What’s Knowledge Got to Do With It?
- Kate Crist
- Mar 4
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 5
written by Brandon White & Kate Crist
edited by Meredith Liben
Who We Are Missing in the Knowledge Conversation
For those of us working in middle and high schools, we know from experience there are many, many students who cannot independently read and understand grade level complex text. Assessment data reflects this reality - about 60% of secondary students are not proficient on the National Assessment on Educational Progress (NAEP). This struggle for older students comes from inequitable reading instruction in early grades. American literacy instruction is a deeply inequitable landscape. Those students who were not taught to read in grade school rarely receive the interventions they need in later grades and so the opportunity gap widens throughout their education.
Part of this widening is due to a consistent lack of access to and experience with rigorous, rich, grade level material. Expectations for middle and high school students who cannot yet read at grade level are low. For many of us who work with such students, the thinking is: “these students cannot read grade level text, so I will give them something they can access”. However well intentioned, the result is that rather than reading a complex and compelling novel, students get something less: a PowerPoint summary, a simple excerpt of the novel, a less complex text, or the audio version of the book. While students can “do” this work, it is not rigorous, rich, grade level work. Providing a consistent diet of less rigorous and below grade level work only serves to extend the inequity of elementary schools straight into middle and high schools. What a high quality education requires is ensuring access to grade level materials. For each and every student.
Importantly, struggling to read does not mean struggling to think. All students are curious and passionate about a variety of subject matters and are capable of complex thoughts and ideas. Middle and high school classrooms should be places where this curiosity and passion can propel students to explore other worlds, critique narratives, and build complex identities. And here is the good news: even students struggling to read at grade level can and should do this work. The challenge of students not yet reading at grade level is a solvable one. Older students can accelerate their reading skills. However, they must have grade level, complex, and diverse texts to do this critical work. Students cannot get better at something they do not do - in this case, reading grade level, complex, and diverse texts. To provide access to these texts, teachers can focus on intentionally leveraging existing funds of knowledge and building new knowledge.
Building Knowledge is a Key Accelerator for Reading Skills
The importance of knowledge building has a widening audience in elementary schools and deserves attention for older grades. A wide and deep knowledge base is essential for reading comprehension; to meaningfully engage with secondary disciplines, students need a robust store of knowledge and vocabulary. Ideally, this is built in elementary grades. But here's the rub - because we haven’t done an adequate job teaching reading in the early grades, many students don’t often get the opportunity to build this robust knowledge store. In short, too many students do not know enough about enough topics to independently read complex texts in later grades. Therefore, we must strategically leverage existing funds of knowledge and build new ones to provide access to our grade level complex texts.
Consider for a moment a high school English Language Arts unit focused on the themes of ‘identity’ in the novel Passing. Tasks and supporting texts might explore ideas around identity, choice, and uncertainty. But what if students know little or nothing about the setting of the novel, Harlem in the 1920s? How are they to grasp themes in the novel around race, identity, and choice without such contextual knowledge? Much less the novel's references, dialogues, vocabulary, and descriptions? Instead of grounding in themes, the unit on Passing can be grounded in building understanding of Harlem in the 1920s by leveraging what students already know and adding to it to build a deep understanding of the topic. This knowledge will become the sticky, “mental Velcro” students need to then explore the themes of identity and uncertainty present in Passing. Rather than detracting from the novel, this knowledge-building focus provides access into the rich and diverse text at the center of the unit.
Additionally, our disciplines in middle and high school do their work in specific content. Although literature, history, or and the sciences might connect along broad themes, they do their deep work in specifics. Consider:
Historians explore themes of expanding and contracting civil rights, and do so via the study of the United States in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era.
Physicists work on general relativity, and do so within a focus on spacetime and gravity.
Literature explores themes of uncertainty, identity, and choice against the backdrop of 1920s Harlem in the novel Passing.
In each of these, if students focus on the surface themes (e.g. expanding and contract civil rights) and do not engage with the work of the specific time and place (in this case, post-Civil War Reconstruction), they miss the opportunity of challenging content explored in compelling ways.
Think of this opportunity as a wide river. Students stand on one bank with all their experience and desire, sometimes without the full battery of reading skills to get across. Grade level work stands on the other bank, with all its complexity and interest. Between the two you can build a bridge made of knowledge - the road must be rich in vocabulary and composed of interrelated, engaging topics. The cables supporting this bridge must be student interest and passion, making the bridge strong and stable. Such bridges remake the existing inequitable landscape by intentionally and strategically building knowledge and vocabulary to access the grade level content.
How to Build the Knowledge Bridge
These bridges should exist as an essential part of any literacy-based content area - English Language Arts, the Sciences, and History-Social Studies. Students need to build different bodies of knowledge in all these different content areas because they each have their own knowledge demands and disciplinary specific literacy skills. And while this work is good for all students, it is a critical bridge for those students who are not yet reading at grade level.
Enter the use of text sets: complex & diverse core text(s) supported with various conceptually related texts at different complexity levels. These text sets are centered on a coherent body of knowledge - a deep binding idea that anchors text selection and task design for units. Student interest matters a lot here, topics that anchor text sets should be compelling, relevant, and engaging. Such text sets work to:
Build student content knowledge and provide access to the more complex core text(s). Tools like Knowledge Maps are helpful for 6-12 curricular analysis to identify what knowledge is built, how and when it's built, and who it's built for.
Develop the interlocking information and word knowledge students need to access unit texts and those to come in later grades. Think of this interlocking information like “mental Velcro” - more information on the same topic creates a stronger and more sticky base of knowledge.
Sharpen students’ socio-political consciousness and criticality. This is work that many adolescents are eager to do.
What Does a Topic-Based Unit Look Like?
Let’s take two different ELA curricular examples: One unit titled “People and the Environment” and another titled “Things Fall Apart”. As you read through their unit tit;e, unit assessment, and core text list, consider: What is the knowledge building focus in each? How does each use text(s) to build a coherent body of knowledge? How does the unit assessment leverage the knowledge built via the listed texts?
Unit Title | Unit Assessment | Texts |
People and the Environment | How have the texts in this unit changed or reinforced your perspective about the relationship between people and the environment? Use at least two unit texts to support your response. |
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Things Fall Apart | Write a character analysis of Okonkwo. In your analysis, consider how internal and external factors influence his relationships and contribute to his fate at the end of the novel. |
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Both these units include a series of texts that seem to be related. At a glance they seem to build knowledge. However, examining the text list for “People and the Environment”, you can see that the texts jump from place to place and impact to impact. The setting and context - the things we build knowledge around - are always changing so nothing is repeated or built one from the next. In such a text set, there is very little time for students to construct their “mental Velcro” or add significantly to their stores of vocabulary. The effect is students are left with a series of fleeting impressions without any durable or meaningful learning. The topic of “People and the Environment” is not the problem, the shallow footing of its text set is. In contrast, the texts listed for the “Things Fall Apart” unit remain focused on a single place and time - the setting and context are repeated or build one from the next. This gives students the opportunity to build the knowledge and vocabulary needed to understand the setting of Things Fall Apart and grapple with its complex themes, turning points, and character development.
Such topic-based unit design is a crucial equity move because it creates a coherent body of knowledge students can use to deeply analyze the novel. Later, this body of knowledge becomes part of bridges built to give students access to other texts. A focus on themes with shallow knowledge footings cannot build these bridges. The knowledge building curriculum therefore becomes not just engaging and meaningful for high school students, but acts as a critical literacy accelerator.
What Our Students Can Gain
Too many middle and high school students are underprepared and overwhelmed when engaging in complex texts. And these students have just a handful of years to strengthen their reading skills. The goal should be to graduate high school seniors with a full repertoire of robust literacy skills so they are confident and empowered to engage with the real world. Accelerating literacy is a move we must make now to ensure their success. Using topic-based units is one such move that can be made across core content literacy classrooms, English Language Arts chief among them. For some ELA teachers, these suggestions around knowledge building might feel like a strong departure from the usual focus of the discipline. However, we believe that far from abandoning the discipline you love, we are suggesting a return to its roots. Strategically building knowledge in your ELA classroom allows your students to explore the human condition and to further comprehend the context from which the human condition is created. In doing so, students are provided greater access to the interrelated texts and understanding of themes that might bind them. This is precisely the kind of disciplinary work we want to do in our ELA classrooms.
Literacy-based core content areas can position themselves as spaces deeply rooted in knowledge building to create bridges across opportunity gaps. This strategically built knowledge will create a flywheel of knowledge and vocabulary that propels adolescent student engagement into compelling topics and themes. It is by learning about the world that students can engage meaningfully with large-scale themes like justice, betrayal, balancing of rights and responsibilities. This is the intellectual and material access all students deserve to wrap their passions around.