This story will inspire you. A school leader discovers how being more intentional about building world knowledge has a dramatic effect on her students’ academic performance. Teaching reading comprehension skills comes in a weak second to familiarity with a topic and knowledge of its vocabulary and key concepts.
A simple and common sense story. Yet it is a testimony to current instructional priorities focusing largely on skills development that we had to search high and low to find it.
Our thanks to the Achievement Network for its video Building World Knowledge.
- The school leader in this video provides a very concrete illustration of how students who have background knowledge of a subject can read about that subject at a level above what would be predicted.
- While you won’t hear the term “text set” in this video, it’s a good phrase to describe the grouped texts this school now uses. There’s a multiplier effect in student vocabulary acquisition when students read topically-related texts rather than scattershot sources. Find out more about text sets here.
For more on how to build background knowledge, see the Resources for Teachers on the Knowledge Matters website.