Almost forty years ago, E.D. Hirsch published his seminal book, Cultural Literacy, which advanced a simple, albeit paradigm-shifting, premise: Intellectual aptitudes—including literacy itself—depend on knowledge more than skills. To comprehend and analyze a passage about the Battle of Gettysburg, a student would need to know much about key historical dates, American civic ideals, the realities of daily life and warfare in the antebellum south, figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, and, of course, the Civil War itself.
Though a best-seller at the time, Hirsch’s book received cold reviews from critics, accusing him of nationalism, reductionism, paternalism, canonism, arrogance, ethnocentrism, and worse. But in the ensuing decades, other authors such as Robert Pondiscio, Natalie Wexler, and Daniel Willingham have advanced similar arguments, and more and more research has vindicated his simple thesis: Knowledge matters enormously, and knowledge starts with facts.
That being said, the instructional and curricular implications of Hirsch’s claim aren’t self-evident. If knowledge matters more than academic skills, how should administrators and teachers alter the curriculum and instruction in schools to best serve students? We’ve confirmed the theory. Now what does it mean for practice?
Hirsch created the Core Knowledge Foundation, as he believed his insights pointed primarily to the challenge of getting curriculum right: Schools must sequence a knowledge-rich progression of learning both across and within grades. He’s correct about the centrality of curriculum, but there are also instructional practices that teachers can adopt to prioritize knowledge even if their school or district doesn’t adopt Core Knowledge or another knowledge-rich curriculum such as Wit and Wisdom.
In my experience, these practices come in five categories.
Teach and facilitate effective study techniques
Human learning occurs in an exchange between our working and long-term memories. The former is the locus of active thought; it’s the doorway to our long-term memory. But what we think about and consider in our working memory is not guaranteed to stick in our long-term memory and even what we do place there tends to fade over time.
Too often, students rely on methods of study—highlighting, rereading, cramming, summarizing, and repetitively practicing—that are ineffective at making learning stick. Advances in cognitive science have found that these practices and habits do little for the retention of knowledge in long-term memory. Instead, educators can teach students more effective methods for study and incorporate such methods into their own instruction.
For example, quizzing—and being quizzed—is a high-impact practice for the retention of information. When students first encounter a new concept, they may encode it in their long-term memory (if they’re paying attention and understand it), but that new knowledge quickly slips away. However, every time they are asked to recall that piece of information, it increases the likelihood that students will retain it in their long-term memory. Like another thumbtack into a flier on a bulletin board, each act of recall makes new learning more secure.
Teachers can encourage students to use this study habit: Make flash cards, encourage self or partner quizzing, inform parents about its benefits. But they can also work it into their instruction. Several times a week, my opening activities were quick, simple, low-stakes quizzes. Not every assessment has to include deeply analytical, long answer questions. Instead, I’d ask students to recall their vocabulary from this or previous units, remember main characters from previous units, or name historical events related to books that we’d read—ten quick fill-in-the-blank questions to begin the day.
There are other basic academic routines that teachers can incorporate into their lesson. For example, spaced practice, where students relearn or practice information after enough time has passed that they may have forgotten some, has been shown to improve the likelihood that students retain new information. Similarly, interleaved practice, where students practice problem sets of different types, is another high-impact, best practice. (For more ideas, I’d highly recommend the essay “Strengthening the student toolbox.”)
Build a student’s schema
Our present knowledge facilitates future learning. Just as more things adhere to a larger sheet of Velcro, a student who already knows a lot can capture a greater amount of new information. The more we know, the more we learn.
To demonstrate this, in a unique study, researchers first measured participants’ knowledge of baseball and various movies before teaching them facts about these topics. Unsurprisingly, on a follow-up exam, those who knew more about each topic remembered more of the facts that they learned about it. Like bigger Velcro, their knowledge about baseball and movies allowed them to capture more new knowledge.
In a second part of the experiment, the researchers tried to create this net of knowledge from scratch. They taught some participants about more obscure topics (professional beach volleyball and off-Broadway musicals) before providing all of the participants information on the topics. In follow up tests, those who had received prior instruction remembered more about this new information. Pre-instruction builds knowledge for participants to learn yet more.
Teachers can leverage the opening minutes of class to prime students to learn new knowledge. For example, when I taught Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, students knew some things about slavery, but they were by no means experts. So I’d open class with a few images and maps of a typical plantation, pre-readings on related topics, or important vocabulary to help them comprehend the chapter. Not only did they learn this information, but it primed them to glean and retain more from the chapters they’d read.
This can apply across content areas. Any imagery, diagrams, difficult vocabulary, or even pre-explanation before a full lesson or challenging reading will prime students to learn the day’s material more effectively.
Don’t forget memorization
My school opens many days with a poem recitation and every quarter the students in each grade must recite a poem at assembly before the entire school. It’s a delight to hear kindergarteners mispronounce their “r’s” in a Robert Louis Stevenson poem while the American flag flaps in the background, but there’s a strong knowledge-based argument for memorization, too.
Perhaps students may initially learn the words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or a Dickinson poem without profound understanding. Nonetheless, young children can delight in poetry—the rhythm, the symmetry, the sing-song nature—even before they fully understand the words. They get fleeting images that store in their memory even if some of the finer points elude them. They also store complex syntax and familiarize themselves with unique grammar constructions to employ in their own writing. Complex language becomes second nature.
It is common parlance in education to hear “I want to teach students how to think, not what to think.” But the how must begin with the what. Critical thought requires knowledge. For our students to think well, we must give them something to think about. Like a painter and their paints, our students need intellectual supplies to think with: beautiful imagery, profound arguments, pithy lines, and famous phrases.
Sometimes this provision of knowledge begins with something as simple as requiring students to memorize the definition of each part of speech. The memorization of facts or definitions is nowhere near sufficient for fully understanding abstract concepts or historical events, but it’s certainly an essential part of it.
Teachers might also consider using knowledge organizers. Largely unknown in the United States, they’re popular in the United Kingdom; they’re the bangers and mash of the British education world. Popularized at the highly successful Michaela School in London, knowledge organizers are essentially study guides that a teacher hands out at the beginning of a unit. They’re simple, ideally a single page, and list the key concepts, vocabulary, and knowledge that a teacher hopes students will memorize by the unit’s end.
A unit of The Magician’s Nephew, for example, may list key vocabulary such as narcissism, literary concepts like analogy, and external knowledge to learn such as “the Biblical creation story.” A knowledge organizer in science might include unit-specific vocabulary, essential diagrams of heat transfer, free body diagrams, water cycles, and essential formulas. A history organizer would include key dates of major events, significant figures, and important concepts. Teachers can use these for making flashcards, study tools, or the basis for analysis questions.
Read out loud
American education has no bylaws dictating that all reading in school must be done individually and silently. It’s a primary method through which everyone acquires new knowledge, but if passages are difficult, students may spend too much energy parsing complex syntax or advanced vocabulary to actually learn what’s in a particular passage or chapter.
Reading out loud to students allows them to access articles, stories, and knowledge that they might not otherwise be able to independently. In the higher grades, this could mean reading aloud complex passages from older works written in archaic language, such as America’s founding documents. How many of us have memories of sitting down to read our assigned Shakespeare at home only to face an impenetrable wall of early-modern English that our adolescent brains simply couldn’t decipher? This is a waste. Instead, teachers can and should read aloud from such texts with their mature fluency so students can more readily grasp the language and pause to explain important passages.
Nor should teachers confine themselves to fiction. For example, studies find that reading informational texts out loud in social studies improves both the content knowledge and the literacy of students. In fact, teachers pause to ask more questions and more complex questions when reading out loud from nonfiction texts than from fiction.
Keep questions simple
Everybody loves Bloom’s Taxonomy. Like salt at a restaurant table, it shows up in almost every discussion about education. But everybody also loves to misuse it, faulting basic comprehension as somehow less important—lower status—than analysis or synthesis. For example, in an article for the popular website Edutopia, the author implores his readers to encourage “higher order thinking,” lambasting standardized tests for requiring only “recall or comprehension.”
Yet in his 1956 Handbook that introduced the concept, Benjamin Bloom explained that he classified cognitive abilities in his taxonomy simply to help teachers “discuss these problems with greater precision,” not to rank or judge them. In fact, he refers to knowledge acquisition as the “primary” objective in education. Knowledge and comprehension are the basis of, not inferior to, far more complex thinking.
Too many teachers want to jump right to analysis or critique when teaching new concepts or reading articles, instead of asking simple, basic recall and comprehension questions. Research confirms that students who answer basic factual review questions after reading a text better retain information from that reading. Teachers should never stop with basic recall, but simple questions of comprehension must precede complex questions of analysis.
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Hirsch is correct in recommending that a knowledge-rich education is largely a curricular affair. When curricula are well planned and sequenced, schools can more effectively build in low-stakes quizzes throughout units, embed vocabulary terms into questions across units, guarantee that students encounter new eras and concepts in every grade, and include the most effective classroom activities. That being said, teachers who practice the suggestions above will help their students build knowledge even if their school or district hasn’t universally adopted such curricula and practices.
