The education i was on the board of the Charter School became fascinated by what was going on partly because i think education is so important i think it is our best hope for addressing and equity inside it society and breaking that society a multi generational poverty. There was a mystery that i wanted to solve essentially which was what happen when kids got to high School Everything seemed to fall apart scores seem to be improving at the elementary level and i would go into classrooms and the kids either looked engaged but when you went into High School Classrooms it was a different picture and the scores were not improving. Nobody seems to understand why although there has been a lot of attention on the high school problem. When i stumbled upon really, i cant say i solve this mystery myself but i stumbled upon the fact that the real problems in the problems of the parents in high school. Its different than the Elementary School. Once i realized that and i realize that despite all of the research i had done in the panel discussions, i had never heard this mentioned as a problem. Somebody had to try to get that issue into the public conversation about education because it really gets to the root of the problems we are talking about and were not going to be able to fix up unless we address the problem. Sumac can you describe the people who are not usually in classrooms. What is the content rich curriculum look like. Natalie wexler first of all it focuses on content rather than comprehension reading comprehension skills. This is really almost a universal approach and concentrates on elementary and a lot of time in reading. About 20 years ago now. The reading that kids are doing is not designed to build their knowledge about anything in particular. The idea is to get them to master skills like finding a main idea for making an entrance. And how you will be able to apply that in a textbook put in front of you. The problem is its cognitive way of learning process have known for decades that the most important factor in what you can understand what youre reading is not generally applicable skills like finding the main idea, is how much background you have of the topic. So really we want to be comprehension, we should be doing the opposite of what weve been doing. We should be increasing the amount of time they are spending on social studies and science and things they expand our knowledge of the world rather than shunting those to the site. Some cases eliminating them as many hours every day on these other skills. There are really different ways of gaining kids knowledge and different kinds of curriculum that can do that. The thing we all have in common is they focus on topics rather than on skills. They have teachers reading aloud to children while those children are learning to read, because kids can take in so much more information through listening to and through their own writing, really through middle school on average. The concepts in the vocabulary and syntax in written language are more complex and that in spoken language. They need to be exposed to that so that that when they are able to read individually, they will understand what they are reading. Tell me a little bit more how a teachers job is different when they are teaching a content rich curriculum versus when they are teaching skills. Natalie wexler it could look more challenging to teachers because the teaching skills is all you really need to do is a mini lesson. Ten or 15 minutes modeling the skill. Then you read a book that you choose not for its content, not for what its about before how well it might lend itself to demonstrate and modeling. The skill of say comparing and contrasting or determining the authors purpose or whatever. You just have to read that book and say, this phrase is coming up a lot so i think maybe thats the main idea or im thinking that this character is planning to do x. Then you just, provide the kids with books that are determined to be at their own individual reading level and they theoretically go off and practice that skill. It doesnt require a lot of content knowledge on the teachers part or really a lot of effort involved, it is hard work to building kids knowledge but any contents of this classroom that is using content focus knowledge curriculum, the teacher is going to focus on whatever topic the curriculum covers and i have to say at that in this country a lot of Elementary Teachers are expected to basically design their own curriculum. That is a tremendous burn into place on teachers who are already juggling so many things. Their attention should be focused on how best to deliver the content of a curriculum not to come up with that content from scratch. Theyre not trying to do that, in the content focus classroom, ideally, the teacher would be provided with curriculum organized by topic so there are books or for reading, maybe spend a couple of weeks or more on the topic than in a series of books youre reading organizer on that topic. You read aloud to kids, sometimes on their own depending on their ability. I think from having been in both kinds of classrooms for both teachers and students find the experience of the content focused classroom much more engaging and much more satisfying. It gives chance. It gives kids a chance to really explore things they are interested in. This is when you discover that your kid is really into birds or dinosaurs or whatever they discover things that they didnt know they were interested in. Natalie wexler i think there is a prevailing thought that we should let kids choose what they want to study. Its really kind of cultivated in teacher training its good to give kids a lot of choice and let them pursue their own interest. Especially for kids coming into the School Without a lot of knowledge of the world come. They dont know yet the date what they are interested in. They get fascinated by greek mythology and they work this at home. Is not necessarily something and they encounter in their daily lives but they love it because his stories and theyre really interested in them. Its so interested. I completely buy it should be exposed to content rich curriculum. That was my experience, in the fourth grade i fell in love with greek mythology and we were not talking about that in my home. But im curious about how you would grapple with the question of who determines what content should be taught. Kaya henderson i think there are a lot of challenges around understanding who decides what kids should learn. So i want to pick your brain a little bit on that. Who gets to decide the curriculum. Natalie wexler that is a question that comes up a lot. Its a very good question. I would say several things, one is we already make this decision is when it comes to the high school curriculum. Kids are somehow we manage to decide what kids should learn. The problem is if we wait until high school to implement those decisions, many kids dont have the background knowledge when they get to House High School to understand what we want them to learn there. If we can make those decisions for high school kids, why cant we make them for Elementary School kids. Then we can ensure that they are actually able to learn what we want them to in high school. There are different ways to build knowledge. There are different tests of knowledge. Different groups might want kids to learn Different Things. I dont think we have to make value judgments about one set of knowledge being better than another. I do think we need to look at what are we blunting the kids to know so that they can understand the newspaper or understand the news. Make informed decisions as voters and to sit decisionmakers. There may be cultural references and Historical Information that we really need them to know about American History and other countries. Without the knowledge, theres a serious disadvantage in high school and college and beyond. Kaya henderson i think one of the challenges is that i think parents have some ideas about what they want their children to be taught. Especially when it comes to at least four young people of color, representation and seeing themselves in history. A lot of times content rich curriculum that we see doesnt include marginalized groups. Their story is kind of western civilization. I wonder, is there a role for parents and for folks who are worried about their kids seeing themselves in the curriculum. What role do they have to play. Natalie wexler i think that parents do have a role to play. I also think the parents want their children to be successful in society. So i think that if they understand that there are or a certain body of knowledge that kids are going to need to acquire and to understand in the newspapers in the world around them, they will probably want both, a mirror and a window. The phrase the winter know in the mirror. You want information to both reflect your own life. All groups of students. A window into other cultures and other the wider world that your mate your people may not look exactly like you but you want to know whats going on with them. I think that the good news about what i am talking about is if we dont spend the time that precious time we are currently spending on them. We have a lot of time left in the school day to provide move that mirror in that window. Kaya henderson i think youre absolutely right. I think we have to be able to walk in and to come at the same time. And we can. But i am convinced that it takes a larger group of people to decide what kids are learning that have previously been case. It was fascinating to work with apparent cabinet when i was at the public schools. They had very clear ideas about what they wanted their young people to learn. They wanted both windows and mirrors i think far too often we discount the abilities that parents have to partner with us on this work. My hope is that as districts inc. About moving in this direction as schools and School Leaders think that this that they actually see parents as real partners. There are huge unexploited potential. Natalie wexler parents can have more influence on what goes on in school. Im talking about urging schools or encouraging them to move away from the skilled focus approach to some kind of knowledge building and then we can talk about which knowledge building approach. I see many parents and is included when my children were younger, they just trust schools. They trust teachers to know what to do, to prepare kids academically and so i didnt look too closely at what my own children were learning when they were in Elementary School. He seemed happy and thriving when i look back now, they did have great Elementary School experiences but i realize that one thing they were getting was history. That is because of a widespread view that history is a developmentally inappropriate topic for Young Children which there is no evidence to that. It can be presented very engagingly as stories and kids love that. I also have a background as a historian and my kids got asked plenty of exposure to history at home. I didnt even question that they werent getting it at school. I didnt really notice it. I think a lot of parents are in the position where they dont really know what is going on in the classroom. I think of more parents really is and was going on the vestment geordie of our elementary classrooms and how little that corresponds to what scientists have figured out about how kids actually learn, that they would be up in arms. Kaya henderson you took a lot about reading and writing. In the argue that our content rich curriculum would make a significant difference in both subjects. Our National Math scores are not so much better. So i wonder if you diagnose the challenge with math differently and propose different solutions. Natalie wexler im not an expert on whats going on in math. I feel that is quite different from literacy, i would say a couple of things. I have been told that the math test dont always correspond to what is being taught in particular the levels. That may be one problem. Another problem that ive seen for myself is that literacy can interfere with kids ability to understand math word problems and tests. That kids will do much better when a math problem is read aloud to them than they have to read it to themselves. One classroom did skill focused, and other doing a knowledge building approach in both of these classrooms were from kids from low income. I was hoping to do a literacy blessing and the kids were doing math. I thought well, i drove here, im going to do this. I will stick around and see what i can learn. Im really glad you did because as i wandered the room, where kids were independently trying to work on math problems, i found that there literacy issues there were not just reading but just vocabulary issues were interfering with their ability to do these math problems. One child was or didnt understand the word combine and he was just staring at a problem because he was trying to combine even three. Hearing it, he did not understand it. Another child, was having real trouble with a number line just what number comes before 84. In series and number between 80 and 90. I eventually realized he didnt understand the word before. These literacy problems effect things beyond literacy strictly speaking. Kaya henderson how did we get here. [laughter]. Natalie wexler that is the reason i wrote them up. I do have background as a historian. I wanted to figure out where this all came from. Frankly if somebody outside the education world, this way of teaching is not intuitive, it doesnt make sense on a commonsense level that you read a book and you dont talk about what the book is about. You talk about with the author was doing or what a sequence of events or in an informational text or whatever. I kind of had to piece this together. I would say the deep roots maybe go back 100 years to the beginnings of whats known as the progressive education movement. Now called constructive education but essentially in one of the central tenets of that movement is it is better for children to discover or construct their own knowledge for themselves. Then to have things told to them or explained to them by a teacher. There is some truth to that. We definitely have to be participate and constructing on a knowledge that theres a difference between that and saying children should discover facts for themselves. About history and science especially if theyre coming into School Without a lot of knowledge of the world. To expected to discover things for themselves is a tremendously inefficient process. But its the way it feeds into the skill focused approach illiteracy instruction that i think teachers feel they are giving their and they are providing children with the tools and skills that will enable them down the road to acquire that construct their own knowledge. Theyre not dumping information on them in a way thats not really going to be observed. I think that mindset sort of made Fertile Ground for the skill focused approach to comprehension to take hold. There have been a number of our recent developments that really intensify that. That beginning with event of highstakes testing. Those tests, which have become the yardstick by which we measure progress, we look at them and seem to be measuring comprehension skills. They are asking kids to read this passage and find an idea as the teachers naturally and administrators they think thats whats being tested are those skills that we need to double down on drilling kids on the skills. We are looking at the fact that one reason kids often score low on the senses because they dont have the background knowledge to understand the reading passages in the first place. Is that they cant make an inference, they make inferences and the like all of the time. Toddlers will make an inference. So thats not the problem as the lack the background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the passage. That has been a big problem th that. Kaya henderson you spent a lot of time talking about teachers. Non colleges colleges of education how teachers are trained. You just said teachers feel like you have to teach the tool that, right, but theres a fact that what are the teachers learning. They were particularly absent from your book. I want understand what role you think that teacher programs in colleges play. Natalie wexler i do address that to some extent. I think its hugely important. I dont know that its going to change that quickly, but basically, yes, teachers training is at the root of a lot of these problems. Id dont want to cast blame on anyone. It is partly the result of the diversions that goes back a long way. Between schools of education on the one hand and the rest of academia on the other. You get schools of education to change concepting developmental psychology that across campus in the department of psychology that are kind of outdated. They have been superseded by a lot of other things. They need, is partly a lack of communication. A different mindset, we talk about research and what Research Means and the suspicion it may be some of the scientific message that the psychologist might use. A preference for observations in the classroom. They may be somewhat dismissive. Theres been a lot of research in the past years of the reading process and the background knowledge and note about a lot of other things that could really help teachers. So that they could teach more efficiently, the students could learn more efficiently. The schools of education faculty are either unaware of this developments or maybe somewhat wary of them because they think of them scientists is being in an ivory tower and not really understanding what goes on in a classroom. I do think you need both, you need the perspective of what goes on in the classroom but you also need to really potentially this very helpful evidence from psychology about how children learn. Kaya henderson that lack of communication has shifted the entire burden on the employer. The employer then has to what we call professional development right, induction of professional development. We have to teach people. I say we as a former School District leader, bf teach people what they are not being taught in schools of education and so, one question is how to get the psychologist and the educator and the university so that they can take some of the burden off of the districts which already have 900 things to do. Natalie wexler i will address that but i want to just say it is not impossible for teachers to learn on the job. Professional development has not been very effective but it seems and it is really suffered to a large respect is that we have disconnected skills and content. How do you deve