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the big idea: A negle

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SEAN A. WALMSLEY
doi:10.1598/RT.60.3.9

merican children, according to national surveys, seem to have well-developed basic literacy skills. But they falter when it comes
to critical or thoughtful literacy (National Center
for Education Statistics, 2004). Given the amount
of time and attention paid to basic literacy
especially under the aegis of the No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001 (2002)perhaps we shouldnt

be surprised by these findings. Indeed, a small

study I recently undertook in a rural upstate New
York school district suggested that engaging children in big ideas is not a common practice. Of
126 teaching or learning episodes observed in K6
classrooms over a 3-day period, only 4 involved exposing children to or discussing big ideas with
them. In most instances, I could not easily have

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imagined students being engaged in big ideas, either because the teaching or learning activity was
focused on something quite specific, like decoding
or writing mechanics (where big-idea discussions
would not have been appropriate), or because the
topic under discussion didnt easily lend itself to
big ideas (e.g., having students talk about what they
did over the weekend). In other words, I not only
observed very few instances where students were
engaged in big ideas but also very few in which
they easily could have been. In this article, I suggest that its time to focus again on big ideas.

What exactly are big ideas and

why teach them?
I define a big idea as the main point of a book,
magazine article, argument, or film; the moral of a
story or the underlying theme of a novel; what an
author, poet, speaker, or artist is really trying to
communicate; and, finally, the life lessons and
deeper understandings a reader, listener, or viewer
takes from a text, a work of art, or a performance.
In reading, big ideas are associated with whole
texts, not parts of them. They are not the same as
the main idea of a sentence or paragraph.
One reason to teach U.S. students about big
ideas is because they arent strong in critical literacy. But there are more profound reasons:
Understanding big ideas is critical to full participation in work, life, and democracyespecially in
the era of the 30-second in-depth analysis. For
example, the media seem to avoid complex topics.
As I write this article, the United States is debating the future of Social Securitysurely a big
ideabut what do adults, let alone young workers
who will be most affected by changes to it, actually know about the issue? As the media become
more focused on the trivial, educators need to become more focused on the substantial.
Understanding big ideas also serves children
well in many states English language arts assessments, especially at the high school level. (In my
state, New York, questions on the statewide English
Regents assessment demand critical analysis and
evaluation of big ideas.)
Finally, readers, listeners, and viewers can enter text at multiple levels (it is not necessary, as
Bloom [1956] suggested, that text must be entered

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at literal levels before it can be engaged at higher

levels). Encouraging children to focus on the big
ideas of a text promotes understanding of not only
big ideas but also smaller details. In fact, stronger
readers routinely use their knowledge of the big
ideas to work through and understand the text at
sentence and paragraph levels.
Big ideas reveal themselves in different ways.
In some cases, they stare the reader in the face. For
example, in Cowchers Antarctica (1991), a nonfiction book about the delicate balance between
penguins, birds, seals, and humans in Antarctica,
the big idea is explicit in the final pages:
The penguins and the seals have always shared their
world with ancient enemies, the skuas and the leopard
seals. But these new arrivals [referring to humans] are
more dangerous. The seals and penguins cannot tell yet
whether they will share or destroy their beautiful
Antarctica.... (unpaged)

Fables, especially, wear their big ideas on their

sleeves. Some even repeat their big idea at the end
of the fable:
The Crow and the Pitcher (Aesop)
A Crow, half-dead with thirst, came upon a pitcher that
had once been full of water; but when the Crow put its
beak into the mouth of the pitcher he found that only
very little water was left in it and that he could not
reach far enough down to get at it. He tried, and he
tried, but at last had to give up in despair. Then a
thought came to him, and he took a pebble and dropped
it into the pitcher. Then he took another pebble and
dropped it into the pitcher. Then he took another pebble and dropped that into the pitcher. Then he took another pebble and dropped that into the pitcher. Then he
took another pebble and dropped that into the pitcher.
Then he took another pebble and dropped that into the
pitcher. At last, at last, he saw the water mount up near
him, and after casting in a few more pebbles he was
able to quench his thirst and save his life. Little by little
does the trick.

In most good childrens literature, big ideas lie

under the surface of the text, revealing themselves
indirectly. For example, Trapanis (1998) retelling
of The Itsy Bitsy Spider recounts the four episodes
in which Itsy Bitsy tries, in vain, to climb up the
water spout, the kitchen wall, and the yellow pail,
but finally climbs a maple tree where she successfully spins her web. Nowhere does Trapani explicitly state the big idea if at first you dont succeed,

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try, try again, but thats the unmistakable big idea

to which each episode inexorably contributes.
The big ideas of some books are even less
transparentperhaps their authors never really intended them to have big ideas. A good example is
Morriss (1993) nonfiction book Hats, Hats, Hats,
which presents photographs of hats with simple
captions (e.g., Work Hats, Play Hats). But as
you read this book, you are drawn into big ideas
about how different kinds of hats serve different
purposes in different situations and especially in
different cultures.
Further toward the more obscure end of this
scale are texts that present big ideas in opaque ways.
For me, despite repeated attempts (on my own, and
with expert guidance) to understand Ritchies exhibit Proposition Player (Massachusetts Museum
of Modern Art, 2004), I am still hopelessly out of
my depth. School children in the middle and upper
grades struggle repeatedly with big-idea poems
many of the same ones (e.g., Keats, Wordsworth,
Milton) with which I struggled as a child growing
up in England.

How should we teach big ideas?

We need to engage children with big ideas in
a variety of ways. We need to infuse big ideas into
daily conversation. We need to read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that express big ideas. We need
to have children experience big ideas in a variety of
media (art, sculpture, architecture, drama, film)
both receptively and expressively. Its hard to understand or discuss big ideas in material that has
precious few of them, or in the content-less confines of what Schmoker (2001) called the Crayola
curriculum in which students spend countless
hours coloring worksheets. While they are valuable
for other purposes, series books (e.g., Famous Five,
Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown) are not
good sources for big ideas. Nor is cutesy poetry.
Instead, we should select books and other materials
that have what Peterson and Eeds (1990) called
multiple layers of meaning. Their favorite example of a multilayered book was Tuck Everlasting
(Babbit, 1975). It wouldnt be difficult to select
others from the hundreds published each year: the
work of Betsy Byars, Cynthia Rylant, Jane Yolen,
Gary Paulsen, Eloise Greenfield, and Eve Bunting

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come immediately to mind. To start with, we

should choose fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in
which the big ideas are fairly simple and easily accessible. These books need to be read to and with
children, and they should be made available for
children to read on their own.
We should model, teach, and have children
practice strategies for accessing and understanding big ideas. To begin with, modeling might simply consist of telling children what the big idea of a
book is before starting to read it aloud. Before reading Trapanis (1998) The Itsy Bitsy Spider, a
teacher could say,
Have you ever heard of the expression If at first you
dont succeed, try, try again? Well, this is a story
about a spider who at first didnt succeed, but she tried
and tried again. Lets read and find out....

Later, a teacher could explain to children how

he or she figured out the big idea of a story or
poem. Later still, the teacher might teach children
techniques like asking questions or making textto-self, text-to-world, or text-to-text connections
(Keene & Zimmerman, 1997) and show them how
to use these techniques independently. Socratic
seminars (Adler, 1982; Ball & Brewer, 1996) also
provide excellent instructional strategies for teaching students to access, grapple with, and understand big ideas
One interesting way to build childrens understanding of big ideas is to use multiple texts and
build understanding within and across them. Heres
an example, using two of Kuskins (1998) poems
from her anthology The Sky Is Always in the Sky
(1998). A teacher might start by sharing A Bug
Sat in a Silver Flower (p. 29). Its a poem about a
little bug thinking silver thoughts who is suddenly eaten by a bigger bug. Asking the children what
big ideas came to them as they heard or read the
poem would probably elicit notions about the food
chain: In nature, bigger bugs routinely eat smaller
bugs, and smaller bugs in turn eat even smaller
ones. They might also raise the point that in nature, not surviving is often a matter of chance
being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I see
this daily in the summer at my pond, as the blue
heron picks off the goldfish and small bass I so
carefully stock. As with Kuskins smaller bugs, the
heron is simply doing to my fish what my fish are
doing to smaller creatures like flies or larvae.

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Next, the teacher might share another of

Kuskins poems from the same anthology,
Buggity-Buggity Bug (p. 26). This particular bug
was wandering aimlessly when all of a sudden, it
too met its end, but this time under the shoe of a human being. The teacher can initiate a discussion
about the big ideas of this poem. Children can
come up with similar ideas as for the first
discussionthe notion of being in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Some children might latch onto
the seemingly careless and thoughtless act of the
shoes in relation to the unsuspecting bug underfoot.
Finally, the teacher can ask about the big ideas
of the two poems combined. Children might see the
difference between what happens to a small bug as
part of the food chain as opposed to what happens
to some of them as a result of human intervention
(intentional or not). In this case, of course, it looks
unintentionalcareless at worst. But the discussion
could easily lead to intentional acts of destruction of
bugs by humans, as in the case of pesticides used
around the home or garden. Whats interesting is
how there are big ideas associated with each of the
poems individually, but additional ones emerge
when the two poems are discussed together.
It always surprises and disappoints me that
while so much really good literature is read to children in the early grades, the discussions that take
place around this literature so frequently focus
on trivial aspects of the books rather than their
big ideas. A good example is Chrysanthemum
(Henkes, 1991), a book about a mouse of the same
name who gets teased mercilessly when she goes to
school for the first time. The most frequent followup activity I see in early primary classrooms involves children doing projects on their names. But
Chrysanthemum really isnt a book about names,
its a wonderful illustration of the proverb Dont
judge a book by its cover, or the need for children
not to be swayed by the opinions of others. It isnt
that researching childrens names is a bad idea, its
missing the opportunity to broaden and deepen
childrens understanding of big ideas.
Without such opportunities for critical thought,
many children will not develop these understandings, which may not hurt them much during the elementary grades, but will come back to haunt them
in secondary school as the conceptual density of
material across all subject areas increases.

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As teachers, we should be able, by the middle

of first grade, to simply pose the question, So,
whats the big idea? and have children engage in a
discussion of Chrysanthemum (Henkes, 1991), or a
nonfiction book about recycling, or one of Karla
Kuskins poems about bugs, that engages the big
ideas of these works. But we also, as Brown (1991)
suggested, ought to be holding regular
conversations in classrooms about big ideas in generalconversations about current events, history,
science, art, music, politics, environment, and so
onso that children can build up knowledge about
these topics, appreciate their importance, and use
the knowledge to inform and strengthen their understanding of everything they read, hear, or view.
Walmsley teaches at the State University of
New York, University at Albany (ED334,
Albany, NY 12222, USA). E-mail
[email protected].
References
Adler, M. (1982). The Paideia proposal: An educational manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
Babbit, N. (1975). Tuck everlasting. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Ball, W.H., & Brewer, P.F. (1996). Socratic questioning: Then
and now. In R.L. Canady & M.D. Retting (Eds.), Teaching
in the block: Strategies for engaging active learners (pp.
2931). Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education Press.
Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The
classification of educational goals. New York: Longman.
Brown, R.G. (1991). Schools of thought: How the politics of
literacy shape thinking in the classroom. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Cowcher, H. (1991). Antarctica. New York: Sunburst.
Henkes, K. (1991). Chrysanthemum. New York: Mulberry.
Keene, E.O., & Zimmerman, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought:
Teaching comprehension in a readers workshop.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Kuskin, K. (1998). The sky is always in the sky. New York:
HarperCollins.
Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art. (2004). The interventionists: Art in the social sphere. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Morris, A., & Heyman, K. (1993). Hats, hats, hats. New York:
Trophy.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2004).
Percentage of students, by reading achievement level,
grade 4: 19922003. The nations report card: Reading.
Washington, DC: National Center for Education
Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S.
Department of Education. Retrieved March 9, 2005,
from http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/results
2003/natachieve-g4.asp

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No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-110, 115

Stat. 1425 (2002).
Peterson, R., & Eeds, M. (1990). Grand conversations:
Literature groups in action. New York: Scholastic.

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Schmoker, M. (2001). The Crayola curriculum. Education

Week, 21(8), 4244.
Trapani, I. (1998). The itsy bitsy spider. New York:
Whispering Coyote Press.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.