Natalie Wexler > Quotes

“For is not a Book the most reliable of Companions--and generally among the most stimulating as well? No need to worry about amusing or pleasing or making a good impression on a Book, when its only purpose is to entertain and, perhaps, instruct. And if it should fail in that purpose, one can merely return it to its shelf, without so much as a by-your-leave and no occasion for anxiety about its wounded Pride, either.”
― Natalie Wexler

“In short, teaching writing is not only inseparable from teaching content, it can also be tantamount to teaching students how to think critically.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Research has established that one aspect of reading does need to be taught and practiced as a set of skills, much like math: decoding, the part that involves matching sounds to letters. The problem is that the other aspect of reading—comprehension—is also being taught that way. While there’s plenty of evidence that some instruction in some comprehension strategies can be helpful for some children, there’s no reason to believe it can turn struggling readers into accomplished ones.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“When I die,” goes one internet meme, “I want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“It’s true that we all construct our own knowledge, in the sense that we don’t just store facts we’ve heard verbatim. We need to interpret and synthesize to achieve true understanding.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Students who aren’t reading on grade level by third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school. If the child is poor, the odds are even worse.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Unfortunately, I have yet to see an American school that consistently combines a focus on content with an instructional method that fully exploits the potential of writing to build knowledge and critical thinking abilities for every child.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“We need to break down the artificial walls that weve erected between "reading" or "literacy" and all other subjects. To ensure that all students can reach their full potential”
― Natalie Wexler, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

“retrieving information from memory—unlike retrieving it from the internet—increases the chances that you’ll remember it more easily the next time you need it.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“In fact, the benefits students derive from the small-group format of guided reading are generally canceled out by the lack of learning in the rest of the classroom.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Hochman discovered that writing, reading comprehension, and analytical ability were all connected—and that writing was the key to unlocking the other two. If you wanted to enable students to understand what they were reading, convert information into long-lasting knowledge, and learn to think critically, teaching them to write was about the best thing you could do.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She’ll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“That graphic has led many educators to conclude that the “lower-order” tasks should be passed over as quickly as possible”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“educators have overlooked the fact that part of “learning to read” is acquiring knowledge.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“By restricting students to their own experiences”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“The debate over phonics again erupted into the national conversation”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“What individuals can read and understand, once they’ve learned foundational reading skills, depends largely on their knowledge of history, geography, science, literature, the arts, popular culture—really, pretty much any knowledge they’ve been able to acquire.”
― Natalie Wexler, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

“Reading tests, Willingham has written, are really “knowledge tests in disguise.” Test-takers don’t need deep understanding; a passing familiarity with pneumonia or Greek mythical heroes will do. The tests don’t directly assess content knowledge; they simply draw on it to try to assess comprehension.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Hochman discovered that writing”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“If teachers organize their read-alouds by topic instead of the skill-of-the-week”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“I—and many others—are arguing in favor of an approach to literacy that systematically builds children’s knowledge, ideally through a logically sequenced, content-rich curriculum”
― Natalie Wexler, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

“guide poor readers to use the same techniques to monitor and control their thinking, a process called metacognition.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Unlike the skill of riding a bike—or decoding words—comprehension skills and strategies arent transferable.”
― Natalie Wexler, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

“To advance students up the ladder of text complexity, teachers were going to have to show them how to “read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Core Knowledge is about “exposure, not mastery.” In other words, it’s okay if students don’t absorb every detail presented in the dense “domains.” What’s important is that they absorb the big ideas, which they’ll be exposed to in multiple ways.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“One national survey found that 72 percent of respondents identified”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“Evidence has also emerged that casts doubt on the reliability of the similar tests routinely used in classrooms to assign students to their individual reading levels. The Benchmark Assessment System”
― Natalie Wexler, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

“any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“In fact, Bloom meant that knowledge and comprehension are prerequisites for higher-order thinking, and that teachers should never ask students to start analyzing or evaluating a topic until first ensuring they have a solid understanding of it. Cognitive science has since provided scientific support for Bloom’s intended approach; we can think critically only when we have factual information at our fingertips—or to be more precise, stored in our long-term memory. That enables us to devote the limited space available in working memory to analysis. Memorizing and understanding is a crucial step to developing so-called twenty-first-century skills like critical thinking. The more you know about a particular topic, the better able you are to think about it critically.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it

“the three shifts.” The first shift is that students need regular practice reading complex text; the second is that they need to be able to ground their claims in evidence from the text; and the third is that students must have “extensive opportunities to build knowledge” through “content-rich nonfiction.”
― Natalie Wexler, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--and How to Fix it