My generation was the last of the free-range kids. I was born between Generation X and the millennials, so I saw both the laid-back attitudes and the safetyism concerns of adults. In the summers, I’d ride my bike all over town to my friends’ houses and call home on a rotary phone to check in with my parents.
They’d tell me when to be home, and I’d sometimes use TV shows in the background to keep track of time. If ‘Fun House’ was on, I knew it was time to start heading home. If the 5 o’clock news was on, it was almost dinner time. If I wasn’t near a TV or a phone (which was most of the time), I would guess the time or ask a friend with a digital watch.
My summer adventures required that I knew a few things, so let’s focus on two: knowing how to ride a bike and knowing what my home phone number was in order to check in with my parents.
These are two kinds of knowledge: knowing what and knowing how. I needed to know my phone number (factual knowledge) and how to ride a bike (procedural knowledge). In simpler terms, we call them content and skills.
A long-standing debate is which type of knowledge is more important. Which should be prioritized? Which should we start with first, and for how long? Do we learn best by starting with content or skills? Different education experts have different opinions. My answer at present is that most learning should start with some content and then be applied to skills. The question is: ‘How much content is needed before practicing a skill?’
Well, it depends. It depends on what you’re learning. Is it complex? Is safety involved? Is accuracy important? Does it require proficiency? Is it something to know or something to do? Let’s take my two summer ‘knowings’ as examples. When it came to calling home, I first had to remember my home phone number by repeating it in my head before dialing it. And dialing it every day helped me recall it so well that I can still recall it 30 years later. I had to know it, and then do it.
On the other hand, learning to ride a bike required just a little content knowledge. I needed to know what the handlebars, pedals, and brakes were and what they did, but most of the learning came from practicing the skill of riding the bike. Also, riding a bike across town meant I needed to know traffic rules to keep myself safe. You can see that learning something is not simply about learning content or learning skills but a mix of both, working together to create a knowledgeable, proficient learner.
For teachers, the challenge is figuring out how much content students need before practicing a skill and when to introduce more complex content to lift the skill level. Not enough content can create students who practice with great inaccuracies, making mistakes a habit. Too much content can dull practice, leaving students able to report information but unable to get better at a skill.
How do we strike the right balance? I suggest using an empirical approach to teaching and learning, and trusting those who support such methods. But that is a topic for another essay. For now, let your students’ learning data guide you in checking and evaluating how well you might be balancing content and skills.
The debate on content vs. skills gets tricky when it comes to reading and writing. Both are obviously skills, but they also require a lot of content understanding. It’s true that one gets better at reading and writing by practicing, but it’s also true that a strong foundation in content like phonics, vocabulary, background knowledge, grammar, conventions, and spelling provides the necessary base for understanding, accuracy, and effective practice.
We learn by knowing and by doing. At present, I believe that much learning (except for things we naturally do, like talking, walking, eating, etc.) starts with knowing first—whether it’s a little bit or a little bit more—and then moves to doing. Sometimes the doing happens right away, and sometimes after a little foundation is built. After that, knowing and doing frequently build upon each other over and over, again and again.
What do you think? Is there some type of learning I’m not thinking of that does not require a bit of content first, however brief?
