The Knowledge Gap
'Education journalist Natalie Wexler joins All Of It to discuss her book, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix It.'
Who's To Blame for the Knowledge Gap - Teacher Habits - http://teacherhabits.com/?p=2364 via @Teacher_Habits
I’m finishing up The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. It’s good. Teachers should read it. I won’t go into a long review here because other people have done so more capably than I could, but I do want to offer one veteran teacher’s perspective on where the finger should be pointed, which is a large part of the book.
Wexler does a thorough job of retelling the history of the Reading Wars and how the teaching of reading in our elementary schools has evolved to be skills-driven instead of content-driven. This, Wexler asserts, is a disaster, and one of the main reasons too many kids can’t comprehend text. It turns out that finding the main idea or making inferences aren’t transferable skills; it’s the background knowledge a reader has about a topic that matters. Therefore, teaching comprehension skills is mostly a waste of time. According to Wexler (and others whose work she cites), elementary schools should be in the business of erecting towers of factual information inside the brains CONTINUE READING: Teacher Habits - http://teacherhabits.com/?p=2364