledge before, but it's always great to hear you talk about it again, hear you talk about it a little bit differently. I'm wondering if you have any final thoughts or advice for educators as they're trying to navigate this whole knowledge conversation.

[00:36:19] Daniel Willingham: I mean, I think my advice would really just be a summation of what we've said before. I think this, over the course of this conversation, I think this is really important. I think it's not the silver bullet. It's not something that if we're only doing this, like all of our problems would be solved.

[00:36:34] Daniel Willingham: But I think it's an important ingredient in a successful literacy program. So for listeners who have not looked into this, I encourage you to look into it and, you know, either have a look at this book, continue to listen to podcasts that are covering this, the Knowledge Matters campaign has lots of resources on their website.

[00:36:59] Daniel Willingham: [00:37:00] You could have a look there, and talk with other teachers about it. When I talk with teachers about it, it rings true and it resonates that like, yeah, when children don't know anything about a topic, it's very difficult for them to do any of the things we really want them to do— what our real goals are, which is to analyze and critique and think deeply about it. If they don't know anything about the topic, they just, they can't get any purchase on it. 

[00:37:25] Susan Lambert: Dr. Dan Willingham, thank you again for joining us. We really, really appreciate your time and always appreciate your expertise. So thank you very much. 

[00:37:33] Daniel Willingham: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[00:37:39] Susan Lambert: That was Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He's also the author of multiple books, including, The Reading Mind, A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, and Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is hard and How You Can Make it Easy. Please check out the [00:38:00] show notes for a link to the Rich Open Access resource we discussed, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The knowledge revival. And speaking of free resources, I hope you listen to our first-ever Science of Reading Essentials episode, which was all about writing. That's available right in our feed, wherever you get your podcasts. Also check out our brand new listening guide for that episode available on our professional learning page, amplify.com/soressentials. Next time on the podcast, we're revisiting one of our all-time favorite episodes. Then I'm thrilled to announce we'll be back with our second ever edition of Science of Reading Essentials. This time we'll be distilling the essential information and teaching strategies on comprehension. 

[00:38:56] Speaker (2): We have to think a little bit more deeply in general [00:39:00] about comprehension and start developing some models that will allow us to do that.

[00:39:05] Speaker: Comprehension is an outcome and it's based on being able to read words accurately, know what they mean, have adequate background knowledge, and also, you know, being able to make inferences and sort of, if you will, not check yourself when you go to text. 

[00:39:23] Susan Lambert: That's all coming up on Science of Reading the podcast, brought to you by Amplify.

[00:39:28] Susan Lambert: I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.