Knowledge Matters

“Explain what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” Madison reads from her packet. The girls reread the text silently, underlining in pencil as they go.

“So,” Madison, 8, posits, “that means, if everyone’s arguing, the country will break apart.”

Most of us probably wouldn’t overhear these conversations or read this assignment and peg them for second grade. But Mrs. Hayes’ Civil War unit is part of Core Knowledge, a literacy curriculum aligned to the Common Core State Standards. In Core Knowledge, students build reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills through units that center on social studies topics like westward expansion, the War of 1812, and ancient Asian civilizations, and science topics like the human body and insects. Students are becoming literate, in other words, while also becoming informed—and vice versa.

Mrs. Hayes believes that if most of us don’t think second graders can do this level of work, it’s because we rarely ask them to try.

Mia and Abril are accessing today’s lesson at different levels. Mia, who joined Westergard from a local parochial school and isn’t shy about telling everyone how much of a better education she’s getting in Mrs. Hayes’ class, is galloping ahead, analyzing the text, shooting her hand up to answer every question, and writing in complex sentences. Abril’s grasp, for now, is more surface-level. Still, from Mrs. Hayes’ perspective, both girls are getting something critically important out of this approach to literacy instruction: They’re building knowledge while they develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills—and the knowledge, in turn, is helping them deepen those literacy skills.

“Some people think it’s not appropriate for our English language learners or students with any kind of learning challenges to do this work. They think it goes over their heads,” says Mrs. Hayes.

“To me, it’s a civil rights issue. Who are you to decide what they can and can’t access? If I withhold the Civil War from Abril, the other kids are going to pass her by. I need to help her with her reading skills, but she has to have knowledge too, so that when she catches up with her reading, she’ll be right there with the rest of the kids. If, year after year, we don’t expose them to this level of work, we’re making the problem worse.”

The read-aloud portion of Mrs. Hayes’ lesson is critical for that. Research shows that students, especially in the early years, are able to access much more complex ideas through listening than reading. So when Abril listens to that story on Grant, she’s processing more complex syntax, vocabulary, and ideas than she would get from a text she’s currently able to read independently. And listening comprehension supports reading comprehension—so if students don’t get exposure to challenging texts read aloud to them, it’s harder for them to move ahead with their reading.

To listen to Mrs. Hayes talk about how her instruction has shifted as a result of the new standards, it’s hard not to think this is common sense. But the transition to the new standards has been met with tremendous resistance.

In part, Mrs. Hayes thinks professional development for teachers has over-focused on particular skills—the how of teaching to the Common Core standards—and less on the why. She believes changing that would address some of the resistance to the standards she sees among her peers.

“A lot of teachers have been down this road before. The new book is the answer. This is the answer. I think they’re just cautious. Professional development needs to be about why this is so important, why it’s important to build knowledge and vocabulary.”

As for learning how to do it, Mrs. Hayes posits that the content itself might be even more important. “I would rather my own child sit in a class with a not-so-great teacher listening to great content, than an excellent teacher doing a pumpkin unit. I think the content is more important than the delivery.”

She laughs. “That’s not a popular opinion.”

Whether it’s the content or the delivery—or most likely a combination of the two—it’s hard to argue with Mrs. Hayes’ results. It’s even harder to argue with the happy, engaged faces of the children in her classroom.

From Mrs. Hayes’ perspective, that’s exactly the point of stretching her kids: It gets them excited about what they’re capable of. That’s not a position everyone agrees with.

“There is a strong belief that if we give them things that are too hard for them, we’ll frustrate them, shut them down,” says Mrs. Hayes. “They will quit school, go home, and cry. They don’t, obviously. Nobody’s crying. Everybody’s happy doing this work, and I’m supporting them.”

The point is putting the work in front of them and seeing what happens, she says—not necessarily holding fast to a particular, pre-determined bar. “I give it to them and just see what they can do with it.”

I like challenging stuff. If I’m not good at it, I want to practice more and get good at it.

– Brandon Galvan, 8

Despite twenty-two years of teaching, Mrs. Hayes says she’s still learning as she goes. “Because it’s new, I’m not quite sure of the expectation. How appropriate is it to expect seven-year-olds to reason? I don’t know yet. I push for it, but not everyone can do it yet.”

Still, she says, that’s not a good reason to keep them from trying.

“Everyone can write to this topic. Everyone can say, ‘This is why the War of 1812 began.’ Or, ‘This is why he or she is my hero from the Civil War.’ Everyone can do that, no matter what level.”

By the end of the week, they’ve hashed out their lists of heroes. Brandon, for his part, chooses Clara Barton, Abraham Lincoln, and Harriet Tubman as his top three. In his essay, he cites Barton’s founding of the Red Cross and notes that she once took a bullet through her sleeve and kept on working.

Abril, too, puts Barton on the top of her list. “She wanted to save the people from dying,” Abril writes in her final essay. “And she was not scared.”

For these second graders, fearlessness seems to impress more than anything else. And as they dive headlong into learning new content, debating with their classmates, and expressing their ideas in writing, it’s clear there’s not much they’re afraid of, either.