In today's episode, we hear from educator and author Kelly Gallagher, whose new book To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff is out now. Discover why background knowledge isn't just about being well-read. It's about being prepared to navigate a world brimming with information, and misinformation.
Kelly shares the inspiration behind his Article of the Week work and explores how background knowledge is critical in every phase of literacy development, from the individual word level all the way through to full-length books. Tune in as we explore his transformative journey from teaching literature to fostering literacy in an age where critical thinking is more important than ever.
Transcript
Kelly Gallagher:
I think the book originated sort of in my mind years ago because when I was teaching high school, I recognized that students didn't know things. And you have to know things to read things, right? I was recently looking at a cartoon, and it showed a woman in bed who had pulled the covers up and the husband was bursting in the door and the caption was, "All right, where is he?" And when you looked on the floor, there was another man's clothes strewn all over the place, but if you look carefully, it was Waldo's shirt. So when he says, "Where is he," and you know it's Waldo, it's funny.
Edie:
It's funny.
Kelly:
But if you'd never heard of Where's Waldo, you can read the words. It's not a fluency issue. It's not a phonemic awareness issue. You got to know stuff to actually understand this stuff. And I realized years ago that my kids, when I was teaching grade 12, my kids would walk out of the classroom door at the end of the year and they could identify foreshadowing in Lord of the Flies, but they didn't know who the Vice President of the United States is.
And so that was a real turning point. Many years ago, I started this thing called the Article of the Week because I realized I'm not a literature teacher, I'm a literacy teacher. And this idea that you have to know stuff to read stuff, I kind of knew that going in. But one of the detours it took me on towards was this idea, you have to know stuff to push back on stuff. You can't argue about a ballot proposition. You can't argue against a president's proposal if you don't know what you're talking about.
And so it seems to me that this building of knowledge is really, really critical to building critical human beings. And the argument I've heard in the past was, "Well, why do you have to teach them stuff? They have a phone. You can look it up right away."
Yes and no. I mean, you could look things up right away, but you have to, if you have to look up everything that you're reading, it's going to slow your reading. You're not going to understand. You're going to have to stop. It's just the more you know, the better you read. The better you read, the more you know. It's like this positive cycle that we want to get kids into.
Edie:
But then also, if you're looking stuff up, I feel like you talk about how you still need background knowledge to kind of be up against this click and go reading or all of the decisions you have to make when you get into the digital space of information. You still have to know stuff to make decisions in that space.
Kelly:
You have to know stuff to know what to read. You have to know stuff to know what not to read. If you know for example a website is coming at you from a particular point of view, a particular political bent, a particular organization, what's the audience and what's the purpose of that, is if you don't know the audience, if you don't know the intended purpose of it, then you're vulnerable.
I think it was maybe even George Orwell who said, "It's okay if you don't want to think. Other people will do it for you." Right? And I just think in an age where misinformation is coming at you at all angles, at all times, you have to know things to be able to critically consume what's coming at you.
Edie:
Let's back up to the Article of the Week because I want to hear about that more. I think you started it kind of around that same time when you realized your students didn't know who the vice president was. But I want to hear a little bit more about why you started it, what it is, how you implement it in your class.
Kelly:
So it's probably been about 20 years ago.
Edie:
Yeah, I think you said maybe Dick Cheney was vice president at the time, yeah.
Kelly:
And I remember the United States had at that time invaded Iraq. And my students didn't even know where Iraq was on a map. And so I brought in an article for them to read and I was employing one of my favorite reading strategies, is when I give them an article, I often give them two different color highlighters. And I would say to them in yellow highlight what you know, and pink is, uh-oh, I don't know.
And what's cool about that strategy is you can walk a room and without having to talk to kids, you can see where their trouble spots are. You can see if they all have the same trouble spots. And I'll never forget it. I walked up to a young lady, student of mine, 17 years old, and she said, "Mr. Gallagher, I don't get this part right here." And I'll never forget the exact phrase she had highlighted. It said, "The lifeblood of al-Qaeda." And she says, "I don't know what this means." And I said, I kind of went into reading teacher mode. "Well, let's look at the context. Let's look at this, this." And as I was trying to get her to wrestle with it, she turned to me and she said, "Mr. Gallagher, I don't even know who this al guy is."
Edie:
Oh, yeah, yeah, right.
Kelly:
We were at war. She's sitting in a classroom with kids entering draft age, and she doesn't know who al of al-Qaeda is. And for me, it was just a flashbulb moment. Why are we spending all this time in Lord of the Flies when this is a much bigger issue? She's graduating a month later and she doesn't know things. She's heading off into the world unarmed and unprepared for what's coming. And so that was the impetus for it.
And I would say this, too. There was a moment after that where I told this story in a workshop and I was in Washington DC or I was in Virginia, very close to Washington DC, and I told the story of al-Qaeda and how the kid didn't know it. And this guy came up to me at the break and he said, "I'm a history teacher. I've taught history for 20 years. My school is 10 miles from the White House, and I have a class where not a single kid could tell me who the Vice President of the United States is." So it just dawned on me, this transition from literature teacher to literacy teacher was critical in helping our kids become readers of the world.
Edie:
This is making me think about something you talk about in the book. What is the difference between teaching strategies and teaching knowers?
Kelly:
Yeah. I mean, we all love strategies. Teachers love strategies. I love to buy books that have strategies in them. I've written books that have strategies in it. This book has strategies in it.
Edie:
Totally, yeah.
Kelly:
But you can have every strategy you want, but if you, let's say you're reading something about the International Monetary Fund. If you don't know what hyperinflation is, it doesn't matter what tools are on your readers tool belt. You could try this to understand it. You could try that. And so what I want to say is it's not a call for anti-strategy. What it is, it's a call, is that the pendulum has gone too far into strategy land, not far enough into building knowers because that is the foundation.
There's one study that I found really fascinating in the book is they found that the amount of knowledge a kid has is far more indicative of success than socioeconomic status. That of course, they're often closely related. If you don't have money, you don't have books and you don't learn. But if you are in a socially disadvantaged situation, but you live next to the public library or you have parents who are very dialed in, the amount of knowledge you have has twice the influence of socioeconomic status on your advancement in school. So studies like that are things that I came across that I found were really, really interesting.
Edie:
I'd love to talk a little bit about how you've structured this book and structured your thinking.
Kelly:
The more research I did, the more it came obvious to me that prior knowledge really starts at the word level. You have to have words to understand things. And if you don't have words, you lose the capacity to understand things. And my concern, and I think this is a Maryanne Wolf term, is that many of the students that I was in front of for all those years, especially late, and particularly with the teachers I'm working with post-pandemic, many students are suffering from word poverty.
And if you suffer from word poverty, you suffer from idea poverty because the words are what enable you to think about things. And so limiting ... This is why in every repressive regime that's ever lived, they try to restrict information. They don't want you to think.
Edie:
When did that thinking come into play where you're like, "Okay, I'm going to start at the word level and sort of build up"?
Kelly:
I've outlined every book I've written, and I've never followed the outline.
Edie:
Yeah.
Kelly:
It's like I start with a roadmap, but the act of writing is generative. It leads you to thinking that's unexpected. And I think that's part of the problem with writing in schools is that writing has often become an exercise in answering questions instead of an exercise to explore where your thinking might go. Read chapter four, here's four questions is very different than read chapter four, tell me what you're thinking now.
And so when I started writing, I wasn't even thinking at the word level. But once something triggered and I went there, and then when I read word level, then I went, "Well, that affects the sentence level." And then when I started digging into the sentence level, that affects the paragraph and passage level, and all of a sudden this outline that I started with was out the door, out the window, and I go, "This is the way it's going to go."
And so it was through the act of writing that sort of led me to that structure. I kind of like it. We got to think about prior knowledge at the word level, the sentence level, the passage level, the article level, the book level.
What I want to say is when I got to the sentence level, the part that was really interesting to me was that kids who understand sentence construction, they understand how sentences are built, are much more likely to develop that ability to write, but it's much more likely to remember almost everything that's in the sentence. Whereas kids who don't understand sentence construction might read a compound complex sentence, and they might only really zero in on one part.
And so teaching kids the knowledge of how sentences are constructed not only helped their writing ability, but what happened was once the kids kind of started figuring out, oh, these are different ways you can do sentences, it actually made them better readers as well, which I think is really fascinating.
Edie:
I loved when you included passages and then you would say, "I don't know what that means. Do you know what that means?" You include some of these really difficult passages. And it helped me remember what it felt like to be a student who had no prior knowledge coming into a really difficult text.
Kelly:
I mean, I taught Hamlet 25 years, and there's this tendency, "Why can't you get this? It's not that hard." 'Cause you forget what it was like when you were 17 years old. And what I want to say, I want to prove, and I think Tom Newkirk asked this of me many years ago. He said, "When was the last time in a middle school or high school, the kids actually watched the teacher struggle?"
And so one of my favorite homework assignments I did somewhere in the year was, "Bring me something you think I will have a hard time reading." And then I wrestle with it in front, because if I don't do that, they think I have been born with a reading gene they do not possess because I do all the hard reading behind the curtain. In fact, I say in one of my books, it's time for the Great Oz to come out from behind the curtain and model this.
We never stop learning how to read, which also gets into readability issues too, which is a very slippery slope because I'm a reader, but I don't have a readability level. I have several readability levels. It depends on what I'm reading. You give me a book on baseball, my reading level's through the roof. You give me a book on ...
Edie:
You can talk back to that. No problem.
Kelly:
You give me a book on how to rewire something in a computer and an automobile, then I'm going to exhibit the same avoidance strategies that I've seen in room 301 forever.
And so it's interesting that readability is often tied to factors that are outside of the book, primarily prior knowledge, but often motivation as well like if you're super motivated to read something.
I do sort of make a counter-argument in the book too, that we shouldn't avoid all difficult reading, that there's an actual value in having kids read a little bit at their frustration level with teacher guidance and help. And I mentioned in the book that I was reading a book by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and I was on chapter three, and there were all kinds of things that I didn't understand that I was reading, but there were two or three things that I never understood before that I pulled from that reading. And so for me, that wrestling match was worth it.
Edie:
That's sort of how you keep learning to read, right? It's the only way we learn to read and then keep learning to read.
Kelly:
We talk in the book about-
Edie:
Pushing a little-
Kelly:
... a connective web. You have to build a web.
Edie:
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Kelly:
And once you have a web, it's easier to connect more things to the web. But if your web is really tiny, it's hard to connect things. It's hard to make a text to world connection if you don't know the world. It's hard to make a text to book connection if you haven't read books. And so it's trying as early, at the earliest age possible to build sort of a background of knowledge for kids so that they have things to attach things to.
Edie:
What do you hope teachers take away from this book?
Kelly:
I guess one last thing I'd like teachers to think about is this big idea that how much you know today is indicative of how much you're going to learn tomorrow. So when we go in the classroom and we decide what knowledge am I going to teach them, how much do they need, how much is too much, where do they need it, when do they need it, I think that is where the art of teaching resides.
Edie:
Thanks for tuning in today. To read a full transcript and learn more about Kelly's new book, visit blog.heinemann.com.
About the Author
Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) taught at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, California for 35 years. He is the coauthor, with Penny Kittle, of Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, as well as the bestselling 180 Days. Kelly is also the author of several other books on adolescent literacy, most notably Readicide and Write Like This. He is the former co-director of the South Basin Writing Project at California State University, Long Beach and the former president of the Secondary Reading Group for the International Literacy Association.
