On ‘background knowledge’ and ‘meeting kids where they are’
By Tyler on March 8th, 2012
This is one in a series of posts examining the Common Core State Standards and the conversation surrounding their impact on teaching and learning.
I’m hoping our educator readers out there can help me understand something a little more deeply.
I assume you’ve been reading, as I have, some of the commentary and strong opinions and back-and-forth out there about the English Language Arts standards in the Common Core. I’m interested in two often-discussed topics today (“background knowledge” and “meeting kids where they are”) and how they might be related. Or not.
Here’s what I’m reading:
In Ed Week, Joanne Yatvin wrote that the authors were being too “constrictive and authoritarian,” and, among other criticisms, she said there ought to be more of an emphasis on connecting reading instruction for the youngest kids to their everyday life experiences. “Would it not be more sensible for children to learn words connected to their everyday lives and their interests rather than to things and experiences as yet unknown?” she wrote.
There’s also talk about whether the Standards discount too much the importance of providing “background knowledge” to students, a common practice by teachers who are preparing students to read from texts on topics they might have no prior knowledge about.
“The attempt is to make it just about the text. But it is never just about the text. Our concern is that this doesn’t take into account that prior experience exists and always affects the way the student interacts with the text,” Richard Long, the director of government relations at IRA, told Ed Week.
In a recent column in the NY Times, Michael Winerip tells the story of a group of students at a Manhattan elementary school, many of whom had never been inside a car before. “Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children,” he wrote. It seems a not-so-subtle way of showing how many kids lack the kind of background knowledge they need to comprehend texts that many other children might grasp more easily.
It’s a debate I find fascinating — about how to balance the need to “meet kids where they are,” while also giving them the tools and supports necessary to expand their worlds and their vocabularies to read more proficiently.
I’m wondering from the educators who read this blog:
How does this play out in your classroom? How do you strike a balance?
Is this debate trickling down into your schools?
Posted: March 8th, 2012 under Education. Tags: common core, reading, teachers.
3 comments
Comments
This is a complicated issue, and one that I have written about for years, following several years of teaching. To boil it down to its essence, background knowledge is 1) critical to reading comprehension and 2) probably the most overlooked aspect of reading instruction in most classrooms. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding is describing reading comprehension a “skill.” It’s not. Decoding, or the ability to turn letters in sounds and words IS a skill. This is why you can “read” nonsense words like rigfap or churbit. But comprehension, making sense of what we read, is a complicated mix of decoing, vocabulary and background knowledge.
Most classrooms tend to emphasize “reading strategies,” or thinking skills to help children make sense of what the read. Unfortunately, such strategies are not enough to compensate for a lack of background knowledge. This is an especially acute problem for low-income kids who come to school with smaller vocabularies and less general knowledge of the world.
To understand these issues further, let me recommend that you see Dan Willingham’s excellent video, “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading” on YouTube. You might also Google “There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test,” an article I wrote in The American Prospect with E.D. Hirsch. Also, at the Core Knowledge Blog, which I write and edit, I posted a piece which may have led indirectly to yours. It’s titled “Meet the Children Where They Are. And Leave Them There.”
Thanks for raising this important topic.
Robert Pondiscio
Comment on March 8, 2012 at 8:22 pm
Robert is right, this is a complicated issue! As a teacher on overseas assignment, I found myself in a classroom where my students were provided with mostly american texts or stories that didn’t always perfectly correlate with their social experience. I found that it was always important to bridge this gap by finding some human element or emotion in the story that my students could relate to. I would use this as an introductory point so that students could immediately relate. Once they felt a connection with the story, it was much easier for them to open up and enjoy learning about unknown and intriguing topics. Entering new worlds made reading fun for them! So while background knowledge and meeting kids where they are at is essential, we should not restrict students from reading about unknown topics as entering new worlds could be what makes reading exciting for a lot of children. We should find a way to connect the dots for them and open doors to new experiences through reading.
Comment on March 9, 2012 at 11:35 am
Whatever I could make out or what I want to say is, using technology in study method is ok but by these educational games and materials kids are bounded to do as the programming says, not according to their mind. So better we use manual techniques in order to make their mind free to think and perform.
Comment on March 12, 2012 at 2:24 am
