Samantha 0:00
Welcome back to creating joyful readers, the podcast where we dive into strategies, ideas and resources to help secondary literacy educators inspire a lifelong love of reading in their students. Today, I’m thrilled to have an incredibly influential voice in the field of literacy education joining us, Natalie Wexler. Natalie is the author of the knowledge gap, the hidden cause of America’s broken education system and how to fix it, a groundbreaking 2019 book that opened educators eyes to the role that background knowledge plays in literacy and learning. Her highly anticipated forthcoming book Beyond the science of reading, connecting literacy instruction to the science of learning, set to release in 2025 promises to take this conversation even further by bridging the science of reading with the science of learning. She’s also co-authored the writing revolution with Dr Judith Hochman, a resource for enhancing critical thinking writing skills across all subjects and grade levels. And through her free Substack newsletter, minding the gap, Natalie continues to share insights and practical advice with educators.

Samantha 0:57
As a small note on this episode, I was getting over a cold when we recorded this interview, so my advanced apologies for the sound quality. I wanted to make sure to get this incredibly valuable conversation into your hands and not delay it any further so thanks for your kindness and understanding about my voice in today’s conversation. Without further ado, here is Natalie Wexler.

Samantha 1:20
Welcome to Creating Joyful Readers, a podcast dedicated to empowering secondary educators with the tools, strategies, and inspiration to cultivate a lifelong love of reading in their students. I’m your host, Samantha. Tune in each week as we explore the transformative power of independent reading, delve into the latest research on literacy, dissect projects that will help your students showcase what they’ve learned in a unique way, and share curated recommendations of young adult novels that will captivate and engage your learners. Join in as we embark on a journey to create joyful, lifelong readers, one book at a time.

Samantha 1:59
Great. Hey, Natalie, welcome to the show.

Natalie 2:01
Well, thanks, Samantha, I’m delighted to be here.

Samantha 2:04
I’m so excited to have you today to talk to our secondary educators about the importance of background knowledge and writing and some other good literacy stuff we’re going to talk about today. Can you explain the importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension for people who may not understand why it’s such an important component?

Natalie 2:22
Yeah, there’s been a lot of research on it that has goes back to me the 70s, and it kind of got swept under the rug a bit or forgotten a bit but knowledge is really crucial to comprehension. There’s certainly evidence that having knowledge of the topic that you’re reading about really helps if you’re reading about that topic. And I think that’s fairly obvious, especially if you look at something, a text that uses a lot of sort of jargon or lingo. And the classic study on this is with baseball, actually, there have been a number like, I think, 19 studies using a baseball text and finding that you know kids, it’s often done with kids, although it could also work with adults – trust me, as a non baseball fan, I’m sure this would happen with me – that you divide basically in this iconic experiment, they took a bunch of seventh and eighth graders, and they divided them into four groups depending on how much they knew about baseball and how well they had scored on a standardized reading comprehension test. And then they gave them all a passage to read describing half an inning of a baseball game and tested their comprehension of that passage. What they found was, what really made the difference was how much a kid knew about baseball. The poor readers, according to the test, who knew a lot about baseball, did almost as well as the good readers who knew a lot about baseball, and significantly better than the good readers who did not know much about baseball. So that’s pretty obvious and you know, baseball, I think, is a great example, because you don’t need a PhD to be really conversant in baseball lingo. But it’s true of any field that that has a lot of its own jargon, like, you know, molecular biology. So I think it’s pretty obvious the role of background knowledge when we’re talking about a topic that uses a lot of inside baseball lingo to no pun intended. What’s less obvious is how much we rely on our general knowledge of the world to understand everything we read, and that is particularly true of more academic kinds of knowledge, because that tends to be the knowledge that’s assumed by text, especially more complex text, because, you know, writers do not explain every term they use. If they did their writing would be really tedious. So if you know the terms that they’re using, you’re fine, but if you don’t, you can be kind of out of luck. And you know one or two words that you don’t understand in a passage, you can look up or Google or whatever, but if there are too many of those words, it really interferes with comprehension, and it is a tremendous burden cognitively to think about what does that word mean, or go off and look it up. I mean, if you’re reading about baseball, you already know what a double play is. You don’t have to think about that. It’s a lot easier to just attend to the meaning of the text. And that is just that is true for all texts. And if you are missing a certain threshold of knowledge, you may not understand the definitions of the words when you look them up. So it’s really a crucial part of comprehension, and it is one that has generally been overlooked by our standard approach to trying to teach reading comprehension, which has really put comprehension skills and strategies in the foreground, rather than the content, especially like, you know, social studies, science content, the kind of content that we have evidence really does the most to build the kind of knowledge and vocabulary that fuels comprehension.

Samantha 5:50
So just to clarify for some of our listeners, as secondary educators, I’m going to generalize a little bit here, but I do think I’m right. I don’t think we have as much knowledge about the mechanics of reading, how kids learn how to read. You know, how teachers are actually teaching them how to read at the elementary level. And I think, as you know, myself included, this is a lot of this is new to me, just learning about, sort of the different approaches and the different ideas and so just, you know, to clarify for people listening, your take is that, especially with younger students, we need to be building background knowledge so that they have these terms already in their brains, so that when they’re reading, it will help them become better readers.

Natalie 6:34
Yeah. I mean, you know, building knowledge extends across grade levels and throughout life, really, but really, you get much more bang for your buck if you start that process early. But just to backtrack a minute, because I know, I mean, I came to this without knowing a lot about how reading instruction is is generally done. So it’s important to bear in mind that there are really two large components to reading, and one is just deciphering the words, the individual words, or recognizing them or decoding them, there are different terms for that. And then there’s the whole understanding text. And so it turns out that we’ve haven’t been doing a great job with teaching kids how to decode the words or recognize the words, and there’s been a lot of media coverage of that, a lot of attention focused on problems with that aspect of reading instruction, because we haven’t been teaching phonics systematically enough. It’s not just that, but it’s often gets reduced to we need more phonics. It’s it’s not necessarily more phonics. It’s more effective phonics, along with other things like teaching about morphology, like prefixes and suffixes, and helping kids, and this becomes really important at higher grade levels, helping them decode multi syllabic words, which are much harder than the simple words they’re likely to learn how to decode in first second grade. I mean, and I’m not saying these things are entirely separate, but that’s one aspect of reading, and then there’s comprehension, and there’s been much less attention focused on problems with a typical approach to teaching comprehension, which is really what I think the bulk of reading instruction in elementary school focuses on, especially after second grade, there isn’t much focus on teaching like phonics. So kids spend hours every week practicing comprehension skills and strategies, and these are things like finding the main idea of a text, or making inferences, comparing and contrasting, visualizing. It’s just a whole bunch of them, and often there’s a skill of the week which the teacher will briefly model. You know, choosing a text, not for what it’s about, but for how well it lends itself to demonstrating the skill of comparing and contrasting, or whatever the skill is. So that might be 10 or 15 minutes, and then students go off to practice that skill on books or texts that have been determined to be at their individual reading level. And again, these so that you know that might be well below their grade level, but you’ll be directed to a basket or a shelf of books that matches your reading level to practice comparing and contrasting or whatever. And again, those books are not organized by topic. The idea here is not for kids to acquire any particular content knowledge, but just to practice a skill like finding the main idea and get really good at it. And the theory is that if you’re really good at finding the main idea of a text, you’ll be able to apply that skill to gain knowledge from any text. But reading research, well, cognitive psychologists certainly have known for a long time that that, you know, the baseball study tells us this, that kind of skill is really not transferable. I can find the main idea pretty easily of a text that I, you know, if it’s on a topic I know a lot about, but you give me a text on a topic I know very little about, it’s going to be much harder for me to find the main idea. So it’s not that we should never ask kids to do something like find the main idea. You don’t want to make a choice between building knowledge and teaching these skills and strategies. It’s a question of what you put in the foreground. What we really need to put in the foreground is the content and help kids, you know, if it’s appropriate, maybe it’s appropriate to ask them to compare and contrast for this particular topic or this particular text. And so yeah, you do want to do that, but it’s not like you are trying to directly teach this skill and you’re just using the text to teach the skill. That’s where we’ve gone wrong. And what has happened is partly because of the tremendous emphasis that’s been placed on reading tests, reading and math tests in elementary and middle school, we’ve been devoting more and more time to reading and math and those content rich subjects like social studies and science have really been marginalized, or even eliminated. So kids get to upper grade levels knowing very little about history or science and the texts that they get the curriculum at middle school/high school assumes they already know something about American history or whatever, and many of them don’t. And so that makes their jobs as students much harder. It also makes teachers jobs much harder, because

Samantha 10:54
very much so

Natalie 10:56
they have to try to fill in a lot of gaps.

Samantha 10:59
Yes, so I think this is fascinating for secondary teachers, because I really don’t think that they’ve understood this, or, you know, have been able to grasp that when students get to secondary for a long time, we’ve been able to expect that they do know many things, and they do know, you know, just in general, how to decode words, and you know, we say how to read, even though we know it’s deeper than that. Do you have examples where you’ve seen this kind of procedure in action, where it worked really well?

Natalie 11:28
Well yeah, if you’re talking about building knowledge, and certainly in elementary school. So for my book The knowledge gap, I followed a couple of early elementary classrooms through a school year, one of them using the typical approach to comprehension, which puts the skills in the foreground, and the other using one of the more recently developed Knowledge Building literacy curricula. So these are curricula that you know it’s kind of like if you can’t beat them, join them. It’s very hard to get elementary schools to spend more time on social studies in science because of the testing pressure, etc. So these elementary Knowledge Building curricula, they’re literacy curricula, but they bring in topics from social studies, from science. And the idea is not just to have kids develop their sort of, you know, literary abilities, you know, metaphors or whatever, but also to actually learn about the American Revolution or the human digestive system or whatever. And they all cover different bodies of knowledge in different ways, but they all do focus on a topic rather than a skill of the week. And they spend, usually two, three weeks, sometimes much more, on a topic. And they all give every kid in the classroom access to these topics, to these texts, regardless of their individual decoding ability, and that’s often through read alouds and discussion, and that builds their background knowledge, which enables them to read and write about those topics at a higher level. And then eventually they acquire a sort of critical mass of general academic knowledge and vocabulary that enables them to understand texts on topics they don’t already know about. But so this one classroom that I followed was a second grade classroom that I was comparing to this other classroom for the book. The other one was a first grade classroom so they were not identical, but they were pretty similar, these two classrooms in that all of the kids came from low income families, they were all children of color, the teachers were really good teachers. But what was going on in those classrooms and the level of engagement in those classrooms was just dramatically different. The teacher in the skills focused classroom, you know, these were six year olds, she was trying to engage them in discussions of things like the difference between a caption and a subtitle, you know, in the abstract, because that was a skill they were supposed to be learning, and they just were not interested in talking about that,

Samantha 13:42
right.

Natalie 13:43
The other classroom, you know, they were learning about Greek myths, which they loved and but also American history they also really loved the war of 1812 you know, which you might be surprised that. But I’ve heard that again and again from teachers who use this curriculum. And those kids, first of all, as I mentioned, they were really engaged. They often did not want the read aloud to end. They still had their hands up with questions and comments when it was time for discussion to end. And they were also acquiring a lot of knowledge and vocabulary that will would stand them very well in years to come. I mean, you know, not just vocabulary specific to the topics they were learning about, but general academic vocabulary like plummeted and foresight and exaggerate and, you know, all sorts of words that don’t stick in the abstract. But these kids understood what they meant because they were encountering them, and, you know, a vivid, engaging context, using them in their class discussions, and those words will be sitting in their long term memory ready to be activated in years to come, when they’ll be expected to know them. So, you know, I would say I have seen and I’ve, I’ve talked to many teachers and been in many other classrooms that have been using that, that kind of career. Curriculum, and there are, now I don’t know, six, seven, good knowledge building curricula that are out there. It is hard to get a lot of research data on their effects, because it takes a long time to see the effects on a standardized test of building knowledge of specific topics, because the passages on the test don’t relate to what kids have actually learned as part of the curriculum. They’re designed to avoid topics kids might have learned in school. But we do have evidence that after because the idea is, well, we’re not testing their content knowledge, we’re testing their just general ability to make an inference, you know, but if you don’t have a certain threshold of background knowledge, you’re never going to demonstrate your ability to make an inference. So we do have evidence now that it may take time three or four years, maybe, but that if you continue with these knowledge building curricula, you will see results on, you know, general tests of reading comprehension.

Samantha 15:54
What I noticed, especially in reading the book as well, you narrated it, which I thought was so cool. You did such a great job.

Natalie 16:01
Thank you.

Samantha 16:02
I noticed that the kids in the classroom that were doing the content based knowledge curriculum seemed like they were having fun, and the other ones just seemed bored. And I think that’s what we’re running into in secondary as well, not just that, you know, content knowledge provides so much opportunity to invoke wonder and get kids to think about different things, but also the fact that trying to pick out a skill or trying to find a main idea or produce a summary or whatever isn’t the most fun thing in the world, and we’re competing with games and phones and all of those other things. And so my, platform, what I’m sort of working on is kind of that we need to help kids find joy in schoolwork, again, joy in reading, joy in whatever we’re doing with them.

Natalie 16:51
Yes and that, that is another, you know, I can, I can definitely talk a little bit more about that, because, you know, I think the people who have been skeptical of systematic phonics instruction have worried that that will kill the joy of reading. It doesn’t have to. I mean, obviously, if you do it for two hours a day every day, that well, good, but that’s not what experts would advise. But I think what they’ve overlooked is that this approach to teaching reading comprehension has, for many kids, killed the joy of reading because it’s turned reading into a chore that’s just a means to an end, where often they get not a whole book or a whole story, but just one paragraph, an excerpt followed by comprehension questions like they would see on a test. And so they don’t see reading as a source of potential pleasure. And when we have statistics on this. Last year, the nape, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they asked 13 year olds about their reading habits. They asked them, How often do you read for pleasure, for fun? And only 14% of 13 year olds said that they did read for fun, which is down significantly. I think it was 35% if you go back to 1984 and something like 31% last year of 13 year olds said they never, or hardly ever read for fun, which is way up from where it used to be. So I mean, it’s not just anecdotal. I think there really has been this shift. And it’s not just about our approach to reading comprehension. As you said, we are, you know, competing with screens and phones and all of that. But that doesn’t mean we just give up, right? I think what that means is we have to work a little harder, do a better job of showing kids how much fun reading can be. And I think one, one way to do that is don’t just give kids excerpts. I mean, there’s, there’s also evidence out there that kids are not reading whole books anymore, whole novels. They’re getting to college, even elite colleges, without ever having read a book in high school. And there is something about especially a novel, I think you know, plunging and losing yourself in a novel, you can’t do that in an excerpt. And I think it also can build the kind of vocabulary that enables you to read more and learn more about the world from both fiction and non fiction. There’s a really interesting study that I wish somebody would replicate that was done in England, not a huge study, but, you know, 300 some students, and they took these a combination of average and struggling readers, and they had teachers, English teachers, just read two novels in the space of 12 weeks, so three months, just at a fairly rapid pace, just basically reading them aloud to the class, like a chapter a day. And at the end of this 12 week experiment, they gave all the kids a standardized reading comprehension test. On average, they had made, I think, nine and a half months of progress on a standardized reading comprehension test, and the struggling readers made an astounding 16 months of progress in three months. And these tests were not related to what they had been listening to in the novel. But, you know, and also they the kids, were like, can we just keep reading? Do we have to stop I mean, these had been struggling, reluctant readers, but they couldn’t get enough of these novels. It was like one classic, one modern novel. And you know, the researchers who did the study were like, we cannot explain these results. We don’t know why there was such a boost to reading comprehension. I don’t know either. But my theory is that we know that when our emotions are engaged, we remember things better and novels, we know novels can engage our emotions in ways that you know one paragraph excerpt probably is not going to so because these kids were emotionally engaged, they were remembering this vocabulary and maybe this complex syntax that they were being exposed to and that may be carried over to their ability to do well in a reading comprehension test. But I do want to just add, I’m not saying you should just read aloud. So yes, yes, they also do need to be doing some of their own reading. But I think you know, if you are a struggling reader, reading on your own is not necessarily a pleasurable activity. It’s a struggle,

Samantha 21:03
yeah.

Natalie 21:04
And so what reading aloud can do is show kids, this is what it can be, and give them the motivation to become better readers.

Samantha 21:12
Can you speak to – I know, at the secondary level, there is an argument about, you know, just a kind of a back and forth about using class time for read alouds, either you know, independently students reading to themselves, or you know teacher modeling reading out loud, or the use of audio books even to model fluent reading. Can you speak to either in your own experience, or you know, in the research that you’ve come across? What should teachers be feeling about that is that you know is that a good practice is that, you know, should we be abandoning that? Where do you stand on that?

Natalie 21:45
I think it should be one component of of instruction. I shouldn’t, I don’t think we should substitute read alouds for having kids do their own reading. But depending on the readers, you know, if you have reluctant or struggling readers, as I said, I think it can be sort of a gateway. You know, reading aloud reading a lot complex text, and I often, I would say the read aloud should be more complex than what kids are likely to read on their own, or maybe can read on their own because, you know, it’s a cognitive capacity issue. Listening comprehension exceeds reading comprehension on average through about age 13, so for quite a while, but for some kids, it’ll be longer than that. Basically, it’s before you are a proficient reader yourself. You’re going to be able to take in more sophisticated information, vocabulary, more easily through listening than through reading, because someone else is doing that cognitive work for you, of decoding the words, figuring out how those words are pronounced, where the emphasis goes in that sentence, and that opens up more cognitive capacity for just taking in information and also actually enjoying the experience. So I think the way to use read alouds is partly to show kids hey, reading, reading can be fun, to also acquaint them with new information, a new topic or a new text that is complex, and then have them – once they’ve listened to it and maybe followed along, then they get to read the text themselves, you know. And it’s going to be easier on the second go round or third go round, even. You might be reading it each time for a different purpose. Maybe the first time is just to get the general lay of the land, but the second time might be about point of view or, you know, whatever. So I think it’s got to be integrated with other things, and we don’t want kids to just become listeners rather than readers.

Samantha 23:28
Yeah, I love that answer. So I know teachers listening, especially at the secondary level, probably feel like by the time secondary students get to high school, it’s kind of, you know, what can you do? I know myself, you feel very helpless standing there trying to figure out, what can I do to help these kids progress at all, move the needle at all. So can we speak to that? Are there – What are some things that secondary teachers can do in their classrooms to help create more proficient readers and writers as students are already in secondary school and have received this kind of instruction that clearly doesn’t seem to be working.

Natalie 24:03
Yeah, and my heart goes out to secondary teachers in that situation, because it is really, really tough, and you can’t go back and say, well, they’ve missed all of this background knowledge. I’ll just start from the beginning and teach them everything I wish they’d learned over the past 10 years. And there are not very many interventions that do move the needle at the secondary level, I would say, other than, you know, tutoring, not tutoring in general comprehension skills, but like you didn’t understand the Civil War, let’s talk about what you didn’t understand, and that is very hard to scale up. The other thing that can work, though, is writing, really explicit writing instruction that begins at the sentence level and is grounded in the content of the curriculum. It can do a number of things. First, it can be a comprehension check, and also, you know, a way to identify what piece of background knowledge are you missing that is preventing you from understanding what I’m trying to teach you now. If you do sentence level activities that are well constructed, it can really help pinpoint what are students either what do they not know or or, just as important, what do they think they know? But it’s actually a misconception, right? But in addition, I you know so this is drawn from the writing revolution, which I’m the co-author of book by that title. It’s not my method. My co-author, Judith Hochman, is a veteran educator, and she developed this method over, you know, many years, trial and error. But so that’s one thing that writing instruction could do, is it could sort of pinpoint, you know, those problems with comprehension or background knowledge. Another thing that is a huge barrier, potential barrier to reading comprehension is lack of familiarity with complex syntax sentence structure. So even if you have, even if you can decode well, and maybe you know you have vocabulary that’s you know in place, but if you’re not familiar with that complex syntax of written language, which is always, almost always, more complex than the kind of sentence structure we use in spoken English, it can really interfere with your comprehension. But things like a subordinating conjunction or an a positive, which is a phrase describing a noun, if you don’t know, if you’ve never encountered that those structures it you know you really have a hard time often understanding the meaning of the sentence. If you teach kids how to use things like subordinating conjunctions, positives, etc, in their own writing, it not only elevates their writing, but it improves their reading comprehension. And I’ve heard this over and over again, that before it was just a bunch of words, now they have meaning because the syntax makes sense. So that’s another thing that writing can do for kids, but also, and more broadly, maybe writing can make new information stickier. It has been said that knowledge is like mental Velcro. It sticks best to other related knowledge, which is another way of saying that background knowledge is really helpful to comprehension and also retaining new information and analyzing new information. But what if you don’t have that other half of the Velcro? Well, writing can really help substitute for that other missing half of the Velcro, because when we write, we are doing things. And this comes not so much from writing research per se, but really cognitive science research that appears to be about something else, but if you look at it, it actually turns out to involve having students write. But these studies tell us that when kids, when students, learners, write about information, they retain the information much better. And they also, if they are writing, not just what, literally, they can recall. That really helps with retaining information. That’s a form of what’s called retrieval practice. Another thing that’s involved with writing often, though, is elaboration. So explaining stuff in your own words, offering it, generating examples of something, or asking questions about something. That really helps with both retention and comprehension. So we are doing these things when we write, if we’re writing well, and that really makes that information makes sense, and it makes it stickier. The problem here is that for most kids, writing is really hard. I mean, you know, it’s hard to teach, it’s hard to learn, and because it’s so hard, it’s cognitively overwhelming. If we just ask kids to write, especially if we ask them to write at length without providing them with explicit instruction and scaffolding, and so they don’t get those cognitive benefits. So to really unlock potential power of writing, we need to make it more cognitively manageable. And so what that means – that’s why starting at the sentence level is really helpful. Because if writing is hard, writing at length only makes it harder. So teaching kids explicitly how to construct sentences and which that can be a knowledge building activity definitely even constructing a sentence. If you have to say supply via positive in a sentence or finish a sentence that starts with a subordinating conjunction, although and if that’s embedded in content in the curriculum, that is a powerful boost to learning and to deepening knowledge. But also, I want to just mention, teaching kids how to when they’re ready to move on to longer writing, teaching them how to create clear, linear outlines for paragraphs and essays is another crucial way to help modulate that heavy cognitive load that writing imposes.

Samantha 29:23
Thanks. I love that you talked about sentence level activities a little bit, and I wonder if you could give another example of maybe what that looks like for a secondary teacher.

Natalie 29:32
Sure. And you know, it looks pretty much the same for a secondary teacher as for an elementary teacher. I mean, this is a method that is designed to be used across the curriculum and across grade levels. And as Judy Hockman likes to say, what increases the rigor is the content. If you have more sophisticated content, creating a sentence is going to be a more rigorous activity. But so one of the, you know, maybe the most well known and most popular sentence level activities from the writing revolution is called because, but, and so. And that consists of giving students a sentence stem, you know, and once they understand what those conjunctions mean, and you shouldn’t necessarily take it for granted, even at the high school level, then you embed it in content. And so you you give a sentence stem, like I have slides with all of these examples, but I’m trying to think of – there’s one that’s embedded in the short story The Lottery. I think it’s the same black box was used every year, because, and then students need to come up with the rest of that sentence, the same black box was used every year, but, and the same black box was used every year so. And each of those conjunctions requires students to retrieve a different kind of information from long term memory. I mean, they already have to have read the story, right? They have to have the content knowledge, but then they’re retrieving it and they’re putting it in their own words. And but is going to be more difficult than because, because it’s asking for contrasting information. So is asking for a cause and effect relationship, but it’s different from because and those simple conjunctions, then when students have gotten the hang of those, then you move on to more sophisticated, complex conjunctions that they lead to so, but leads to although, despite so leads to, as a result, therefore, those kinds of things. So that’s kind of how it builds how the method works.

Samantha 31:28
Thank you. When we think about secondary classrooms and their use of technology and digital resources and things like that, How can teachers use those – I want to ask both with the background knowledge and with writing. So if we can maybe speak to, you know, both of those separately, How can teachers leverage the resources that they have? Because we’re seeing so many – and it’s rapidly changing now with the addition of AI, How can teachers use what they have in the classroom to be able to do these things effectively?

Natalie 31:59
Yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert on on the use of, you know, digital resources, but clearly that it’s going on to build background knowledge and fill in some gaps. You know, if you’re teaching a novel that’s set during the Great Depression, or, you know, during the 1920s if you’re teaching The Great Gatsby, and you you realize that your kids actually don’t know anything about the Great Depression or the 1920s what would it’s going to really enrich their understanding and make the novel probably more engaging, is to bring in some material that builds that background knowledge. And that can certainly be done. There are various digital resources out there, including videos, but there are government agencies that have lots of resources online, like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, you could find, I’m sure, all sorts of things. I’m not a classroom teacher, so I have not explored all these resources myself.

Samantha 32:50
I’m so glad that you said that, because I was going to ask you about the use of video, if that was as effective, or, you know, nearly as effective, as using written text to be able to build this background knowledge.

Natalie 33:02
Well, I think it won’t necessarily familiarize kids with that complex syntax of written language, but other than that, yes, it can certainly and be an engaging way of supplementing building, you know, like, here’s a video about the Great Depression, or whatever. They’re going to be learning, you know, you want to make sure they’re paying attention, and you probably want to have some way of evaluating whether they’ve actually gained the knowledge that and there can be assumptions made in those videos about what kids already know that could interfere with their learning from those videos. So it’s not just sort of subcontracting all of this out to a video or a digital resource, the teacher needs to be right there making sure that it’s working. But I do think there are lots of lots of ways that certainly did not exist when I was a high school student or whatever, that that can help kids acquire the knowledge they need to then appreciate and understand the texts that they are going to be reading. I do want to say something about AI and, you know, chat GPT, because that’s become such a big issue. And I have no doubt that there are ways to use artificial intelligence to enhance learning, teaching and learning, but I think we need to be careful about using them as a substitute for learning. Having kids, you know, I’ve seen teachers high school English teachers say, Well, I just have the kids sort of use chat GPT to do a first draft or an outline for them. But because writing is itself a way of learning, of deepening, reinforcing knowledge, it’s not just a matter of putting down on paper or on a screen what’s already in your head. Ideally the process, in the process of writing, you are coming to new insights. You are deepening your understanding of what you’re writing about. If you subcontract that out to chat GPT, you’re missing out on that learning experience. And we may end up in a situation where kids, they’re, you know, they’re supposed to edit what chat GPT gives them back. Back, but they may not be in a position to do that. They may not be in a position to really fully understand what chat GPT gives them back. So I don’t think it’s a shortcut in that sense at all.

Samantha 35:13
Okay, great. So at the end of every episode, I’ve been doing a lightning round with my guests, just a little bit of fun to kind of you know, see what type of reader you are. So the first question I asked for the lightning round is, what book made you a joyful reader?

Natalie 35:25
Well, it’s hard to pick just one,

Samantha 35:27
I know.

Natalie 35:28
And I when I was a kid, I was an only child, and I just – books were my friends, to some extent. I mean, I had friends. I had real human friends too, but I loved books. And I especially love sort of magical books with kids who were part of a big family, because I was an only child. There’s a an English author named e Nesbit who wrote in like the late, I guess, the late 19th, early 20th century. And I loved her books the five children, and it was probably my favorite.

Samantha 36:01
That’s great. What is the last five star book you read?

Natalie 36:05
Well, I’m in the middle of one now, I guess, does that count?

Samantha 36:08
Yeah, and you already know it’s a five star. You don’t even know the ending.

Natalie 36:12
I think I do, because it’s, it’s, it’s by an author I really love, Ann Patchett, and it’s her latest book. I think it’s, I gave it to my daughter for her birthday a year ago. So it’s been out for a while, but as a by coincidence, her husband’s mother gave him the same book, and so they had two copies of it. Their birthdays are a few weeks apart. I am very much enjoying Tom Lake, and I would recommend any of Anne Patchett’s books.

Samantha 36:38
Are you a physical book reader, an e reader, or an audio book listener?

Natalie 36:42
Given my druthers, I love physical books. I just like holding a book in my hand. I like being able to flip back and forth easily. You know what happened to the last chapter, that kind of thing. But for convenience, you know, if I’m traveling, a Kindle obviously, you know, has its advantages.

Samantha 37:00
For sure. Okay, so thank you so much for being here with us today, Natalie. Can you let people know where to find you, as well as any projects that you might have coming up?

Natalie 37:08
Sure. So the best place to find me is my website, which is Natalie wexler.com and it has a lot of information relating to both the knowledge gap, the writing revolution my substack. I have a free substack newsletter called minding the gap, and so you’ll see the most recent posts there, and the box to subscribe for free if you want. And also, I haven’t really put anything on my website about this yet, but I do have a new book coming out in January, should become available for pre order mid December, and it’s called Beyond the science of reading, connecting literacy instruction to the science of learning. And the basic idea is that, you know these, these really aren’t separate things literacy and learning. And every literacy teacher also needs to be a content teacher, and vice versa, every content teacher needs to be a literacy teacher.

Samantha 37:56
I can’t wait to read that.

Natalie 37:58
Thanks.

Samantha 37:59
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Natalie 38:02
Thank you. Samantha, this was really fun.

Samantha 38:04
Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview with Natalie Wexler. I hope you feel inspired to make background knowledge and explicit writing instruction a part of your instructional routine. For more information on these practices and Natalie’s books, please visit the show notes. Happy reading.

Samantha 38:20
Thanks for tuning in to creating joyful readers. I hope you found inspiration and practical strategies to ignite a passion for reading in your students. Remember every book we introduce and every reading experience we foster can transform lives and help students become lifelong readers. Follow me on social media at Samanthainsecondary for more tips book recommendations and to connect with a community of educators dedicated to making reading a joyful journey. Until next time happy reading.