Why We Build Knowledge (Ft. Kelly Gallagher)

Dear colleague,

In Kelly Gallagher's new book, To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge, he offers an abundance of mini-sermon material for the Value of building knowledge.

As the title proclaims, Gallagher's apologetics for knowledge-building focus especially on the role that knowledge plays in reading comprehension. But throughout the book (and in the conversation I had with Gallagher; see the video below), further arguments emerge to support the idea that all of our classrooms should be knowledge-rich environments:

• “You have to know stuff to read stuff, but you really have to know stuff to write stuff” (p. 5).
• Knowledge undergirds good thinking, specifically in doing things like visualizing, questioning, making predictions, or drawing inferences (pp. 9-12).
• Knowledge-building is in large part vocabulary building — just knowing words, what they mean, how their meanings compare to other words — and as we get rich in words, we become rich in our ability to comprehend and think (Ch 2).
• Knowledge-building affects our comprehension of even the simplest forms of communication — e.g., sentences, political cartoons, memes, tweets — and as we own more knowledge, we gain the ability to play with the infinite complexities of sentence construction (Ch 3).
• Knowledge-building helps us talk back to articles and news stories and to rise above the storm surge of clickbait and “angertainment” that pervades the Internet (Ch 4).
• Lack of prior knowledge is the key obstacle students face when reading whole-class texts; as we develop prior knowledge in advance of reading texts, we can be amazed at the good feeling that comes with doing a hard thing (Ch 5).

These are just some of the many apologetics Gallagher provides for creating knowledge-rich curricula and classrooms, no matter where or what we teach. (And if you're concerned about whose knowledge we're teaching…there's a whole chapter for that, too.)

But enough of me talking — let's hear from the man himself. Below you'll find a video of a long-from interview in which Kelly and I discuss the ideas in his new book.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR