Elementary teachers pave the way for their students to be able to engage in rigorous project-based learning (PBL) by ensuring that they develop essential reading skills. This is accomplished through natural spelling and vocabulary practice, which can help students build content knowledge across disciplines.
Unfortunately, schools do not always emphasize the importance of building content knowledge.
For example, Jessica Winter notes in The New Yorker that reading instruction often focuses on skill development and strategy guessing without the intentional development of rich content knowledge and academic vocabulary in disciplines such as science and social studies. A curriculum based strictly on high skill development, collaboration, and strategic guesswork equates to what she calls “empathy-based literacy.”
As a former high school science teacher, I found it difficult for students to think critically about things they didn’t fully understand at the outset. The solution is to provide students with rich content knowledge that they can read, write, and talk about in the classroom.
Cultivating Rigor
Rigorous PBL is an inquiry-based approach that follows a specific pathway that enables students to develop three levels of learning: the
- Surface (I know ideas or skills).
- Depth (I can connect ideas and/or skills), and
- Mobility (I can apply ideas or skills to multiple contexts).
Rigorous PBL is based on an understanding that knowledge of the subject area is critical to successful learning across the levels of rigor. It also requires equal intensity and integration of all three levels, which develops as students engage in daily tasks that require reading, writing, and speaking. To be most effective, these activities should be addressed by ensuring that teachers follow best practices based on the science of reading.
Science of Reading and Rigorous PBL
In rigorous PBL, students need content knowledge development to effectively learn how to read, write, and speak. Without superficial knowledge, students cannot learn deeply and transferably within and across disciplines. Research shows that without a rich content base, these skills are not transferable.
Common PBL approaches fall short in building and deepening content knowledge. Often, the culprit is the ideology that students will not be motivated by the content or will be disempowered by having to participate in direct instruction. The result is an “empathy-based PBL approach” that builds on pedagogical skills such as problem solving, collaboration, and research without the knowledge necessary to successfully meet all levels of complexity.
However, rigorous PBL is based on the idea that knowledge is power, and we must design and teach strategies that not only activate but also embed content knowledge.
Furthermore, rigorous PBL is based on the concept of balance. We need to combine learning to read and reading to learn for beginning graders, and we need to deepen their content knowledge.
4 Strategies for Increasing Content Knowledge
1. Juxtapose skill and knowledge learning intentions with success criteria. Ensuring that students are clear about learning expectations has been well documented in countless studies and books. The question is, to what extent do we balance our expectations for students between content and skills? This is especially important when we are dyslexic. As journalist and author Natalie Wexler writes in The Atlantic, content should be embedded when we learn literacy.
Let’s help students realize that literacy skills are essential in fully acquiring what they learn. Skills should be recognized as the tools we use to answer our “need to know” within and across disciplines.
Place content-based outcomes next to skill outcomes in your unit plans, in your syllabi, and when building clarity with students.
2. Incorporate social studies and science into literacy investigation units. Typically, in elementary school, we have 30 to 100 minutes of literacy lessons. In rigorous PBL, it is recommended that direct instruction in science and social studies be incorporated into these modules by.
- Conducting interactive read-alouds and embedding content several grade levels ahead in grammar. Teacher reads the article aloud, students reread it and discuss a short summary in a think-pair-share format.
- Build academic vocabulary with students and use it when previewing texts, reading texts, and discussing texts after reading.
- Provide students with content-rich books for daily reading and writing.
3. Use deep learning strategies to think aloud about content. It is important to have students talk about content. Use protocols such as the Fishbowl, Discussion Mapping, Four A’s, and Final Word Protocols to enable students to comprehend and solidify information.
Because it is much easier to talk about what we read than the actual process of reading and writing, protocols should be viewed as a potential precursor to reading and reported reading. This also applies to writing.
As students engage in these daily activities, teachers should encourage students to use academic language in their discussions.
4. Integrate writing into daily routines. “Thinker’s block hinders writing. That is, students struggle to write when they don’t have much to write about. When students encounter rich content-based readings and conversations, they have a good opportunity to engage in the writing process.
In addition, we need to incorporate writing as a habit into students’ daily lives. One strategy to consider is quick writes to anticipate what students will read, share ideas about a text they are reading, and summarize and reflect on a text.
Making learning content a daily habit of reading, writing, and talking is essential for students to develop all three levels of complexity and is an essential component of rigorous PBL.