The Knowledge Matters Podcast

Discover the fascinating connections between the Science of Reading and the Science of Learning. The hosts discuss how long-term memory impacts reading comprehension and why holistic reading is superior to screen excerpts. They also emphasize that clear writing fosters clearer thinking in students. This engaging conversation with educators and researchers highlights the essential goals of memory retention and knowledge-building in education.

Join Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, as he discusses the vital link between writing and reading comprehension. He shares insights on how writing enhances retention and understanding of content. The conversation dives into practical strategies for effective writing instruction, emphasizing the role of revision and collaborative learning. Explore how integrating writing into the curriculum can engage students, particularly multilingual learners, and improve their overall learning experiences.

In this engaging discussion, Kristen McQuillan, Chief Program Officer at StandardsWork, Kyair Butts, an award-winning teacher, and Susan Neuman, a distinguished researcher at NYU, delve into the vital role of knowledge in reading comprehension. They reveal how a rich foundation of linguistic, cultural, and content knowledge empowers students to engage more deeply with texts. The speakers critique traditional reading strategies, advocating for a more integrated approach that fosters genuine understanding, especially for diverse learners.

Season 2 Episode 6 | Explorers boldly venture into unfamiliar worlds, where confidence, curiosity, knowledge, and persistence are rewarded. When students approach texts like explorers, they bring these same qualities to the task—a mindset cognitive scientists call the “standard of coherence.” Such reading is purposeful, engaging, and expands the reader’s horizons. Reading anywhere, anytime is not just doable. It’s joyful.In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben discuss the key ingredients that power persistent reading and support students to apply the “standard of coherence” mindset when they read, including how the standard of coherence and related practices helped students accelerate their literacy development at the Libens’ NYC school.The notion of “coherence” sets a high bar for a reader’s expectations of their abilities and the text. They expect that it will make sense, and if it doesn’t, they will know what to do. With this mindset, students immediately apply practiced strategies to comprehend a text: closely read and reread, account for and explain what they know and don’t know, and use evidence from the text to back up those assertions and ideas. Expert Margaret McKeown talks about the key role comprehension monitoring plays in the process.The Libens then talk with three teachers who have experienced new curriculum and helped students develop the standard of coherence in their classrooms:Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrisey, who discusses strategies to preview texts and build fluency (spoiler alert: spend time with books, not screens)Patty Collins, a teaching veteran, compares her work as a watercolor painter to how she creatively engages students within the EL Education reading curriculum (which she calls “my medium”)Third-grade teacher Staci McDougall, who discusses how she and her students have grown, by changing classroom practice and building stamina and comprehensionDavid and Meredith also talk about the importance of building stamina to engage with texts. By giving students time to read closely and persist through comprehension strategies, like providing textual evidence, they can become strong and steady readers who can keep focused on complexities over time.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Season 2 Episode 5 | Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? That’s the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s something students encounter all the time.In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling.First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares the origin story of her “juicy sentences” strategy, where teachers divide content-rich sentences into “chunks” and help students build vocabulary and knowledge through focused instruction and discussion. The Libens then share personal examples of two other instructional techniques that foster reading comprehension and the metacognition that supports its growth: explaining the answer and structured journaling.Explaining the answer is just that: asking students to answer a question and explain their response using evidence from the text. The magic lies in choosing questions based on a careful pre-read of the text at hand, not a learning standard. Students learn to identify what they do and don’t understand, and then practice returning to the text to re-read. Finally, the Libens discuss structured journaling, where a teacher chooses an important section of the text and students respond to four questions:  What are the most important ideas here? What don't I understand? How does this connect to what we've been discussing in class - or other texts that we've been reading? Do you have any reflection (aka ‘I wonder’) questions? These techniques focus students on the text while also helping them expand their thinking about what they have read. For example, David recalls how a second-grade student wondered why the author of The Tale of Despereaux described certain settings as light and dark, which sparked a class wide discussion about symbolism. The discussion probes connections between these classroom techniques and cognitive science. Rachel Stack, a former teacher at the school the Libens started and now at Great Minds, shares a compelling story about how she worried her students would get tired of explaining their answers, but they never did.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo R

Season 2 Episode 4 | How do actual teachers and students “center the text” in reading classrooms? In this episode, David and Meredith Liben get specific with teachers and experts about how read alouds and close reading can connect students of all ages and literacy levels to a text—and to one another.Two ideas animate the discussion. First, theory is not terribly helpful without practice. And second, learning to read is (and should be!) a social experience.First, the Libens explore the power of read alouds with three guests, who share real-life examples of interactive ways to engage students with a variety of needs:Inclusive classrooms: Patty Collins teaches third and fourth graders reading from the 1st to the 99th percentile. She uses several models of read alouds to give all of her students access to grade-level text, including whole-class, mixed and leveled small groups, and audiobook technology.Early learners: Reading and vocabulary expert Margaret McKeown focuses young students on words—not pictures—during read alouds, and avoids leading questions. Teachers can read short passages without showing pictures and ask students “What's going on there?” or “What was that all about?”Multilingual students: Desiree Garcia teaches in a bilingual kindergarten classroom where read alouds have fueled an explosion in her students’ vocabulary in both languages. They are excited to share their own ideas and figure out answers by themselves. Then, the Libens talk through close reading, where students read a passage multiple times and carefully find the connections and structure that move a text forward. This starts with teachers reading the text themselves, finding what Meredith calls the “sticky parts,” leading a focused discussion on why these passages are particularly important.Two guests share their experience with close reading: Kyair Butts, a former Baltimore City teacher of the year, uses close reading to give his middle-school students multiple “at bats” that build knowledge and improve vocabulary. He has students annotate the text to leave tracks of their thinking and see how their thinking evolves. Upper elementary teacher Katie Scotti says close reading is “leveling the playing field” between her higher- and lower-achieving students. Reading a text multiple times, and ensuring all students are familiar with the relevant vocabulary and background knowledge, gives every student the chance to understand and talk about a text, including higher-order ideas. While she was worried her students would be bored by close reading, she’s found just the opposite. Kids love it!Key quote: “Every student has that access to that same text. They might have different levels of questions, they might be doing some noticing and wondering while other students are doing a deeper level of analysis. But they're all experiencing the same characters, the same plot. They’re all experiencing the same reactions. . . and all students deserve to have that experience. Reading is a social experience.” (Scotti) For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitt

Season 2 Episode 3 | When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them. But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not the text itself.In this episode, David and Meredith Liben explore what Meredith calls “the tail wagging the dog” in reading comprehension, including examples from personal experience, insights from research, and stories of how they learned to do things differently. The Libens also highlight the costs of a strategy-first approach: missed opportunities for students to engage deeply with the ideas and implications of a text, and activity prompts that ask kids to check their brains at the door as they complete inauthentic exercises. Two guests join the conversation:Literacy expert Margaret McKeown discusses how strategy-focused instruction  is still all too common in classrooms. It’s tangible–and is doomed to fail.Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrissey shares his firsthand experience piloting two ELA curriculums - one that centers on novels and read-alouds, and one that uses book excerpts on a common theme and tests on target strategies. The differences are stark. Finally, the conversation turns to a habit of mind the Libens will discuss later in the season: the standards of coherence. This is a habit of mind where a reader expects they will understand a text, and if it doesn’t make sense, they go back and do the mental work needed to make meaning from what they are reading.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.Key quote: “I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, ‘Hey, kids, today we're gonna learn to do a summary.’ What I would do is: in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, ‘Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that, and move on.” (McKeown)This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Join Erin Hanrahan, an 8th-grade ELA teacher who elevates comprehension through real-world vocabulary exercises, Sean Morrisey, a 5th-grade educator embedding tier-two words in multiple subjects, and Staci McDougall, a 3rd-grade teacher inspiring a love for complex texts. They share innovative techniques linking vocabulary to empathy and current events. Dive into the importance of strategic vocabulary selection for enhancing reading skills and discover how teaching practices can combat the challenges of fostering literacy in today's classrooms.

Season 2 Episode 1 | In today’s reading classrooms, too many kids are not alright. One of the biggest challenges is comprehension–or rather, its absence. Students don't understand what they read well enough to think deeply, connect what they are learning to the wider world, and prepare for the futures they want. On this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben break down reading comprehension: they explain what it is and how it works in the mind of the reader, based on cognitive science. They map this understanding to the classroom experience and share specific ways to support children to read and understand texts. Guests Margaret McKeown and Rachel Stack join the conversation and explain why centering the text is the cornerstone to comprehension.McKeown, one of the originators of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 vocabulary, talks about why centering the text is more important than a series of comprehension strategies. Stack, a former teacher and co-creator of Wit & Wisdom, describes a critical moment in her classroom: seeing her students mine the text for understanding. This episode ends with an excerpt from a discussion the Libens had with a dozen school district leaders, hosted by Curriculum Matters. The research and artifacts mentioned in this episode are all posted on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. Key quote: “We want them in the text all the time, thinking about the text, and what they have to do to make sense of that text. That's really the heart of it.” (McKeown)This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Season 2 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast is here! Teachers and reading experts David and Meredith Liben host “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension,” a six-part podcast series based on their book of the same name.With their signature charm and straight talk, David and Meredith take on an urgent problem in American schools today—kids not understanding what they read—and how reading comprehension can be taught more effectively. Over six digestible episodes, David and Meredith explore how comprehension works in the mind of the reader, the roles of building knowledge and vocabulary, the importance of reading language-rich, grade-level texts, and how text-centered classroom instruction is the key to students’ confidence and reading comprehension. The series features a range of teachers and expert voices, like Margaret McKeown and Lily Wong Fillmore, as well as practical ideas for classroom implementation.For more information, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.