To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge

In the age of click-and-go reading, why do students need to know information when they can just look things up?

Bestselling author Kelly Gallagher argues that to think critically, it’s imperative that we teach kids stuff. Lots of it. Why? Because students who know more are able to read more, and read better.

In To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff, Kelly draws from his own teaching practice to share the importance of building students’ prior knowledge at four levels:

Words: How building knowledge helps students to overcome word poverty

Sentences and Passages: How building knowledge helps students to comprehend “small” reading

Articles: How building knowledge helps students to critically read articles―an important skill in our digital age

Books: How building knowledge moves students away from fake reading and back into reading full-length books

To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff also shows how students can monitor their own comprehension. They can see that many reading difficulties aren’t the result of not being a “good reader”― they simply lack knowledge.

Our students are fortunate to live in an age where so much information is a click away. But to read well―and think well―they need to own that knowledge.