Explorers boldly venture into unfamiliar worlds, where confidence, curiosity, knowledge, and persistence are rewarded. When students approach texts like explorers, they bring these same qualities to the task—a mindset cognitive scientists call the “standard of coherence.” Such reading is purposeful, engaging, and expands the reader’s horizons. Reading anywhere, anytime is not just doable. It’s joyful.

In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben discuss the key ingredients that power persistent reading and support students to apply the “standard of coherence” mindset when they read, including how the standard of coherence and related practices helped students accelerate their literacy development at the Libens’ NYC school.

The notion of “coherence” sets a high bar for a reader’s expectations of their abilities and the text. They expect that it will make sense, and if it doesn’t, they will know what to do. With this mindset, students immediately apply practiced strategies to comprehend a text: closely read and reread, account for and explain what they know and don’t know, and use evidence from the text to back up those assertions and ideas. Expert Margaret McKeown talks about the key role comprehension monitoring plays in the process.

The Libens then talk with three teachers who have experienced new curriculum and helped students develop the standard of coherence in their classrooms:

• Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrisey, who discusses strategies to preview texts and build fluency (spoiler alert: spend time with books, not screens)
• Patty Collins, a teaching veteran, compares her work as a watercolor painter to how she creatively engages students within the EL Education reading curriculum (which she calls “my medium”)
• Third-grade teacher Staci McDougall, who discusses how she and her students have grown, by changing classroom practice and building stamina and comprehension

David and Meredith also talk about the importance of building stamina to engage with texts. By giving students time to read closely and persist through comprehension strategies, like providing textual evidence, they can become strong and steady readers who can keep focused on complexities over time.

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? That’s the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s something students encounter all the time.

In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling.

First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares the origin story of her “juicy sentences” strategy, where teachers divide content-rich sentences into “chunks” and help students build vocabulary and knowledge through focused instruction and discussion. 

The Libens then share personal examples of two other instructional techniques that foster reading comprehension and the metacognition that supports its growth: explaining the answer and structured journaling.

Explaining the answer is just that: asking students to answer a question and explain their response using evidence from the text. The magic lies in choosing questions based on a careful pre-read of the text at hand, not a learning standard. Students learn to identify what they do and don’t understand, and then practice returning to the text to re-read. 

Finally, the Libens discuss structured journaling, where a teacher chooses an important section of the text and students respond to four questions:  

• What are the most important ideas here? 
• What don't I understand? 
• How does this connect to what we've been discussing in class - or other texts that we've been reading? 
• Do you have any reflection (aka ‘I wonder’) questions? 

These techniques focus students on the text while also helping them expand their thinking about what they have read. For example, David recalls how a second-grade student wondered why the author of The Tale of Despereaux described certain settings as light and dark, which sparked a class wide discussion about symbolism. 

The discussion probes connections between these classroom techniques and cognitive science. Rachel Stack, a former teacher at the school the Libens started and now at Great Minds, shares a compelling story about how she worried her students would get tired of explaining their answers, but they never did.

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

In Episode 3 of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited" you’ll hear from three teachers who’ve experienced the before and after of the shift to using a knowledge-building curriculum in their classrooms.

Abby Boruff, Deloris Fowler, and Kyair Butts are three classroom teachers who are, in some ways, very different. They teach different ages, and different subjects, in different parts of the country, but in other ways they have a lot in common. All three were skeptical when their schools switched to new knowledge-building literacy curricula. Curricula like these give all children in the classroom access to the same complex, grade-level texts, building their knowledge and vocabulary through read-alouds and discussion, instead of limiting them to books they can decode themselves.

At first Abby, Deloris, and Kyair worried that the curriculum would be too challenging, too restrictive of their autonomy, or that the topics wouldn’t interest their students. And, the biggest challenge of all, as Deloris explains, was not understanding “the why” of the changes they were making. But once they saw the dramatic benefits for their students, that “why” became clear and all three came to embrace a new approach to teaching literacy.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the six-part Knowledge Matters Podcast series, "Reading Comprehension Revisited," where education writer and host, Natalie Wexler, tackles one of the most pressing issues in education: the reading crisis. Natalie poses essential questions: Why do students from low-income backgrounds typically score lower on reading tests? Why do improvements in the early grades fade out as students advance to higher levels? And most significantly, why haven't substantial investments in education reform delivered expected results? The answer lies in a longstanding but misguided emphasis on teaching reading comprehension skills in isolation rather than building students’ knowledge of the world. In this first episode Natalie introduces the roots of America’s hidden reading crisis, and the urgent need to revisit our approach to teaching reading comprehension.

For more information about the information in this episode, including links to studies and pictures of the infographics mentioned, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

In the second episode of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", host Natalie Wexler dives into persistent misconceptions about reading comprehension that have pervaded the education system for decades.

Unpacking the fact that teachers have often believed they were teaching comprehension when, in fact, they weren’t, Natalie explores the overlooked importance of knowledge in reading comprehension and its profound and under-recognized impact on student literacy. This is particularly significant for students from historically disadvantaged groups.

Featuring prominent reading researcher, Dr. Hugh Catts – a professor of communication science and disorders at Florida State University – this episode explains that reading comprehension is not a set of discrete skills that can be applied to any text. Instead, Natalie and Hugh explain that comprehension is deeply intertwined with the reader's prior knowledge about the topic and the world in general, along with the vocabulary that grows alongside that knowledge. This means that teaching reading comprehension as a set of abstract skills, often at the expense of subjects like history and science, can lead to students struggling to understand texts at higher grade levels. And while standardized reading comprehension tests purport to measure comprehension skills, they often end up assessing whether students have the knowledge and vocabulary to understand the test passages.

It’s crucial to teach kids to decode, and the attention being focused on that issue is hugely important. But unless we also start building knowledge and vocabulary in the early grades, many students will hit a wall at higher grade levels, when texts become more complex.

For more information about the information in this episode, including links to studies and pictures of the infographics mentioned, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Coming soon: "Reading Comprehension Revisited," the inaugural series from the Knowledge Matters Podcast.  Hosted by Natalie Wexler, education journalist and author of “The Knowledge Gap”, this series explores one of the most pressing dilemmas in education today: the hidden cause of America’s reading crisis.

In this powerful and compelling series, Natalie tackles crucial questions such as, why do students from low-income backgrounds typically score lower on reading tests? Why do improvements in the early grades fade out as students advance to higher levels? And most significantly, why haven't substantial investments in education reform delivered expected results?

The answer lies in a longstanding misunderstanding about reading comprehension itself, and how students learn to make meaning from texts. Over six episodes, you’ll learn what research tells us about how children really learn to read, and you’ll hear from educators from around the country as they share their experiences of embedding knowledge-building into their literacy instruction, and the powerful effects this change had on their students.

Season 1 is coming soon, so subscribe to the Knowledge Matters Podcast, and be a part of this important conversation.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

How do actual teachers and students “center the text” in reading classrooms? In this episode, David and Meredith Liben get specific with teachers and experts about how read alouds and close reading can connect students of all ages and literacy levels to a text—and to one another.

Two ideas animate the discussion. First, theory is not terribly helpful without practice. And second, learning to read is (and should be!) a social experience.

First, the Libens explore the power of read alouds with three guests, who share real-life examples of interactive ways to engage students with a variety of needs:

• Inclusive classrooms: Patty Collins teaches third and fourth graders reading from the 1st to the 99th percentile. She uses several models of read alouds to give all of her students access to grade-level text, including whole-class, mixed and leveled small groups, and audiobook technology.
• Early learners: Reading and vocabulary expert Margaret McKeown focuses young students on words—not pictures—during read alouds, and avoids leading questions. Teachers can read short passages without showing pictures and ask students “What's going on there?” or “What was that all about?”
• Multilingual students: Desiree Garcia teaches in a bilingual kindergarten classroom where read alouds have fueled an explosion in her students’ vocabulary in both languages. They are excited to share their own ideas and figure out answers by themselves. 

Then, the Libens talk through close reading, where students read a passage multiple times and carefully find the connections and structure that move a text forward. This starts with teachers reading the text themselves, finding what Meredith calls the “sticky parts,” leading a focused discussion on why these passages are particularly important.

Two guests share their experience with close reading: 

• Kyair Butts, a former Baltimore City teacher of the year, uses close reading to give his middle-school students multiple “at bats” that build knowledge and improve vocabulary. He has students annotate the text to leave tracks of their thinking and see how their thinking evolves. 
• Upper elementary teacher Katie Scotti says close reading is “leveling the playing field” between her higher- and lower-achieving students. Reading a text multiple times, and ensuring all students are familiar with the relevant vocabulary and background knowledge, gives every student the chance to understand and talk about a text, including higher-order ideas. While she was worried her students would be bored by close reading, she’s found just the opposite. Kids love it!

Key quote: “Every student has that access to that same text. They might have different levels of questions, they might be doing some noticing and wondering while other students are doing a deeper level of analysis. But they're all experiencing the same characters, the same plot. They’re all experiencing the same reactions. . . and all students deserve to have that experience. Reading is a social experience.” (Scotti) 

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, 

When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them. 

But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not the text itself.

In this episode, David and Meredith Liben explore what Meredith calls “the tail wagging the dog” in reading comprehension, including examples from personal experience, insights from research, and stories of how they learned to do things differently. The Libens also highlight the costs of a strategy-first approach: missed opportunities for students to engage deeply with the ideas and implications of a text, and activity prompts that ask kids to check their brains at the door as they complete inauthentic exercises. 

Two guests join the conversation:

• Literacy expert Margaret McKeown discusses how strategy-focused instruction  is still all too common in classrooms. It’s tangible–and is doomed to fail.
• Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrissey shares his firsthand experience piloting two ELA curriculums - one that centers on novels and read-alouds, and one that uses book excerpts on a common theme and tests on target strategies. The differences are stark. 

Finally, the conversation turns to a habit of mind the Libens will discuss later in the season: the standards of coherence. This is a habit of mind where a reader expects they will understand a text, and if it doesn’t make sense, they go back and do the mental work needed to make meaning from what they are reading.

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.

Key quote: “I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, ‘Hey, kids, today we're gonna learn to do a summary.’ What I would do is: in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, ‘Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that, and move on.” (McKeown)

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Imagine reading a story about a trial, but not knowing the meaning of “indicted” or “exonerated.” Without a lot of determination and a dictionary, you’d be lost. The knowledge and vocabulary readers bring to a text substantially determine how readily they comprehend it–a fact that’s just as relevant in ELA as it is in social studies and science class.

In this episode, David and Meredith Liben walk us through the relevant research and talk with three teachers whose innovative practices intentionally build vocabulary and knowledge across subjects:

• Erin Hanrahan, an 8th-grade ELA teacher who makes time for vocabulary-building exercises before students dive in to books on real-world issues
• Sean Morrisey, a 5th-grade teacher who includes vocabulary lessons that purposefully relate to multiple subjects throughout the school day
• Staci McDougall, a 3rd-grade teacher who leads close reads of challenging texts, then uses students’ love of multimedia to put new vocabulary to use

David and Meredith also discuss the difference between topics and themes. Many teachers may approach these as interchangeable opportunities to connect texts across a unit. But reading a series of texts on a single topic, such as immigration, the solar system, or sea mammals, yield greater Tier 2 vocabulary growth than reading texts connected by a shared theme, like friendship, loyalty, and survival.

This episode talks about influential research regarding the longer-term benefits of reading and comprehension. In their article What Reading Does for the Mind, Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich report that all kids—no matter their reading level—benefit from a volume of reading. And cognitive psychologist Chuck Perfetti has shown that the more a reader knows about a word (its spelling, orthography, pronunciation), the more likely they are to be a successful comprehender.

And finally, this episode talks joy! The teachers featured in this episode share specific examples linking better student comprehension with love for words and reading.

The research and artifacts mentioned in this episode are all posted on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. 

Key Quote: “If my students are learning ‘sh’ - like the ‘-tion’ sound, I'm purposely picking Tier 2 words like ‘ambition’ or picking words that come up in science, like ‘conservation,’ and in social studies, ‘segregation.’ . . It’s more of an efficient way for kids to learn.” (Morrisey)

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

In today’s reading classrooms, too many kids are not alright. One of the biggest challenges is comprehension–or rather, its absence. Students don't understand what they read well enough to think deeply, connect what they are learning to the wider world, and prepare for the futures they want. 

On this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben break down reading comprehension: they explain what it is and how it works in the mind of the reader, based on cognitive science. They map this understanding to the classroom experience and share specific ways to support children to read and understand texts. Guests Margaret McKeown and Rachel Stack join the conversation and explain why centering the text is the cornerstone to comprehension.

McKeown, one of the originators of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 vocabulary, talks about why centering the text is more important than a series of comprehension strategies. Stack, a former teacher and co-creator of Wit & Wisdom, describes a critical moment in her classroom: seeing her students mine the text for understanding. This episode ends with an excerpt from a discussion the Libens had with a dozen school district leaders, hosted by Curriculum Matters. 

The research and artifacts mentioned in this episode are all posted on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. 

Key quote: “We want them in the text all the time, thinking about the text, and what they have to do to make sense of that text. That's really the heart of it.” (McKeown)

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Season 2 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast is coming soon! Teachers and reading experts David and Meredith Liben host “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension,” a six-part podcast series based on their book of the same name.

With their signature charm and straight talk, David and Meredith take on an urgent problem in American schools today—kids not understanding what they read—and how reading comprehension can be taught more effectively. 

Over six digestible episodes, David and Meredith explore how comprehension works in the mind of the reader, the roles of building knowledge and vocabulary, the importance of reading language-rich, grade-level texts, and how text-centered classroom instruction is the key to students’ confidence and reading comprehension. The series features a range of teachers and expert voices, like Margaret McKeown and Lily Wong Fillmore, as well as practical ideas for classroom implementation.

Episodes 1 and 2 drop October 15, 2024!

For more information, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

American education has a number of serious problems – and our failure to start building kids' knowledge early is a fundamental one. By now you know that reading comprehension is complicated and as you’ll hear, so is the explanation for what has gone wrong with the way American schools have approached it.

In the sixth and final episode of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", Natalie will explain how we ended up in a place it’s not clear anyone wanted to go, in the grip of a reading crisis that goes far beyond the important issue of how we teach students to decode. Not only do two thirds of students test below the proficient level in reading, many Americans lack vital knowledge about the world they live in. For example, scores on national tests in American History hit a new low in 2022: only 14% of eighth graders scored proficient or above, and 40% scored below the "basic" level. Scores in civics are only slightly better. And students don’t necessarily learn more about these subjects after eighth grade: one survey, for example, found that 11% of US adults haven't heard of or aren't sure if they've heard of the Holocaust. For millennials, the figure is 22%.

Closing knowledge gaps is important for several reasons. It's important for the untold numbers of students whose potential remains to be unlocked – students who might otherwise go through school and life, feeling like they’re failures, when in fact it's the system that has failed them. It's important for society, which will otherwise be deprived of those students’ potential. And it's important for democracy, which depends on a citizenry that can understand the world well enough to make informed decisions.

Because, as Spring Cook, the educator you met in Episode 1 put it:

It is a matter of equity, it's a matter of democracy, and when we're able to give students those skills and that knowledge at an early age, then think what a better society will have.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search the #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

So far in "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", we've heard from classroom teachers about their experiences making the shift from the standard approach to reading comprehension – which focuses on having kids practice supposedly general skills like “finding the main idea” – to a newer approach. That new approach involves building children's knowledge of the world so they can better understand what they're reading. In this episode, we'll look at the experience of shifting to the new approach from the perspective of a school or district leader.

Educators who have been through that shift say that strong leadership is crucial. Teachers can do a lot to build students’ knowledge within their own classrooms, but they can't control what's happening in the classroom next door. And to become fully literate, many students need a curriculum that builds knowledge in a logical, coherent way across grade levels. Only a leader can put that kind of system in place.

In this episode you’ll meet two leaders who’ve done exactly that: Brent Conway – Assistant Superintendent in Pentucket, MA, and Dr. LaTonya Goffney –  Superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District, TX. Brent and LaTonya will talk about what motivated them to initiate the change, how they navigated the challenges, and what they saw happen in classrooms after the switch. Change is hard, but, as you’ll hear in this episode, it can be worth the effort.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

In the last episode of "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", you heard from three teachers – Abby, Deloris, and Kyair – who talked about their experiences using some of the knowledge-building literacy curricula that have recently been developed. In Episode 4, you’ll hear from them again, and you’ll meet Cassidy Burns, a 3rd grade teacher from Louisiana. They describe how these newer curricula incorporate writing instruction, and how that differs from the standard approach.

In the standard approach to literacy, writing is often kept separate from reading, just as both of those things are kept separate from building students' knowledge of the world. When it's time for writing, students generally drop whatever they've been learning about, and try to respond to a disconnected writing prompt about, for example, a personal experience, or a topic in a separate writing curriculum with its own content. But the evidence indicates that students learn best when reading and writing are connected to each other. And both should be connected to a curriculum that is rich in content.

Writing instruction can be a game changer at all grade levels. It can help  identify the misunderstandings or gaps in background knowledge that are preventing students from doing grade level work and also make it easier for students to learn and retain new information. As Abby, Deloris, Kyair, and Cassidy will tell you, it is not only possible to teach writing this way, it’s preferable – for students and for teachers.  In this episode you’ll hear how knowledge-building has changed their approach to teaching writing, and the difference it made in their classrooms.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

How is the Science of Reading connected to the Science of Learning? Join hosts Dylan Wiliam, Doug Lemov, and Natalie Wexler as they delve into the links between the two, both in theory and practice, in Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. Across six 30-minute episodes, we’ll explore how long-term memory shapes reading comprehension, why reading whole books is better than excerpts on a screen, and how teaching students to write clearly can help them think more clearly, in conversation with researchers and teachers.

“We want our students to remember. That’s the goal!”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Additional resources:

• Dylan Wiliam - Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival
• Doug Lemov - The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading
• Natalie Wexler - Beyond the Science of Reading

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

This bonus episode is an audio recording of our most popular webinar ever, Writing: An Unsung Hero of Reading Comprehension. It features familiar voices to listeners of Season 1 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, best-selling author and host Natalie Wexler, as well as StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan, Doug Lemov (Teach Like a Champion), and Julia Cooper (SchoolKit).

Their conversation focuses on why writing should be connected to content learning. How does the act of writing about one’s learning deepen retention of the content? How does it support emerging writers in focusing on their craft? Our guests share practical examples of connected writing instruction when it’s done well, and how to identify when a curriculum is weak in addressing this critical aspect of literacy.

You can watch this webinar as a video recording as well as the rest of our webinars on our website. 

Resources mentioned in this webinar:

• Slide deck from the live recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f6216Vc9auVNHTqQNKJC9hBF-Fof4uhh/view?usp=sharing
• Knowledge Matters Review Tool: A Guide for Evaluating K-8 Curriculum: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/review-tool
• The Writing Revolution: https://www.thewritingrevolution.org 
• Reading Reconsidered: https://teachlikeachampion.org/reading-reconsidered
• SchoolKit Resources: https://schoolkitgroup.com 
• Teach Like a Champion: https://teachlikeachampion.org/?books=teach-like-a-champion-3-0
• The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—and How to Fix It: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/547653/the-knowledge-gap-by-natalie-wexler/9780735213555/
• Natalie’s free Substack newsletter: Minding the Gap

Stay in the loop! Sign up for our newsletter to find out about the next webinar.

Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Today’s episode is a special bonus—an audio recording of our recent webinar, Knowledge: Why It Matters. We found the conversation so valuable that we wanted to make it accessible in as many ways as possible.

In this episode, StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan and Baltimore City Public Schools teacher Kyair Butts join Dr. Susan Neuman (New York University) and Dr. Margaret “Moddy” McKeown (University of Pittsburgh) to explore how content knowledge plays a critical role in reading comprehension. They also discuss the limitations of approaches that emphasize reading strategies without a strong foundation in knowledge.

You can watch this webinar as a video recording as well as the rest of our webinars on our website. 

Resources mentioned in this webinar:

• Knowledge Matters Review Tool: A Guide for Evaluating K-8 Curriculum
• Books by Dr. McKeown
• The Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Neuman, 2003)
• All About Words (Neuman, 2013)
• Educating the Other America (Neuman, 2008)
• Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance (Neuman, 2012)
• Growing Knowledge Matters. A Lot. (Student Achievement Partners, 2021)
• The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies (Daniel Willingham, 2014)
• Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking (The Knowledge Revival, 2025)
• 10 Ways Educators Can Bring Knowledge-Building Into Their Classrooms (ASCD, Knowledge Matters Campaign)

Stay in the loop! Sign up for our newsletter to find out about the next webinar.

Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Our memories grow stronger when we work to retrieve them. That’s why flash cards and pop quizzes are effective: they prompt students to recall and access information from their memory bank. What other instructional tools and techniques help students remember what they’ve learned, and how can teachers put these to use?

Host Dylan Wiliam takes a deep dive into four vitally important principles that are rooted in cognitive science and receive far less attention than they deserve: retrieval, spacing or distributed practice, metacognition, and interleaving. These concepts are brought to life by guests Patrice Bain and Zach Groshell, educators who have used them in the classroom and written books on the topic.

Bain offers a strong overview of memory-building instructional moves, which she calls “power tools.” They include asking students to think about what they’re learning while jotting notes (metacognition), guiding class discussions that focus on material learned a week and more ago (spacing), and teaching varied aspects of related content in a single study session and requiring students to “switch gears” (interleaving).

“Too often as teachers we concentrate on putting information into our heads. What if instead we concentrated on pulling information out?”

Groshell identifies some common teaching practices where these principles most readily apply: turn-and-talks, exit tickets, and Do Nows, which he recommends include a mix of current, recent, and past content. He also discusses common study techniques that are less effective, like re-reading notes or highlighting a text, because they draw on a student recognizing something familiar, not accessing knowledge from their memory stores. 

“Recognition and familiarity are really bad cues compared to: if I can retrieve it, if I can have someone test me on it and I can verbalize it or I can write it down. These are much better signs that I'm learning the material.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

How can schools and teachers maximize student learning? To answer this question, we need to understand how the human mind works. What needs to be explicitly taught, how many new things can we remember at a time, and what is the role of background knowledge in easing students’ cognitive loads?

Host Dylan Wiliam begins the six-part “Literacy and the Science of Learning” podcast with an accessible overview of cognitive and educational psychology, in conversation with experts Daisy Christodoulou, David Geary, and John Sweller.

With Christodoulou, Wiliam talks about the role of schema–the background knowledge and framework that helps us organize and remember new information. They also discuss the importance of “deliberate practice” rather than repetition. For example, the best musicians practice scales, not just sonatas.

Geary focuses on the different ways humans learn: while much of our development is instinctual, the sorts of knowledge and skills we learn in school must be explicitly taught. Babies can learn to read faces and speak, but students need to be taught how to decode, for example. Then, Sweller explains the limitations of working memory, which can hold up to seven items at a time for 18 seconds, maximum. 

How can we balance the need for explicit instruction with the limitations of working memory? By helping students build and access knowledge. This can free them from the “bottleneck” of working memory by transferring brain work to our long-term memory, which sets the stage for new information to be learned:

“We can’t really increase the capacity or duration of short-term memory, increasing the capabilities of our students involves increasing the content of long-term memory. This is why knowledge matters. The way to make our students smarter is not to give them practice in thinking, but to give them more to think with.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

When we read fluently, we recognize words without effort. We also maintain an engaged pace (automaticity) and perceive expression (prosody), all of which support attention and leave working memory free to make meaning from a text. This is a complex achievement, and many students have fractured attention spans. What can educators do to account for interruptions and focus on building fluency, which is key to developing comprehension?

Host Doug Lemov looks at the science of how we read and the foundational aspects of literacy that teachers can purposefully support in the classroom. Today’s students are surrounded by digital distractions and struggle to focus with stamina, and many schools have responded by teaching shorter texts. But the change in student attention shows that it is malleable.

“What if, rather than reducing the attentional demands of what we read, we tried to build up students’ capacity to focus by carefully attending to the details of how they read?”

Doug details how educators can curate an environment where students regularly read attentively, thoughtfully, and deeply for sustained periods of time. They can reintroduce reading time in the classroom, have students read hard-copy books together, and build in social exchanges so students are motivated to interact with one another in thoughtful and sustained ways.

Researcher and literacy expert David Paige joins the conversation to explain the importance of sustained attention and fluency as it relates to working memory. In particular, oral reading can be a critical teaching tool, and read-alouds are powerful for students of all ages. When students read with prosody, they don’t just understand the meaning of the words in a passage; words begin to sound like spoken language, and students gain a more engaged internal reading “voice.”

“We can change students’ reading habits from the outside in.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Writing is hard—and teaching writing is even harder. But science tells us it’s well worth the effort, because writing flexes the mental muscles that nurture literacy and learning.

Host Natalie Wexler connects cognitive science to specific writing practices that transfer information from working to long-term memory and require students to retrieve and elaborate on that information. She’s joined by psychologists John Sweller and Jeffrey Karpicke, whose research has identified effective instructional and academic strategies for teaching, learning, and lightening students’ cognitive loads.

“Writing isn't just a product—it’s part of the process of learning. In fact, evidence shows that having students write about what they’re learning can result in dramatic cognitive benefits,” Wexler says.

Learning and putting new information to use is a two-way process: students must first transfer new information from working to long-term memory. Then they must be able to remember that information by retrieving it from their memory stores. Writing supports both. 

Karpicke describes an experiment in which college students read science texts in different conditions. Compared to students who read the text once, twice or created a concept map, students who read the text once and then wrote down everything they remembered, recalled significantly more about the topic a week later. 

Many studies have found the same result: writing boosts memory. But not all writing has the same impact. Writing prompts that require elaboration, such as “how” or “why” questions, help expand and strengthen understanding by drawing new connections to the material. And writing is not equally effective for all students. Inexperienced writers can be so cognitively overwhelmed by the task of writing that it actually impedes learning.

Wexler explains how teachers can ease the cognitive burden on students who are learning to write. First, they can ask students to write about content they've already learned about, so they don’t have to juggle new information in working memory along with the cognitive demands of writing. That approach also helps deepen students’ knowledge of curriculum content.

Sweller describes how teachers also can provide opportunities for “deliberate practice,” which can make foundational literacy skills automatic. For example, students who have mastered spelling rules don’t have to think about spelling when they write. Higher-order writing skills never become completely automatic, but practice helps. For example, students who practice distinguishing between complete sentences and fragments, with feedback from a teacher, eventually “develop a gut sense of what makes a sentence a sentence,” Wexler notes.

These processes work together to enhance student writing—which accelerates literacy and knowledge—not as an end-product, but an active part of the learning process.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

“The book is in a death struggle with electronic and social media. And right now, it’s losing.”

Host Doug Lemov makes a spirited case for reading whole books in the classroom—especially since today’s students read almost no books outside of school. He’s joined by guests Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week and cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and speaks with two Texas educators using whole books in their school.

“Learning to be able to struggle—to read a challenging text, and to persist with it—is one of the greatest gifts an education can give students,” Lemov says.

Sawchuk discusses the trade-offs of a common shift to reading shorter-form excerpts and articles instead of books, which builds attention and stamina because teachers can grow the length of reading assignments over time.

“In this drive to respond to the formats that we think kids are most engaged by, we end up further weakening the kinds of text and language structures that kids are exposed to,” Sawchuk says.

Willingham explains that books relay stories, which are “psychologically privileged”—our minds more readily understand and remember information contained in stories compared to other kinds of texts. Books also call on readers to actively engage and persist to make meaning. “In this novel, you can't flick your thumb and make something else happen. You kind of need to sit with it and see what you can make of it.”

Books also model long-form reflective thinking—which stands in stark contrast to modern social-media posts, where a few words or brief video provide a snapshot of right-now considerations, Lemov notes.

“Books are the medium in which people have been doing their best long form thinking for hundreds of years. They are the storehouses of almost every idea that is important to us. Whether it is the seeds of democracy or the foundations of science, chances are it has been communicated and passed down in the form of a book,” he says.

A visit to teacher Lori Hughes’ classroom in Amarillo, Texas, shows the benefits of reading books in class together. The way students read orally becomes the way they read silently, and the community activity builds engagement and enthusiasm. Principal Genie Baca notes, “The word I would use more than anything is investment. Whether you're a low reader or a very fluent reader, these kids get so invested in the book and the characters like we've never seen before.”

That’s no surprise–as Lemov says, “When what you read is meaningful, you are more likely to read again. But if what you read is an exercise in main-idea-ing, you are likely to choose your phone.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.