The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Natalie Wexler. Natalie is an education journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She's a senior contributor to Forbes.com, a former lawyer and legal historian. She's the author of the new book, The Knowledge Gap, The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and How to Fix It, which you can read about in a recent issue of The Atlantic.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Natalie, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Great, thanks. I'm delighted to be here. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to talk about this challenge around knowledge and the tension between knowledge and skills that we've had as a debate in the education profession for quite a while now. But you've really hit on some things that I think get to the heart of a lot of our efforts to improve student learning.

[01:08]

I wonder if you could take us into the moment when you started to develop a hunch that we had a problem in the profession that we weren't really attuned to. What was the kind of the origin story of the argument that you make in The Knowledge Gap?

[01:21] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'd say that I thought I knew quite a bit about education. Five years ago, six years ago now, I've been in a lot of classrooms. I was writing about education in Washington, D.C. I was on the board of a charter school. I was on the school performance committee.

[01:34]

I read everything I could get my hands on. I went to panel discussions. But I finally realized I hadn't understood exactly what I was looking at. And I might never have understood that, except that I had gotten to know a woman named Judith Hoffman, who devised this method of teaching writing that I thought made a lot of sense. And eventually I co-authored a book with her called The Writing Revolution. But before that, as I mentioned, I was on the board of this charter school, which was an elementary school.

[01:59]

And I thought it would be great if they could adopt this method of teaching writing. So I asked Judy Hockman, who had become a friend, could you go over there and see if you can talk to them about that? And she reported back to me, the thing is, this method of writing instruction really only works if it's embedded in the content of the curriculum. And that school isn't actually teaching any content. And I was mystified. I said, what do you mean?

[02:26]

It's a school. That really started me on a journey. I discovered that they're really... the vast majority of elementary school classrooms, the main objective, certainly below fourth grade, is to teach kids these math skills, but also foundational reading skills, which are important, the decoding skills.

[02:46]

But then there's a lot of time spent on these reading comprehension skills. And I've seen this, and the kids all looked engaged. It looked like a lot of learning was going on in these classrooms, but I came to realize that it was largely an illusion.

[03:00] SPEAKER_01:

And I want to repeat that just because it's a little bit of a stunning statement that the school was not actually really teaching much of any content.

[03:09] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let me explain. I mean, obviously there's content anytime kids are reading something, there's content by definition, but they weren't focusing on content. They were focusing, what was in the foreground were these so-called skills, like finding the main idea, like making inferences. These are the skills that appear to be tested on standardized reading tests. And the theory is that if kids just get really good at those skills, they will be able to apply those skills to any text that's put in front of them. And it really doesn't matter, especially in the early elementary years, what they're reading or what they're retaining from what they're reading.

[03:49]

What matters is that they get good at these skills. The problem is that as cognitive scientists have known for decades, the main determinant of whether you can understand something you're reading is not some kind of abstract skill. It's how much knowledge and vocabulary you have relating to the topic you're trying to read about. So a couple of researchers back in the late 80s wanted to test what was more important, these general reading comprehension skills or background knowledge of the topic. And they figured, well, baseball, that's a topic that You know, some kids are going to know a lot about baseball and they're not sort of generally good readers. So they took a bunch of seventh and eighth graders and they divided them into four different groups, depending on how well they had scored on a standardized reading comprehension test and how much they knew about baseball.

[04:34]

And then they gave them a passage to read about baseball. And what they found was that the supposedly poor readers who knew a lot about baseball scored better. than the supposedly good readers who didn't know much about baseball, and almost as well as the good readers who knew a lot about baseball. So it was pretty clear evidence that what is really important is background knowledge and vocabulary relating to the topic. And that experiment, that study has been replicated in a number of other contexts. But a lot of teachers, a lot of educators don't know about that research.

[05:10]

You know, so what we've been doing, rather than Providing kids with subjects like social studies and science beginning in the early elementary years, things that would actually build the kind of knowledge that would boost their reading comprehension. We've been marginalizing those subjects and spending that time instead largely on these largely illusory reading comprehension skills.

[05:33] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a fascinating argument about skills, and especially if we compare the advice that we get as educators in professional development, in expectations for how we prepare students for standardized tests. There's so much emphasis on skills and on transferable skills and preparing students for the kinds of passages they might have to read online. on a test. But if I think about my own experience as a developing reader, I remember being taught decoding, you know, the phonics, you know, this is what sounds this letter makes. And, you know, the pH is a tricky one, you know, like I remember learning phonics, but other than that, I don't remember being taught any reading skills. I remember reading a lot and I remember developing vocabulary from, um, doing that reading and sometimes asking, you know, mom, what does this word mean?

[06:22]

Or, you know, developing that knowledge from reading. But personally, I don't think I was taught any reading skills beyond decoding. What was your experience of that?

[06:31] SPEAKER_02:

I was in elementary school quite a while ago. And I don't know when you were in elementary school, but this emphasis on reading comprehension skills really starts in the 80s. I mean, there were always some focus on this. If you had a basal reader, which is a textbook that's used to teach kids reading, there would be comprehension questions at the end of a passage. And there would be things like, well, what was the main idea of what you just read? And I don't remember that myself, but that's been around since the 50s, 60s.

[07:03]

Then what happened, I kind of had to reconstruct the history of where this focus on comprehension skills came from. So there was some of it going back to the 50s or 60s, but then Starting in like the 80s, 90s, the whole language movement came in and they were very much against basal readers and those kinds of comprehension skills that appear to the basal readers. But some teachers in the whole language movement discovered some research by cognitive psychologists on something called reading comprehension strategies, which they saw as distinct from reading comprehension skills. And these strategies are more metacognitive things like monitoring your comprehension, asking yourself, questions as you go along. How can I connect this to something I already know? Can I summarize this paragraph?

[07:49]

They're not all that distinct from the skills, but the teachers felt they were. And then, so they started reintroducing those strategies, those metacognitive strategies. And then in 2000, there was something called the National Reading Panel, a blue ribbon panel of reading experts that issued a report. Their main focus was on phonics and decoding and they were supposed to resolve, settle the reading wars once and for all. Debatable whether they actually did that. But they came down very clearly on the side of phonics, systematic phonics instruction.

[08:25]

But one of their other recommendations was that they had found evidence supporting reading comprehension strategy instruction. And that led to a big boost in reading comprehension strategy instruction. In teacher training programs in 2006, only 15% of them covered reading comprehension instruction in their curriculum. Ten years later, that had gone up to 75%. And so teachers were learning, this is how you teach reading comprehension. The problem is that what those ed schools are teaching and what teachers are doing in the classroom bears very little resemblance to what the National Reading Panel endorsed, because they have brought back in a lot of those skills that really don't have any evidence behind them.

[09:08]

That's one problem. Another problem is that the National Reading Panel focused on a few strategies and the studies supporting their efficacy lasted on average only six weeks. We do this thing year after year, you know, through elementary school and middle school and sometimes in high school as well. The other thing that the National Reading Panel failed to mention is the importance of background knowledge and The thing about these strategies that they endorsed, these metacognitive strategies, is they only work if you have enough background knowledge to understand the passage. You know, you can ask yourself all the questions you want about what you're reading, but if you can't understand the passage, you're not going to be able to answer them. So it's really been a misinterpretation, I think, to a large extent of what science actually supports.

[09:55] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that becomes highly relevant whenever we start talking about achievement gaps, when we see that the more affluent a student is, the more likely they are to be reading on grade level, the lower income background the student comes from, the more likely they are to struggle with reading. So I think as a profession, we have responded to that gap largely by trying to explicitly teach reading strategies, right? Like we know students aren't just automatically going to become better readers. We know we're going to have achievement gaps based on income if we don't purposefully do something about that. But the piece that we've been missing, if I understand your argument correctly, is knowledge and vocabulary, that we're teaching skills too far removed from learning the vocabulary, the background knowledge that's essential for those skills to actually operate? Is that it?

[10:44] SPEAKER_02:

That's essentially it. And of course, it's not poverty per se. It's really level of parental education that is, you know, kids who come from well-educated families are exposed to sophisticated knowledge and vocabulary pretty much from birth. Kids who are not that lucky and whose parents themselves don't have high levels of education are not getting that same exposure. It's complex, but that's basically what it boils down to. And so what we need, and every year that goes by, those kids who start out with more knowledge and vocabulary are able to acquire more and more knowledge and vocabulary while the other kids fall further and further behind.

[11:26]

So that gap keeps expanding. And what we need to do is for all kids, but especially the kids who rely on school for gaining that knowledge and vocabulary that can help them. We need to systematically expose them, immerse them in particular topics and bring in skills and strategies, if you want to call it that. I think it could be called just good teaching, but you bring those in in service of teaching the content, building their knowledge. So yes, summarizing can be a very powerful way for kids to acquire knowledge, but the point is not just to to teach sort of summarizing in the abstract and then say, OK, go off and practice this. And it doesn't really matter what you're reading about.

[12:08]

And it's a bunch of random topics. The point is to spend at least a couple of weeks on a particular topic. And maybe you bring in after you've read aloud a chapter or whatever, a book of some kind of text, say, OK, now who can summarize that in just a few words or even a few sentences? Or even better, and this is my other sort of hat, but it's related, have kids write about what they've heard, what they've been learning. If it's done in a way that's not overwhelming for inexperienced writers, writing, including summarizing, is an extremely powerful lever for building knowledge. But it's not, you couldn't, and I think this is why writing is so important to include in the core curriculum and not as some like extra that's added on.

[12:58]

If You ask a kid to focus on something like summarizing. That student has to remember information that has partially forgotten, which is a kind of scientists have found that to be an extremely powerful technique for building and retaining knowledge. Put that information in his or her own words. Again, incredibly powerful. But you can't just say, OK, and I was in a second grade classroom where this happened. And this was a second grade classroom that was unusual in that they were using a curriculum that really did focus on building kids' knowledge.

[13:31]

And they'd been studying the Civil War. And the teacher said to these second graders, okay, here's a blank piece of paper. Write down everything you've learned about slavery in the past three days. For a second grader who's still working on letter formation and spelling and all sorts of things, that's really overwhelming. So we have to start at a sentence level. Or otherwise, we risk really overloading kids and defeating our purpose.

[13:55] SPEAKER_01:

I think that gets us into the topic of content a little bit. I would say certainly we've seen a narrowing of the curriculum and the kind of removal from many schools of especially science and social studies at the elementary level. So in your example there, obviously a social studies topic, what have you seen happening to those subjects that typically gave us a lot of the content that students were writing about and learning vocabulary within. And how did we develop this bias against content? Like when and why? You know, you're a journalist.

[14:27]

What did you find as kind of the origin of that bias against content?

[14:30] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, those are two different but connected questions. I mean, reading has always dominated the elementary curriculum, especially since the advent of high stakes reading tests. The amount of time spent on social studies and science and especially social studies, I would say, has really disappeared especially in schools where test scores are low because and even if social studies is taught it's the same teachers generally teaching english language arts and often either that time and the schedule gets devoted to english language arts or these reading comprehension skills or the social studies content is again subordinated to the reading comprehension skills because as one social ela social studies teacher told me a fourth grade teacher You know, the test isn't going to be about Saturday Rock or where the Navajos resided. What my kids are going to need to do well on the test are their reading comprehension skills. So where this all really comes from, this sort of bias against content, I would say it could really, the deep roots of it go back 100 years.

[15:29]

And it really has to do with progressive education, you know, pedagogy. And one of the central tests of that, and also was more recently called constructivism, is that it is better for for students to construct or discover their own knowledge rather than to have the teacher stand up in front of the class and deliver information. That will not really sink in. Kids will be bored. And it is true that we all need to be participants in constructing our own knowledge. But it has been interpreted to mean that children and students also need to kind of discover their own information for themselves.

[16:09]

And that's, I think, where, you know, that laid the foundation, the fertile ground for these reading comprehension skills and strategies to take hold, because some teachers are feeling like, well, I'm not just standing here telling kids stuff. I'm not explaining and lecturing. I'm giving them the tools that they can use to acquire their own knowledge. When you're dealing with kids who don't have much knowledge of the world and you're expecting them to discover their own information about topics in history, science, et cetera, it's just not going to work very well. It's a tremendously inefficient process. So yes, I think they can't stop at delivering information, but they do need to start there with, in many cases, with novice learners or learners who are new to a topic.

[16:57]

Once kids have a basic, you know, have amassed a certain amount of information, then you can bring in things like projects and inquiry and group learning. But I think a lot of teachers have heard that or been trained to believe that you should almost always go for inquiry learning or group learning or projects that those are just always good. They're really only good in certain situations, and they're not always easy to do well. So I think that's where a lot of the problems come from. So you see it throughout education, this sort of bias against delivering, explicitly teaching anything. But I think you do see it most in elementary school where you're most likely to have novice learners, right?

[17:44]

So that's where we need more direct teaching. And it doesn't have to be a teacher droning on in front of the classroom. What this can look like is a teacher reading a really engaging story, but it's about history because history or science, but history in particular, um, can be presented as a series of stories. And I've seen kids just fall in love with history. For second graders, there is another pervasive belief not backed up by evidence among educators that history, you know, the entire domain of history is a developmentally inappropriate topic for kids below maybe fourth grade because it's too abstract and too remote from their own experience. Really, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

[18:29]

Kids really are interested in a lot of things that are remote from their own experience, and it doesn't have to be presented as an abstraction. It can be presented in a very concrete way.

[18:37] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I have to chime in here about the Magic Treehouse series of books, which are designed for maybe second graders, somewhere around there. I remember giving those to our older daughter, and she just devoured them. She was ready for them. They were, I think...

[18:56]

introduced to her at the right time. But the big transformation that I saw as a result of those books, which are loaded with science and social studies content, I mean, The Magic Treehouse, you know, they're not especially hard books to decode. They're not a super high reading level. But the amount of background knowledge that's introduced through those books is just incredible. And, you know, now suddenly she knows things about ancient Egypt and, you know, world geography and things that, you know, if we had done, you know, a unit or if her class had done a unit on those things, she would probably have come to a similar level of background knowledge. And yet I think there's an irony in...

[19:36]

this trend that you've identified that when we see that kids do have big gaps in their their reading ability we say oh we need to explicitly teach the strategies that they're lacking and so we start to pull back from that content knowledge and we start to say well let's let's look at the skills that they really need to succeed. And that has created this cycle where persistently some students, especially those in schools where test scores are lower, are not getting exposure to that content that everybody else is.

[20:07] SPEAKER_02:

And I would say also that our perception might be that they're lacking skills or lacking strategies because, you know, A lot of the data you get, especially from these periodic tests, that's how it's sliced and diced, right? Oh, this question about comparing and contrasting, it didn't add, so we need to work more on comparing and contrasting or identifying author's purpose or identifying what a caption is or whatever. But it could very well be that the reason the kids got that answer wrong was they didn't understand the reading passage because they didn't have the background vocabulary, whatever, to do that. even a toddler can make an inference. It's not that kids necessarily lack that kind of skill. It's that they aren't able to demonstrate that skill because they don't understand the passages that they're trying to.

[20:57]

I mean, you know, decoding is a separate issue. I'm assuming that kids are fluent decoders and that's when these comprehension issues come into play. One other thing, I mean, I think the Magic Treehouse books are great and Kids can learn a lot through their own independent reading or books they can read independently. But it is really, really crucial, especially for kids who are struggling readers, to read aloud to them from books that they could not read themselves. Because kids' listening comprehension upcases their individual reading comprehension on average through middle school. So they can take in a lot more sophisticated concepts and vocabulary by listening than by their own reading.

[21:43]

And that's really important because written language is almost always more complex than spoken language. So when they go out from books that are about kids' own reading, substantially about their own reading, they are laying the foundation for those kids to be able to read complex text on their own later on because they will have stored in their long-term memory, they'll have those conventions of written language, those concepts, that vocabulary that will help them understand complex later on.

[22:13] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I'm thinking about a recent experience of reading Anne of Green Gables to our kids who I would say it would be a challenging book for our older daughter. And it's honestly a challenging book for adults because some of the language is a little bit archaic and it's, you know, it's just difficult book vocabulary wise. But one thing I've noticed from reading that aloud over the last couple of weeks is that we have to be metacognitive as we read it. Like we have to stop and say, wait a minute, who is she talking about here? Or I don't know that word, what do you think that word means?

[22:46]

And our own strategies as adults often are how we're teaching those strategies to our students. And I wonder if we've gotten away from read alouds and things like that because we don't always know in advance what strategies we're going to identify.

[23:03] SPEAKER_02:

right like like as a in a lesson plan i'm supposed to know in advance what skills i'm going to teach today and then choose a text to teach that with as a skill but that's not necessarily how we do it in a read-aloud huh i actually just wrote something for forbes about very interesting study that was done in england um where basically average and struggling readers their teachers just read at a fairly fast pace two novels, two novels that were above these kids' own reading level, back to back, without really stopping much for comprehension, strategy, instruction, whatever. There was one group of teachers that I couldn't sort of, you know, control them, who had been given training in comprehension skills and strategies. What happened was the, especially the struggling readers, made tremendous progress. I think it was 16 months of progress in a standardized reading comprehension test in only 12 weeks.

[23:59]

after hearing these novels back to back, and the comprehended strategy instruction made no difference. Now, it's not clear why this happened, but I think part of it is when you are emotionally engaged in a story, the vocabulary and things stick more. There's some evidence to this. They stick better in your mind. Even if you don't understand every single word or every single allusion, you're kind of immersed in it, and it equips you to understand other more complex texts. I also saw this in a classroom I was in in England at a school called the Michaela School, where the struggling readers went to an after-school program and sat.

[24:40]

There were like 30 kids in a classroom listening to a teacher. And it's important that the read-aloud be done by somebody who can read with expression and write the right intonation. And the teacher was basically doing all the reading, and the text was Jane Eyre. And these were a bunch of 13, 14-year-old kids in a low-income part of London, many of them students of color. It's hard to imagine, in some ways, something that's more remote from their own experience. And the language was archaic, and you would think they would all be fidgeting.

[25:09]

You could have heard a pin drop. They were totally into the story. And I was into the story. I then went and reread Jane Eyre because it's a good story, right? So I think there is a huge power in reading aloud. reading novels aloud and not worrying too much about pausing to explain things.

[25:29]

You know, you've got to make sure that the listeners are following the story, but maybe it's even more effective or certainly as effective if you don't worry too much about strategy and skill instruction, even while you're going along.

[25:43] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk about test prep a little bit, because I think it's now impossible to talk about reading instruction without talking about standardized testing and how we prepare students for that or, or choose not to prepare students, uh, directly for it. What are some of the so-called skills that you've come across that are not supported as skills by the research? Cause I know you've spoken extensively with Dan Willingham or, uh, research into the research on reading instruction. And this idea that everything is a skill that can be explicitly taught is one that we've latched onto for a while. But you've found the research support for that lacking. Where are we teaching skills that are not really skills?

[26:24]

And what should we change in terms of our test prep approach?

[26:28] SPEAKER_02:

I would say, you know, I'm going to be really radical here. I would prefer, and this is not my own suggestion, this is a cognitive scientist named Alan Cammy, that reading be redefined to mean just the decoding aspects of reading, and that we don't group reading comprehension under that same rubric, because I don't think reading comprehension, there aren't any real skills or strategies. I think calling them reading comprehension skills and strategies gives the impression that these things can be taught directly. I think we should acknowledge that reading tests are, in fact, as Dan Willingham says, knowledge tests in disguise. And so we should be teaching social studies and history and science and all of those things. And, you know, teachers should be trained to ask good questions of students that will make them, first of all, make sure to test their comprehension.

[27:19]

That's the first thing, make sure they've actually understood this content. And then guide them to analyze it, to think about it, to connect those dots. The problem with standardized reading comprehension tests is that they are not designed to test anything content that kids actually learned in school or been exposed to in school. Because who knows what content, if any, they've actually been exposed to in school. So test designers really try to come up with topics that just depend on kids' general knowledge, like Amelia Earhart, The Wild Plants of Chickatig. And if you're using a good knowledge building curriculum, your third graders may know a lot about Greek mythology or the human digestive system or whatever.

[28:06]

But they may not have the background knowledge and vocabulary, especially if they're coming from less educated families, to answer questions about a reading passage on the air card or whatever. So it's kind of a crapshoot. And I think what's really interesting and encouraging is a pilot project that's now going on in Louisiana, which has done a lot of innovative things along these lines. They are experimenting with a new kind of standardized reading test under a provision in ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act, their new reading test is going to focus on topics and even reading passages that are included in the state's, not only their ELA curriculum, but also their social studies curriculum, which is being used by about 80% of the schools in the state. So, you know, you can only really do that if you have a bunch of schools that are all covering the same topic, that all have the same basic curriculum.

[29:03]

It might be possible for test designers to come up with a list of possible topics that will appear on, say, the fourth grade test. So here are the topics that may be covered on this test, westward expansion, whatever. And that would at least give teachers some guidance on how they can genuinely equip their students to do well on those tests.

[29:27] SPEAKER_01:

It is a radical idea to teach content in order to teach skills and then test students on the basis of the content that you've taught. But yeah, I don't think anybody is doing that anywhere else in the US, certainly. And there's this effort to ensure that standardized tests aren't biased towards any particular body of knowledge, you know, because as you said, it is kind of a crapshoot who's been exposed to that knowledge. But yeah, what if we did align our reading tests to our science and social studies and our actual curriculum? And I think that narrowing effect that we've seen, if we did that, that narrowing effect would largely disappear because there would be no incentive to narrow the curriculum and squeeze out recess and squeeze out social studies and squeeze out science, because as they are in the real world, they would be integrated. It's funny to me how much of what we knew in the 80s, and I'm a child of the 80s, so maybe I'm biased here, but so much of what we knew in the 80s and what Madeline Hunter was teaching about mastery learning, we're finally coming full circle back to that after this long period of distortion that I think came from the overemphasis

[30:35]

on standardized testing. So a fascinating tale that you've crafted here, a fascinating explanation, and I think some really provocative questions. So Natalie, thinking about our audience of school administrators and district administrators, what advice or food for thought do you have for principals and central office administrators who maybe are in charge of some of those curriculum and instruction decisions?

[31:00] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I would like to say, you know, specifically about principles. From what I saw researching my book and what I also know through the Writing Revolution organization, principles are really crucial. They play a crucial role in creating and sustaining this different approach, this different way of teaching. I mean, they are to some extent, you know, their hands are bound to a certain extent by what the district, their school district is requiring. But I have seen...

[31:30]

I've been in schools where principals supported the adoption of new curriculum, and there are five, six, maybe more curricula, elementary language arts curricula that have been developed in recent years that do focus on topics and not on the scale of the week. But what I've also seen is that when that school leaves, things revert to the status quo pretty quickly. I was in a school in Baltimore, for example, I was just there sort of to see what, you know, I was just trying to visit as many classrooms as possible. And I talked to a veteran teacher there. She was actually, there was a volunteer tutor. She retired.

[32:09]

She said, you know, 10 years ago, this school was a core knowledge school, which is core knowledge language arts is one of the curricula that builds knowledge. And she said, you know, and the kids loved it. The parents loved it. The teachers loved it. And the test scores went zoom. I said, well, what happened?

[32:28]

She said, well, That principal left, and then I discovered that the new one who came in wasn't familiar with that Cornell curriculum, and so she reintroduced the basal reader that she was familiar with, and everything went back to the skill of the week, and the test scores went back down. So I think the challenge for principals who, you know, they don't want to devote their entire career to being at one school is to – In addition to understanding the research and understanding the need for building kids' knowledge, figuring out how they can create a system that will be sustained even after they may move on to another position. Curriculum is a necessary first step. Adopting a knowledge building curriculum, but it's only the first step. Teachers also need support and time to adjust to this very different way of teaching.

[33:22]

And they need opportunities to collaborate with their peers and coaching and professional development that is grounded in the actual content they're teaching. So not like, how do we foster critical thinking in the abstract? Because professional development has suffered from the same problem of divorcing skills from content. But instead, how do we foster critical thinking about this Greek myth or whatever it is that the teacher is going to be teaching?

[33:48] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I would say principals have been faced with the same challenge around skills that districts are now looking for principal skill in observing a lesson and providing feedback on it. And my first question is always, well, what does this principal know about the teacher and the curriculum? Because teaching is not just an abstract skill that happens in a vacuum and observing teaching is similarly not an abstract skill that can happen, you know, completely separate from content. It's happening at all levels.

[34:15] SPEAKER_02:

I mean, there are definitely skills involved, but you also have to be looking for the right things when you're observing. I mean, I think from what I've heard from a lot of teachers, principals may be looking to make sure there's a skill of the week written on the board. And that's the opposite of what I'm talking about. So it does really, principals or administrators really need to understand why that skill of the week approach has not been working and they need to understand what they should be looking for when they go into classrooms.

[34:47] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The Knowledge Gap, The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System and How to Fix It, available wherever books are sold. And I have seen it at Barnes & Noble and places like that. I would also encourage people to check out your piece in The Atlantic called Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong. Natalie, thank you so much for joining us on Principal Center Radio.

[35:07] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin. It was a real pleasure.

[35:09] Announcer:

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