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Hattie's Golden Rule for Teachers: Know thy Impact

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Hattie's Golden Rule for Teachers: Know thy Impact

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John Hattie’s Eight Mind Frames For Teachers - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Learn more about John Hattie’s eight mind frames in a great video scribe animation by Cheryl Reynolds. Watch the video.

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Principles of Great Teaching- One Page Infographics

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Principles of Great Teaching- One Page Infographics

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High-quality PDFs of my one-page guides are available to download for free. These resources were created by Jamie Clark and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. All Rights Reserved 2024.

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This post is a one-stop shop for my Five Ways To series and the superb one-page summaries produced by the wonderful David Goodwin. Download and share freely. scaffold-classroom-dialogueDownload che…

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Devoted to visualising educational concepts and processes

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We can do it!

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Collective Teacher Efficacy is the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students. With an effect size of d=1.57 Collective Teacher Efficacy is strongly correlated with student achievement. Here is a quick overview of John Hattie's "new number one" influence.

John Hattie and his team have presented Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) as the "new number one" influence related to student achievement several times, e.g. at the Annual Visible Learning Conference (2016) or the Collaborative Impact Conference 2017. Although Hattie's latest published list of 195 effects in The Applicability of Visible Learning to Higher Education (2015) puts CTE only in second place, its effect size of d=1.57 is still huge: it is more than two times bigger than that of feedback ( d=0.72), and almost three times bigger than the effect of classroom management ( d=0.52). The message seems to be clear: together teachers can achieve more, especially if they collectively believe that they can do so!

Hattie's new factor is based on Rachel Jean Eells' "Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Collective Teacher Efficacy and Student Achievement" ( PDF). For her Ph.D. thesis at the Loyola University Chicago, she has conducted a meta-analysis of 26 studies on Collective Teacher Efficacy and found that "the weighted average effect size of r-mean (outlier removed) was 0.617″. This number can easily be converted into Cohen's d=1.568, the number Hattie reports.

The concept of Collective Teacher Efficacy itself is much older. It was introduced in the 1990s by Albert Bandura and is rooted in his concept of self-efficacy, Bandura (1993, 1997). He defines collective efficacy as "a group's shared belief in the conjoint capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainment." Bandura found that the positive effects of CTE on student academic performance more than outweigh the negative effects of low socioeconomic status.

His findings were later confirmed by Goddard, Hoy, and Hoy (2000). In their studies, they could demonstrate that between-school differences of collective teacher efficacy were more important in explaining student achievement than socioeconomic status. Moreover, Hoy, Sweetland, and Smith (2002) found that the strength of CTE helps the positive effects of individual teacher efficacy and vice versa. A stronger collective teacher efficacy seems to encourage individual teachers to make a more effective use of the skills they already have.

According to Hattie's presentation at the Collaborative Impact Conference 2017 "Collective Teacher Efficacy" is not about making teachers feel good about themselves. It is more complicated than just believing you can make a difference collectively. One of the authors that come closest to Hattie's definition "collaborative conversation based on evidence" is Jenni Donohoo with her book " Collective Efficacy: How Educators' Beliefs Impact Student Learning ".

For further reading and a practical guide about how to build Collective Teacher Efficacy in your school, you should read the short and excellent Issue Brief " Building Collective Efficacy " by Dana Brinson and Lucy Steiner.

Update

In recent a video John Hattie explains what Collective Teacher Efficacy is, and what it isn't. Have a look.

References:

BANDURA, A. (1993). Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning. Educational Psychologist, 28 (2), 117-148. (Abstract)

BANDURA, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY, US: W H Freeman. (Book)

BRINSON & STEINER (2007): Building Collective Efficacy: How Leaders Inspire Teachers to Achieve. Issue Brief. The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. ( PDF)

EELLS, R. J. (2011): Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Collective Teacher Efficacy and Student Achievement, (Abstract / Full text)

GODDARD, HOY, WOOLFOLK HOY (2000): Collective Teacher Efficacy: Its Meaning, Measure, and Impact on Student Achievement. In: American Educational Research Journal Vol 37, Issue 2, pp. 479 - 507 (Abstract)

HATTIE, J. (2015): The Applicability of Visible Learning to Higher Education. In: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1 (1), 79-91. (Abstract)

HATTIE, J. (2016). Third Visible Learning Annual Conference: Mindframes and Maximizers, Washington, DC, July 11, 2016. (Programme)

HOY, SWEETLAND, SMITH (2002). Toward an organizational model of achievement in high schools: The significance of collective efficacy. Educational Administration Quarterly, 38 (1), 77-93. (Abstract)

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Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) according to John Hattie - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Collective Teacher Efficacy is the collective belief of teachers in their ability to positively affect students. With an effect size of d=1.57 Collective Teacher Efficacy is strongly correlated with student achievement. Here is a quick overview of John Hattie's "new...Read more ›

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Explicit Teaching Gradual Release of Responsibility

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Explicit Teaching Gradual Release of Responsibility

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Principles of Instruction_ Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know, by Barak Rosenshine; American Educator Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2012, AFT

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A Slightly Annotated Willingham on Science of Reading - Teach Like a Champion

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UVA cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and Barbara Davidson of Knowledge Matters were on the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast a few days ago. About ten minutes into the discussion, Willingham gave a fantastic explanation of the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. I transcribed the key sections below with a few notes of...

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

1. Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).
Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of 'evidence-informed' advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam's five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have 'done AfL to death' in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn't get a job unless you said 'AfL' about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam's ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of 'AfL' was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here's how I see it all connecting:
1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Wiliam says 'if you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there'. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read 'learning intentions' as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge - in all its forms - they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means 'what does excellence look like?'. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in 'clarifying, understanding and sharing' - teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
In some ways, this 'strategy' is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. 'Discussions, tasks and activities' covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of 'responsive teaching'. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they've learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design - including good diagnostic multiple choice questions - and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction. Shimamura's 'Generate-Evaluate' model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall's ideas about 'hidden lives' and the idea that we can't be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check - now, and again later.
3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward. It's this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ' feedback as actions ' post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students' learning improves - and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It's got an interpersonal, motivational element that can't be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn't a purely technical, objective task - although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.

The goal is to change the students' capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin's Butterfly is wonderful - because it shows what effective feedback can achieve - but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to 'look like a scientist' or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine's ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we're still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we've succeeded (SatNav style), then we've still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.
4. Activating students as learning resources for one another
I think this is the feature of Wiliam's five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other's learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can't have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out 'where the learner is' and 'how to get to where the learner is going'. This is where disciplined ' think pair share ' becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains - but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners' answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy - because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students' responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie's 'reciprocal teaching', Shimamura's 'think it, say it, teach it', Slavin's collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.
5. Activating students as owners of their own learning
In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of 'noble intent' rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. 'Owning your own learning' is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these 'goals' are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals - the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;

setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.

setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building - as per Shimamura's Relate in MARGE.

providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that 'AfL' or even 'formative assessment' has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it's when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That's the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It's powerful stuff, right there, where it's been for years.
Key References:
Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning(pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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In many of Dylan Wiliam's talks and publications he references five 'key strategies' that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

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4 Principles for the Science of Learning

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4 Principles for the Science of Learning

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The human brain has a remarkable and often unexpected way of making, storing, and retrieving memories. Did you ever wonder why it's easy to learn some things and hard to learn other things? Why can you read a book and feel you learned a lot, only to find that you've forgotten most of it a year later? Why can you remember your first day of teaching, but not your tenth day?

What is the science of learning?

Cognitive scientists have conducted research on what's called the "science of learning"-how we learn stories, names, facts, important events, unimportant events, and more. Research on the science of learning dates back more than 100 years.

Teaching fads feel like they've persisted for 100 years, too. Sometimes we learn about these fads during pre-service programs and professional development, and other times through word of mouth or online blogs. We've all had the experience of being excited about a "new" teaching idea, only to file the materials away for a rainy day. Rarely are these new strategies utilized, and professional development programs often feel like a waste of time.
There are two main reasons why educators keep reinventing the wheel with teaching strategies based on the "fad of the semester," when scientifically based strategies are already out there:

1. The science of learning sits dormant in academic journals, rather than easily accessible in pre-service textbooks and professional development materials.

2. The science of learning has recently been featured in newspapers, blogs, and social media, but it's hard to know if these are trusted sources or simply people concocting more fads.

Teachers are given the impossible challenge of finding time to seek out good research, make sense of it, and apply it in classrooms. Educators often ask, "Why haven't I heard about this research before? Why didn't I learn about this in my pre-service program or professional development?" It's because this research isn't accessible-literally and figuratively. There is valuable research on the science of learning out there, but it's sitting behind lock and key.

4 Teaching Strategies Based on the Science of Learning

By drawing on empirical research by fellow cognitive scientists and practical strategies from educators around the world, let's focus on four powerful teaching strategies based on the science of learning: retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaving, and feedback-driven metacognition.

1. Retrieval practice boosts learning by pulling information out of students' heads (e.g., quizzes and flashcards), rather than cramming information into students' heads (e.g., lectures). Retrieval practice is a no-stakes learning opportunity that increases student performance, beyond formative and summative assessments.

2. Spaced practice boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so that learning isn't crammed in all at once. By returning to content every so often, students' brains have had time to rest and be refreshed.

3. Interleaving boosts learning by mixing up closely related topics and encouraging discrimination. For example, learning increases when students practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems all mixed up, rather than one type of problem at a time.

4. Feedback boosts learning by providing the student the opportunity to know what they know, and know what they don't know. This enhances students' metacognition or understanding about their own learning progress.

Research demonstrates that these four strategies:

Raise student achievement by a letter grade, or even two (from a C to an A.) Research shows there is a consistent and reliable increase in students' grades, confidence, and engagement.

Boost learning for diverse students and subject areas at all grade levels and disciplines (e.g., STEM, social studies, language arts, fine arts, special education, and foreign languages).

Enhance higher-order learning and students' transfer of knowledge. These strategies apply for basic fact knowledge, skill learning, and critical thinking.

When it comes to retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaving, and feedback-driven metacognition, the combination of being research-based and classroom-proven is paramount. The rigor of science gives us confidence that these strategies aren't fads, and successful classroom implementation gives us confidence that these strategies work in the real world, not just in the laboratory. The better you understhtand the research behind the strategies, the more effectively you can adapt them in your classroom to propel and guide student learning.

Adapted from Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain.

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What Every Teacher Should Know About the Science of Learning

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The human brain has a remarkable and often unexpected way of making, storing, and retrieving memories. Did you ever wonder why it's easy to learn some things and hard to learn other things? Why can you read a book and feel you learned a lot, only to find that you've forgotten most of it a year later?

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Have you ever been the teacher or school leader and find that your ideas are interesting to other people? Other colleagues like how you engage students through classroom strategies or relationships, and they want to learn more from you? Suddenly, months go by and other colleagues in the school or district begin to get a bit upset that you are the one asked to teach new strategies at faculty meetings or in professional development sessions.
Perhaps they tire that it's your name that comes up, or that their ideas are ignored...
Lately, it has been happening a great deal to University of Melbourne researcher and professor, John Hattie. While many teachers and leaders want to soak up his research and get a deeper understanding, there are others who want to cherry pick at his research and criticize it. They treat it as though it is static and hasn't changed from when he first published Visible Learning in 2009, and ignore the fact that he has been open and honest about the lessons he has learned along the way.

There have been a few consistent criticisms of Hattie's work. Those are the following:

We don't like the meta-analysis approach that Hattie uses because he combines large studies that include smaller individual studies

We don't like large effect sizes that are over a 1.00.

For full disclosure I work with Hattie as a Visible Learning trainer, and I often write about his research here in this blog. Additionally, I present with him often, and read pretty much everything he writes because I want to gain a deeper understanding of the work. To some that may mean I have a bias, which is probably somewhat true, but it also means that I have taken a great deal of time to understand his research and remain current in what he suggests. I also left my job as a school principal which I loved very much, so I too have taken a great deal of time to look at his research through a critical lens, and I believe I see how it fits into our practical lens as building principals and teachers.

John Hattie is Wrong
Recently, I read a criticism of Hattie's work from Robert Slavin, which you can read here. It was published by the Johns Hopkins School of Education and is called John Hattie is Wrong. In his criticism, Slavin wrote,

I reached out to Hattie to clarify some of these criticisms that Slavin wrote about in his blog. Hattie wrote,

Slavin also writes,

Slavin is a renowned researcher, but he has come under criticism for his Success For All program, which you can read here in an AASA article, and here in Forbes (updated 3/07/19). Hattie very rarely says to throw out any influence that has below a .40 effect size unless we have been talking about an influence like retention which has an effect size of -.32. A negative influence is a long way from the .40. We know there is a plethora of research that suggests retention doesn't work.

In fact, In Visible Learning for Literacy (Fisher, Frey and Hattie) the authors focus on Problem-based learning (p. 37) which has had effect sizes of .12 in 2016 to .26 in Hattie's present list of 251 influences in 2018. The authors write,

There Are No Shiny New Toys
Slavin does bring up a point that Hattie often brings up. Hattie has always suggested that school leaders and teachers not simply go after those influences that have the highest effect sizes. In fact, in numerous presentations and articles he has suggested that schools get an understanding of their current reality and research the influences that will best meet their needs. He has additionally suggested that those leaders and teachers not throw out those strategies they use in the classroom, but actually gather evidence to understand the impact of those strategies they use.

In all of his criticisms, he only cites Hattie's work from 2009 or before. Hattie has written numerous articles, books and has done many presentations where he himself has said that he has learned a great deal from taking his work on the road and listening to other researchers, professors, leaders and teachers. I believe it's a strength of Hattie that he listens to those he interacts with so often. Can we say the same for other researchers?

In our correspondence about the blog, Hattie writes,

Secondly, Hattie's work is not all about the numbers, which Slavin suggests. And that is actually a good point to end with in this blog. Many school leaders have a tendency to go after the influences with the highest effect sizes, and those of us who work with Hattie, including Hattie himself, have suggested that this is flawed thinking.

In the End
Hattie's work is about getting us to reflect on our own practices using evidence, and move forward by looking at our practices that we use every day and collecting evidence to give us a better understanding of how it works.

Overall, Hattie's messages are about evidence of impact, understanding our practices, addressing how we engage families and how we talk with them (Flaxmere Project), and putting students in the driver seat of their own learning. It's about preparing students for their future so they know what to do when an adult isn't around.

Our world is an increasingly complex place where people talk at each other and not with each other, and Hattie's research is about preparing students to actually work together in a way that they can solve these complex issues together. Is that really something to argue with?
For an article of Hattie explaining the meta-analysis approach, click here.
For other news regarding Hattie click here.
Peter DeWitt, Ed.D. is the author of several books including Collaborative Leadership: 6 Influences That Matter Most (Corwin Press. 2016), School Climate: Leading with Collective Efficacy (Corwin Press. 2017), and Coach It Further: Using the Art of Coaching to Improve School Leadership (Corwin Press. 2018). Connect with him on Twitter.

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John Hattie Isn't Wrong. You Are Misusing His Research. (Opinion)

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Have you ever been the teacher or school leader and find that your ideas are interesting to other people? Other colleagues like how you engage students through classroom strategies or relationships, and they want to learn more from you?

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Free Resources for Instruction | Solution Tree

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Access free worksheets, study guides, and templates focusing on lesson planning, teaching strategies, differentiated instruction, and more.

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"We're talking about ! We're talking about ! We ain't talking about the game." Allen Iverson, dropped the P word 22 times in a press conference given sixteen years ago, apparently annoyed that he had to answer questions about his effort in after a lackluster game as the star basketball player on the Philadelphia 76ers. This famous rant is now legendary, according to my husband, as he quoted Iverson's words as I was going off on my own little rant about how practice gets the short shrift.

While Iverson and others might not appreciate the value of practice, there really is no substitute for it in any endeavor. None.

Children with dyslexia and other learning differences can only improve in reading through correct practice and feedback. In his groundbreaking 2009 book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, Stanislas Dehaene explained how learning to read changes the neural networks for vision and language. These cerebral changes can only occur by building new pathways through repetition of the basic skills in phonics decoding, phonemic awareness, and practice with decodable text. There are no shortcuts. The learner must do the daily work, and someone needs to ensure that the work is done correctly. Every day.

Reading proficiently requires that these foundational skills become automatic because conscious attention to decoding interferes with reading comprehension. The only way to become a fluent reader is through code-focused practice, the kind of word-work that pushes children to look through a word from left to right and see the same letter patterns matched to sounds again and again. Only when children begin to make these connections effortlessly will they be able to generalize and transfer their understanding to more difficult words. Opportunities to read often allow for self-teaching through practice. Accurate word recognition at the "speed of sight," a term used in the title of Mark Seidenberg's book, Language at the Speed of Sight, does not happen through memorization of whole words. Fluency occurs through a progression of skills. There is no magic pill. While typical readers can decode without intensive phonics training, the struggling reader needs many, many, more practice sessions. And this means more than they usually receive at school.

Interventions cannot possibly work well without practice. Even if there is a lot of information on the efficacy of an intervention, nothing changes without hard work. No challenge, no change. The most common barrier I see to successful outcomes for children is the lack of practice on targeted skills. One day off turns into another day, and that turns into a whole week without putting in the time to practice. Disciplined practice requires a routine in school and at home. When children return to me for their tutoring sessions, I can always see who has done the practice work and who has not. Those who have practiced move on; those who have not practiced need to review. Whether or not the child has a mild or severe disability, it doesn't matter. Practice is the great equalizer. The important message for successful learning is practice. The key to all great accomplishments is practice.

Faith Borkowsky is the Founder of High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching with over thirty years of experience as a classroom teacher, reading/learning specialist, regional literacy coach, administrator, and tutor. Ms. Borkowsky is Orton-Gillingham trained and is a Wilson Certified Dyslexia Practitioner listed on the International Dyslexia Association's Provider Directory. She provides professional development for teachers and school districts, as well as parent workshops, presentations, and private consultations.

Her book, Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent's Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention, is available on Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/failing-students-or-failing-schools-faith-borkowsky/1128896546 and Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/1937615456/

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Children with dyslexia and other learning differences can only improve in reading through correct practice and feedback.

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If You Learn A, Will You Be Better Able to Learn B?

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Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, Casper D. Hulshof

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If You Learn A, Will You Be Better Able to Learn B?

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In 2015, we published our book Urban Myths about Learning and Education.1 An excerpt of one section of that book, “Technology in Education: What Teachers Should Know,” was published in the Spring 2016 issue of American Educator. An unexpected effect was that after the book’s publication, all three of us received a number of requests per week for new educational fact checks. At first, we blogged or tweeted our short answers to these queries, but at a certain point we decided to bundle the questions and expand upon our answers. This has resulted in a new book with all new “myths,” More Urban Myths about Learning and Education: Challenging Eduquacks, Extraordinary Claims, and Alternative Facts, from which this article is excerpted. Here, we discuss some of the most often asked questions related to one basic principle in particular: transfer of learning.

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Collaborative Learning and Working Memory Overload: Good News or Bad?

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Consider the following paradox:

Teachers need to give students instructions - of course we do!

After all, instructions help students do what they need to do, so that they can learn what we want them to learn.

At the same time, too many instructions might very well overwhelm working memory.

After all, the student has to HOLD the instructions in memory while PROCESSING each one individually. And: "holding while processing" is one handy definition of working memory function.

In brief: the right number of instructions can help learning, but too many instructions can impede learning.

I recently asked a group of wise and experienced teachers this question:

"Can you think of other teaching practices - like instructions - that are beneficial in small amounts, but might create working memory overload in large amounts?"

After some time to think and discuss, one teacher answered: group work.

After all, he mused, collaboration might simplify some mental processes. But collaboration itself creates additional mental taxes - all that negotiating and delegating and coordinating and explaining.

And disagreeing.

And resolving.

Are they ways that teachers can reduce those "mental taxes" so that students get the benifits without the penalties?

If only we had a research-based answer to those questions...

Inspired by this teacher's observation, I hunted up this study.

Quadratics in Quito

To explore this question, researchers working in Quito, Ecuador worked with 15-year-olds solving quadratic equations.

Specifically, they wanted to know if practice collaborating helps students collaborate effectively.

As is always true, research design gets tricky. But the overall design makes sense.

Some students did practice solving quadratic equations collaboratively; others didn't.

For a second round of math learning, all students were then sorted into groups for collaborative learning.

So, did students who practiced collaborating do better on later collaboration?

For complex equations: YES. Both three days later and seven days later, students who practiced collaborating did better solving problems than students who didn't.

For simple equations: NO. If the mental work wasn't very hard, students didn't need to practice to collaborate effectively.

In light of these findings, the researchers' recommendations make good sense.

If learners are novices, learning tasks are comlpex, and information distribution demands [extensive cooperation], teachers should prepare group members ... using similar problems.

...

If task information does not demand [extensive cooperation], it is not necessary for the teachers to prepare learners to collaborate.

I want to highlight one part of this summary: "using similar problems."

This research team emphasizes that "collaboration" is NOT a general skill. Collaboration will look different depending on the precise demands of the discipline and the topic.

So: students who "practiced" were given a VERY specific format for learning how to collaborate on this task.

If we want to get the benefits of practice for our own students, we should be sure to tailor the practice in very specific ways.

The Story Behind the Story: an Analogy and a Principle

A research article like this study always begins with a summary of earlier research findings, conclusions, and questions.

This summary includes a particularly helpful foundational inquiry.

When does collaboration increase WM load so much as to threaten learning?

When does collaboration reduce WM load enough to promote learning?

Is there some sort of taxonomy to consider or principle to explore?

To explain, I'll start with an analogy.

Imagine I want to illuminate a yard at night.

For all sorts of reasons, it would be simplest to have one lamp to do so. Having multiple lamps just adds to the complexity and expense of the project.

So, if my yard is small enough to be covered by one lamp, then I should use one. Adding more lamps makes the project worse - more complicated, more expensive - not better.

But at some point, a yard gets big enough to need multiple lamps. If I use only one lamp, I just can't illuminate the full yard.

In this case, the additional expense and complexity of having multiple lamps provides a meaningful benefit.

You can see where this is going.

Here's a potential principle:

If a cognitive problem is simple enough, then one student can solve it on her own.

Adding other students ("collaborative leaning"!) increases the WM complexity of the situation without providing any additional benefit.

In this case, each student's mental effort has become less effective, not more effective.

If, on the other hand, a cognitive problem gets complex enough, then it goes beyond any one student's cogtivite capacity.

In that case, the problem benefits from additional students' cognitive efforts - even though all those extra students do increase the complexity of the problem.

At some tipping point, when a problem gets complicated enough, it needs to be divided into sub-tasks - despite the complexity of managing that work.

At that tipping point, well-structured and precisely-practiced collaboration probably is more beneficial than harmful.

TL;DR

Groupwork (probably) increases WM demands on simple cognitive tasks, but reduces WM demands for complex cognitive tasks.

To get the most benefits from collaboration, students should practice that skill - and teachers should tailor the practice to the precise demands of the cognitive work.

Zambrano, J., Kirschner, F., Sweller, J., & Kirschner, P. A. (2019). Effects of group experience and information distribution on collaborative learning. Instructional Science, 47, 531-550.

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Collaborative Learning and Working Memory Overload: Good News or Bad?

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Consider the following paradox: Teachers need to give students instructions - of course we do! After all, instructions help students do what they need to do, so that they can learn what we want them to learn. At the same time, too many instructions might very well overwhelm working memory.

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Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they shared their work on their concept formative action and the training programmes they run for schools. I first encountered this at the London ResearchEd in 2022 and it immediately made sense to me. The concept has been described extensively in Dutch and, with help from René, I posted a translation of their own blog so you can read it for yourself here:

Here I'm going to explore my take on the process. In general terms, it's a reworking of the idea of formative assessment as described by Dylan Wiliam.:

In a responsive teaching situation, teachers need to set and clarify learning goals, get students to engage and then elicit evidence of the learning so that teachers can and then adapt their teaching accordingly. The problem René had with this was that in Holland 'formative assessment' didn't translate. They couldn't get beyond the deeply held idea that Assessment = Testing. It wasn't compatible with that sense of a process that is truly formative, dynamic, real-time, leading to actions by students to improve their learning. So 'Formative Action' is an attempt to reframe it so that these elements are more explicit.
1. Orient and Predict.

Step 1 aligns with Wiliam's Clarify Learning Intentions. It's arguably the most important step because all the others hinge on the clarity with which teachers can establish and express the focus of the learning: what the specific goals are for the lesson, where they sit in the wider map of the learning journey towards the end goals of the curriculum and how this lesson leads to those wide goals. A big part of the work that Toets Revolutie does with schools is essentially curriculum mapping, starting with the end goals and working back to the specific steps that students should take along the way.

Related to this is the idea of 'sense of quality' - and for the teachers we spoke to this concept really cut through. Essentially, until you know very clearly what the standards are that you are aiming for in the long term and short term, you don't have the benchmarks to assess against to then inform the best course of action. The predict element is informed by this road map... you pre-empt areas of struggle or misconceptions in the instructional delivery but also then check to see how students have done in relation to your predictions.
2. Thinking and Generating

This step aligns with many people's ideas and observations about the need to involve all student in thinking, revealed through a generative process that yields some kind of product: some evidence of learning. It's Wiliam's elicit evidence step. Without those products, you have no source of information to inform your decision-making. Mini-whiteboards, structured pair talk, demonstrating skills in writing or via a physical artefact or performance are needed - and must involve all students. The questios for teachers are then:

how do I engage all students in thinking and generating a response?

how will I check and sample those responses?

3. Interpret, Communicate & Decide

The third step is shown as rising up above the 1-5 pathway. This signifies that process of taking stock.. rising up, hovering above the action to see the lay of the land. This is the assessment moment where students and teachers, evaluate the quality of their answers, their work, their products, their understanding. It's the artist, standing back from the easel to evaluate their composition. This can weave in Wiliam's 'students as resources for each other' idea - by including peer assessment.

Importantly in this step it's vital to decide the big 'so what?'. What happens now? What do the student needs to do in order to move forward.? That has to be the outcome of this step - communicating the next steps to students, or them deciding for themselves. This is Wiliam's 'feedback that moves forward' concept.
4. Informed Follow-Up Action

Now we reach the core of things: The Action. Formative assessment only helps if it leads to actions. In Formative Action, this is entirely explicit. The students must now respond to the feedback; they must take the actions identified in the previous step. The feedback has to land back on the ground of students' tangible activities. Hence the arrow shown aiming towards a landing spot. Teachers spoke of 'the landing spot' - meaning the exact actions students must take in light of the review (step 3) of the work done so far (step 2).

Conceptually and practically this is powerful - the feedback must land. There must be action.
5. Verify, Reflect & Predict

Finally, there is a need to check - to verify - that those actions have been successful. Has the student now understood and produced a correct or more complete answer? Has the knowledge now been secured? Has the quality of work improved?

To complete this step - reflect and predict - teacher and students are encouraged to consider their next steps. Depending on the degree of success so far, the teacher and students can move on to the next part of the learning journey, or embark on more improvement loops. Here, students develop self-regulation and agency -Wiliam's owners of their own learning .
Conclusion
The teachers we met had found this formulation incredibly powerful. The emphasis on actions and follow up to actions, on feedback loops, on sense of quality - all made a lot of sense . The five steps also provide a superb framework for instructional coaching and professional development. And, of course, it locates assessmen t firmly in the realm of classroom dynamics, not the examination room.

Toets Revolutie are publishing a detailed book next year - it's going to be a must-read.

Thanks to all those responsible for this work especially Dominique Sluijsmans, René Kneyber and Valentina Devid.

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Formative Action: A brilliant, refreshing take on formative assessment and responsive teaching.

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Recently I spent time with the Dutch team led by René Kneyber, Toets Revolutie where they shared their work on their concept formative action and the training programmes they run for schools. I first encountered this at the London ResearchEd in 2022 and it immediately made sense to me.

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There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access. I'll keep adding to it as I find things and when people make suggestions:
John Dunlosky: Strengthening the Student Toolbox

Click to Download

Barak Rosenshine: Principles of Instruction

See also: Rosenshine Re-ordered. A Poster by @olicav
Rob Coe et al: What makes great teaching. Dylan Wiliam: 9 things every teacher should know- via tes
The article is here: https://www.tes.com/news/dylan-wiliam-nine-things-every-teacher-should-know with a nice box inset about that researchers - many of whom are featured in the other summaries represented here.
James Ko et al: Effective Teaching
John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, summarised by Oliver Caviglioli for How2.

Here's another great paper from CESE in New South Wales on Cognitive Load Theory - with thanks to Matthew Benyohai: Summary on page 7 is very helpful.

Daniel Willingham' s Why don't kids like school. Summary.

And here's a link to Willingham's American Educator article:

The Learning Scientists - downloadable materials

Yeager, Walton and Cohen: Addressing achievement gaps with psychological interventions.

Also, for quick reference:

EEF Toolkit: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/resources/teaching-learning-toolkit
Chris Husbands and Jo Pearce: Nine claims from research
American Psychology Association Top 20 Principles from Psychology

There's a quick access summary of the 20 principles here:

Clark, Kirschner and Sweller - A readable version of their research into guided (and minimally guided) instruction.

Education Endowment Foundation report on Metacognition: by Professor Daniel Muijs et al .

Robert Slavin on Cooperative Learning - Group work - a short helpful summary via CUREE.
Arthur Shimamura: MARGE: A whole brain learning approach.
See also: Introducing MARGE: A superb ebook about learning by Arthur Shimamura.
Bjork: Desirable Difficulties:
See also: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/desirable-difficulties which includes an excellent video presentation by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork.
The Great Teaching Toolkit
This superb review from Evidence Based Education is a definite must-read. It's a very comprehensive guide to most of the ideas above - grouped into four categories. Download it here

This is summarised in this brilliant A4 summary:

IES Practice Guide Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning -
As recommended by Dylan Wiliam:

Just realized that I've never tweeted a link to the IES's 2007 Practice Guide on "Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning": https://t.co/VU0LJdM4hB. The checklist makes a much better placemat than most of the quick reference guides offered to teachers. pic.twitter.com/onmAYxJvzG
- Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) October 29, 2020

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Teaching and Learning Research Summaries: A collection for easy access.

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There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, I am pulling them together into one place for easy access.

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Barack Rosenshine's Principles of Effective Instruction

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Barack Rosenshine's Principles of Effective Instruction

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Effective Teacher Professional Development: New Theory and a Meta-Analytic Test

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Effective Teacher Professional Development: New Theory and a Meta-Analytic Test

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A free Resource Library for teachers including eBooks, podcasts and webinars on assessment theory.

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End Game for the Education Crisis The Time to Transform Education for Equitable Student Success isNOW. Contact Us We know How to Improve Student Achievement and Well-Being We Just Need to Use the Evidence.Decades of research and results from high achieving states, districts, and schools have demonstrated what's needed to ensure all students receive an...

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Last weekend, I gave a talk at the U.S. ResearchEd conference in Greenwich, Connecticut, on "The Case for Curriculum," based on a paper I wrote for Stanford University's Hoover Institution, which was published this week at The 74. But truth in advertising forced me to come clean with my audience: The case for curriculum is in equal measure the case for making the classroom job doable by the teachers we have-not, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, the teachers we wish we had or hope to have someday.

It's a simple fact that we've seemed determined to ignore for decades: We need nearly four million women and men to staff America's classrooms. A number that large means teachers will be, by definition, people of average abilities. In no field of human endeavor from the performing arts and athletics to science and business do we look at the most gifted practitioners as proof points. Yet this is the mindset we apply, at least tacitly, to teachers. What the most talented and driven can accomplish with children is what we expect from all teachers. We expect them to both design and deliver lessons at an expert level when doing either is a challenge, while also "differentiating instruction" in classes with wildly divergent student skill levels. Increasingly we expect them to master the arcana of the "science of reading" and to play a quasi-therapeutic role under the banner of "social emotional learning"-if not also practitioners of mental health.

We have fresh data that speak to the impossibility of these demands. The vast majority of teachers surveyed in a new Pew Center report say there's not enough time in the workday to accomplish all that's expected of them. Eighty-four percent say they "don't have enough time during their regular work hours to do tasks like grading, lesson planning, paperwork, and answering emails."

Teachers cite a broad range of thing that bleed away their time, according to Pew, from noninstructional work such as hallway monitoring or lunch duty (24 percent); helping students outside class time (22 percent); and being asked to cover other teachers' classes (16 percent). But the biggest one by far, cited by 81 percent of teachers as a "major reason" they can't get all their work done (and a minor reason by nearly all the rest), is that they "just have too much work." To be sure, many other issues compound teacher stress these days, including students distracted by cell phones, chronic absenteeism, behavior problems, and verbal abuse from students. But if you're one of those who thinks teaching is easy because of summers off and school days that end in mid-afternoon, the Pew survey is a sobering read. The bottom line is that it's time to take a clear-eyed look at the ever-spiraling demand we place upon teachers and talk seriously about taking things off their plate and making the job doable by the workforce we have.

To my mind, the most obvious target is curriculum. We know from various RAND surveys that nearly all teachers draw upon "materials I developed and/or selected myself" to teach English language arts, for example. Those materials don't create themselves. An MDR study shows that teachers spend seven hours per week searching for instructional resources and another five hours creating their own classroom materials. That's twelve hours not spent reviewing student work, giving feedback, building relationships with students and parents, and many other potentially higher value activities that a classroom teacher is literally the only person positioned to perform. Curriculum materials can be created or selected by someone else.

If the effort it takes to find and create materials could be shown to enhance student outcomes, it would be time well spent. But Fordham's own report, The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar, showed "a major mismatch between what content experts think educators should (and shouldn't) use in classrooms and what teachers, hungry for instructional resources, are choosing to download."

On Twitter, Mike Petrilli took warm notice of my Hoover report, which is flattering, but noted "it's too glum" to say curriculum reform is one approach to raising student achievement that hasn't been tried. He cited the launch of the EngageNY website and "a huge uptick in adoption of [high-quality instructional materials,] especially in math." Joanne Weiss also chided me for not citing the Council of Chief State School Officers' Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network, which has worked since 2017 to get HQIM in the hands of teachers in more than a dozen states and ensure professional development grounded in their use.

These are fair criticisms from respected colleagues. The turn, however, will come when we see more crucial time devoted to diagnosis, intervention, and feedback; evidence-in what people do, not what they say-that curriculum is central to teaching; and a shift in the culture of teaching away from teacher-as-lesson-designer- and-deliverer. When Tom Kane of Harvard looked at math textbook adoptions in six states over three years, he found "little evidence of differences in average math achievement growth in schools using different elementary math curricula." But he also found few teachers using official curricula exclusively and, more tellingly, only "modest" amounts of teacher professional development on the adopted textbooks and curriculum. This suggests either a naïve "magic bullet" faith in curriculum as a difference maker-just get it in teachers' hands and they'll do the rest!-or evidence of its second-class status: If curriculum was central to school improvement plans, implementing it well would be a primary focus of teacher training and professional development, not an afterthought.

It is unlikely and not even desirable that teachers will cease their efforts to customize lessons and even occasionally prepare them from scratch. But hard evidence of a shift in practice will look like teachers spending fewer hours creating or curating curricular materials and more hours wielding them. Until that evidence emerges, the "case for curriculum" still needs to be made as a means of making education coherent, raising student achievement-and making teachers' jobs a little closer to manageable.

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The "case for curriculum" is about reducing teachers' workload

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The case for curriculum is, in part, the case for making the classroom teacher's job doable by the teachers we have, not the teachers we wish we had.

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Instructional Framework: Gradual Release of Responsibility

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Instructional Framework: Gradual Release of Responsibility

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AK SOR Symposium- Notes from Anita Archer's Presentation

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AK SOR Symposium- Notes from Anita Archer's Presentation

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Link to Anita Archer's Presentation from the Alaska Science of Reading Symposium- The Science of Reading and the Science of Learning: Both Are Imperative

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Alaska Science of Reading Symposium Share Out by Sarah Miller

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The slide below is one that I often use in my CPD presentations. The percentages are revealed after some reflection time. I'm keen to stress that, as a physics teacher, this is how I see my time is divided. I am not recommending this particular split; I am reporting my experience of it. Other teachers might have a different sense of it - although I do often get quite strong agreement.

I invented Mode A: Mode B as a short-hand for different elements in the teaching-mix to get across the idea that, whilst some strategies are much more likely to be effective for certain purposes, there are multiple purposes - so it's likely that we'll need a mix of approaches over time. This links to the balanced diet idea I wrote about a long time ago.

Beyond the early years, a lot of the time, if not most of the time, teachers are trying to teach specific knowledge and skills to their novice students. This requires good instructional methods; these are the staples of knowledge building in very many subjects and contexts: this is Mode A. In Chapter 8 of The Learning Rainforest - Building the Knowledge Structure - I am essentially describing Mode A teaching: explaining, modelling, questioning, giving feedback, the role of practice.

However, possibly within any unit of the curriculum and certainly in the curriculum overall, we need some other approaches too. Learning takes many forms and there need to be some deviations; a slice or chunk of Mode B. I can't imagine a truly great curriculum where students do not, at some point, have a range of hands-on experiences, learn to make choices, explore ideas independently to find patterns and rules or develop original ideas. They need to have the chance to make things, to work with each other and to pursue some areas of the curriculum in an extended fashion through projects. It's just a question of these things being sequenced and structured well so that the learning builds on secure foundations. I explain this at length in Chapter 9 of The Learning Rainforest - Exploring the Possibilities.

Of course the two modes overlap. Yes, you can inspire awe through straight-forward instructional teaching (not something special you've laid on); yes you can build some types of knowledge through hands-on learning and open-ended projects. The key for me, in my message to teachers, is to be deliberate about the teaching approach you adopt - using your evidence-informed wisdom to ensure that the approach matches the demands of the curriculum content.

I also often say that Mode A is the place to focus CPD time; it's usually the hard bit and everyone needs to be able to do this really well. You can't go off piste until there is a piste - so to speak! But, in promoting excellent instructional Mode A teaching, I am not saying that Mode B doesn't matter. It does. A lot. However, it's a bit like the ingredients in a balanced diet. Some things only need to be present in very small doses to keep us fit and healthy - but they are still absolutely essential. We'd be much weaker specimens without them.

A related post is about how this plays out in the way we interpret findings from research: You're doing it all wrong: context and complexity in Ed-research and debate.

Here I stress that the need for balance and nuance in understanding research does not mean anything goes. That's always the risk. But I'll leave you to consider what your equivalent of my 80:20 split might be.

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Mode A + Mode B = Effective teaching and a rich enacted curriculum

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The slide below is one that I often use in my CPD presentations. The percentages are revealed after some reflection time. I'm keen to stress that, as a physics teacher, this is how I see my time is divided. I am not recommending this particular split; I am reporting my experience of it.

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EIA Webinar Archives | Ancora Publishing : Ancora Publishing

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April 24, 2024, 1 pm PT Evaluating Curriculum Materials Through an Explicit Instruction Lens Recorded webinar PowerPoint Rubric K-5 Curriculum Review Workbook February 15, 2024, 1 pm PT The Heart of Teaching Recorded webinar Handout PowerPoint January 16, 2024 Comprehension Is the Outcome: Applying Explicit Instruction to Informative Passage Reading

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Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

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A practice guide is a publication that presents recommendations for educators to address challenges in their classrooms and schools. They are based on reviews of research, the experiences of practitioners, and the expert opinions of a panel of nationally recognized experts.

To search by Topic or Keyword, use the Practice Guide Search.

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A practice guide is a publication that presents recommendations for educators to address challenges in their classrooms and schools. They are based on reviews of research, the experiences of practitioners, and the expert opinions of a panel of nationally recognized experts. To search by Topic or Keyword, use the Practice Guide Search.

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Multisensory Instruction: What Is It and Should I Bother?

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In our fifth installment of the blog series Structured Literacy: Unpacking Nine Key Topics for Transforming Reading Instruction and Outcomes for Readers, we're honored to feature guest author Dr. Holly B. Lane, director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI). To catch up on earlier posts in the series, start with the introduction, "From [...]

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Frontiers | Enhancing teachers’ instruction on how to study: an exploration of the effectiveness of learning strategies for particular secondary school subjects

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Teachers’ instructions on learning strategies play a key role on how students study. However, how the effectiveness of learning strategies can be matched to…

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Frontiers | Retrieval-based concept mapping makes a difference as a retrieval practice activity: a study with high school students

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IntroductionWhile specific sequences of retrieval-based activities have been shown to have a powerful effect on learning, no previous study has examined this…

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A Motivational Perspective on (Anticipated) Mental Effort Investment: The Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat - Educational Psychology Review

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Research in cognitive load theory is increasingly recognizing the importance of motivational influences on students’ (willingness to invest) mental effort, in particular in the context of self-regulated learning. Consequently, next to addressing effects of instructional conditions and contexts on groups of learners, there is a need to start investigating individual differences in motivational variables. We propose here that the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat may offer a useful model to study the motivational antecedents of (anticipated) mental effort. We also report four experiments as initial tests of these ideas, exploring how feedback valence affects students’ challenge/threat experiences, self-efficacy, and mental effort investment. The results showed that negative feedback leads participants to expect that they will have to invest significantly more effort in future problems than positive feedback (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or no feedback (Experiment 3). Had we not considered the motivational variables in investigating the effect of feedback conditions on effort investment, we would not have known that this effect was fully mediated and thus explained by participants’ feelings of self-efficacy (Experiments 1/2) and threat (Experiment 1). We would also have concluded that feedback does not affect the willingness to invest effort in future problems (all four experiments), whereas actually, there were significant indirect effects of feedback on willingness to invest effort via challenge (in Experiments 1/2) and threat (in all experiments). Thus, our findings demonstrate the added value of considering challenge and threat motivational states to explain individual differences in effort investment.

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The four-day school week is a school calendar that has become increasingly common following the COVID-19 pandemic. Proponents of the calendar often claim that offering teachers a regular 3-day weekend will help schools better retain existing teachers and recruit new teachers to their district without incurring additional costs due to higher salaries or other pecuniary benefits. However, there is scant empirical evidence assessing these claims. I use difference-in-differences and synthetic difference-in-differences models to assess the impact of four-day school week calendars on teacher retention and teacher quality in Arkansas. I find evidence that the calendar may help retain teachers who otherwise would have moved to another school and suggestive evidence that retention in non-adopting schools may be harmed by the four-day school week adoption in nearby districts. Results examining changes in teacher quality are inconclusive. These results have significant implications given the rapid growth in four-day school week calendars in recent years.

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Teacher Retention and Quality in the Four-Day School Week

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The four-day school week is a school calendar that has become increasingly common following the COVID-19 pandemic. Proponents of the calendar often claim that offering teachers a regular 3-day weekend will help schools better retain existing teachers and recruit new teachers to their district without incurring additional costs due to higher salaries or other pecuniary benefits.

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Should More Time Be Spent Learning Math Facts?

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As schools nationwide contend with declining math scores, some districts are dedicating more time to the practice of foundational skills.

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The Part of Explicit Instruction Most Teachers Get Wrong (and how to fix it tomorrow) - Learning with Mr. Lee

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Unlock the most misunderstood part of explicit instruction. Learn the real purpose of guided practice and a simple five step routine you can use tomorrow to prevent errors and build accuracy.

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Explicit Instruction: Fidelity of Implementation

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You teach a lesson that lights up the room. Students are nodding and hands are flying up, and afterward you walk out thinking, "They got it. They really got it."

And then, the next week, you ask a simple review question-and the room falls silent.

If that situation has ever made you question your ability to teach, take heart: You're not failing, you're simply facing the forgetting curve. Understanding why students forget-and how we can help them remember-can transform not just our lessons but our students' futures.

The good news? You don't have to overhaul your curriculum to beat the forgetting curve. You just need three small, powerful shifts in how you teach.

Meet the Real Challenge: The Forgetting Curve

50 percent of new information disappears within an hour,

75 percent is gone by the next day, and

Up to 90 percent fades away within a week.

Our students' brains aren't broken. They're doing exactly what human brains are wired to do: prioritize survival over trivia. But if we weave retrieval and reinforcement directly into the learning process, their brains understand that new information is not trivial, and we can flatten the curve -and help students remember what matters. Here are three practical strategies for helping students beat the forgetting curve.

In my English 11 class, we use a technique called a "brain dump" after almost every new concept. For example, after a lesson on analyzing tone in nonfiction, I asked students to close their laptops, put away their notes, and spend two minutes writing down everything they remembered: definitions, examples, why tone matters. No looking back. No pressure for perfection.

Early in the year, students are hesitant to do this: They aren't used to struggling for recall. As time goes on, they expect brain dumps and even ask for them. Brain dumps are part of how we learn.

Teach the lesson or concept.

At the end, tell students, "No notes, no books. Write everything you remember."

Encourage them to include anything that makes sense to them-bullet points, images, doodles, mind maps, examples, real-world connections, etc. The goal is to explain the knowledge in a way they personally understand and can remember.

Set a timer for two to four minutes.

After time is up, invite students to share a highlight from their brain dump with a partner or group.

A brain dump isn't just a memory exercise-it's a formative assessment tool that lets you see how students are organizing and understanding knowledge, giving you a chance to reinforce or redirect learning in real time. And here's the best part: Students don't just remember more-they own what they've learned.

2. Personal Reflection

Another great tool we use to boost memory is our "living wall," a spot where students post their answers to questions like these:What surprised you today? Where might you use this skill outside of English class? How does this connect to something you already know? They can add answers anytime during independent practice.

When we studied rhetorical appeals, for example, one student wrote, "I realized my favorite commercials use pathos to make me feel something-especially those animal rescue ads." Another posted, "I connect logos to how my dad convinces me about financial decisions."

These reflections build what brain scientists call elaborative encoding -a powerful web of connections that solidify memory. When students see their learning linking to the real world, they're not memorizing: They're weaving new knowledge into their lives.
How to build a living wall of learning

Set aside a visible wall space or bulletin board.

Put sticky notes, markers, and pencils next to the space.

Ask reflection questions during the lesson and post them on the wall. In addition to answering the questions, students can write tips, tricks, or advice on how they are understanding the content in real time. Ask them to fill up two or three notes during independent practice to get the wall started. Early in the year, they may benefit from sentence starters like "This reminds me of..." or "Now I understand more about..."

Use different-colored sticky notes for different units or skills-this helps keep the feedback organized for students to see connections.

Cluster similar ideas together (like a concept map that grows over time). You can occasionally assign roles-Connector, Pattern Finder, Questioner-to guide students to dive deeper.

Every few weeks, revisit the wall and direct students to link older notes to newer learning. Early on, it will help if you walk around and confer, asking questions like "Can you find an older note that helps explain what we did this week?"

While the living wall is open for use at any time, I design an intentional opportunity every Friday for students to use it to reflect, connect, and grow. That structured routine gradually builds the independence I'm aiming for. They start off needing a push-early on I'll walk around and ask questions like "Can you find an older note that helps explain what we did this week?"-but by midyear, they're making connections on their own.

Here are some activities we use during Friday reviews:

Revisit: Read three to five notes from earlier in the unit or quarter. Look for ideas that relate to what we learned this week.

Reflect and Connect: Use a different-colored sticky note to write a "connection note" (like "This vocab word from Week 2 helps explain today's article"). Or draw lines, group notes, or create a web of learning.

Celebrate Growth: Pick one sticky note that shows how your thinking has deepened. (Optional: Share it in a whip-around or pair-share before dismissal.)

If students learn something new but don't use it right away, the forgetting curve wins. I work to ensure that applying ideas happens immediately after initial instruction. After a mini-lesson on irony, for example, students didn't just take notes-they wrote two-sentence micro-stories packed with ironic twists.

And after reviewing characterization techniques, they created fake Instagram profiles for Lord of the Flies characters, using posts and captions to show indirect characterization.

Applying new ideas doesn't have to be formal. It just has to be fast-and real.

As John Medina explains in Brain Rules, immediate application shifts learning from fragile short-term memory into durable long-term storage. The sooner students use new knowledge in meaningful, creative ways, the stronger it sticks.
How to have students apply knowledge immediately

After teaching a concept, challenge students to use it in a mini-task that takes five to 10 minutes. Examples: sketch a quick cartoon, write a two-sentence story, create a metaphor, draft a fake text or tweet, list three real-life uses, or explain the concept to a younger student.

Keep it authentic: Ask them to create, connect, or solve using the skill-the goal is not to summarize the concept but to use it.

Celebrate speed and creativity-not perfection. Share a few examples publicly to validate the effort.

The Bottom Line: Memory Is Built, Not Borrowed

If students forget what we teach, it's not a sign that they aren't smart. It's a sign that we need to build stronger connections to help them hold on to it. Memory isn't built by covering content once-it comes through retrieving, connecting, using, and revisiting over and over, until it sticks.

With brain dumps, living walls, and immediate use, students move from passive memorization to being active owners of their knowledge. They aren't just passing tests, they're learning how to learn for life. And that's the kind of memory that doesn't fade.

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3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

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Our brains are wired to forget things unless we take active steps to remember. Here's how you can help students hold on to what they learn.

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Retrieval Practice: Why Thinking Hard Improves Long-Term Learning [FREE ONE-PAGE GUIDE]

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Discover the science behind retrieval practice: learn when and how to use this powerful learning strategy effectively without overwhelming students or turning it into busywork.

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Seven Essential Principles for Teachers to Know

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Research-Backed Strategies to Keep Students on Task

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Teachers can help students build their capacity to stay on task by ensuring that they have a clear path to start working, reasons to continue, and support when they lose focus.

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Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Do Today’s Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?

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How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?

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Don’t blame teachers; instructional churn is a rational response to a system that prizes novelty over execution.

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We're in our Curriculum Awakening Era. A podcast about literacy curriculum has gone viral. Columbia University Teachers College has canceled Lucy Calkins over the shortcomings of her work, and parents are suing Heinemann, the publisher of widely-used Balanced Literacy curricula, over its 'defective' programs.

You would think that states would be hustling to understand the curriculum used in each district, and to publish that information openly. You would be wrong.

In recent years, just eight states have published a map of the curriculum used in local districts:

Rhode Island has the best curriculum map, because it features annual updates (starting in 2019-20, through today), and the data spans all districts, at least in recent years. Both ELA and Math are covered. Take a bow, Little Rhody.

Colorado offers a helpful Literacy Curriculum Transparency Dashboard. Its interface shows a statewide breakdown as well as district-level data, by year since 2021-22.

Massachusetts published a curriculum map in 2022, and the data was updated in 2024, though no historical record is available online. It covers ELA, Math, and other subject areas. Some district info is blank.

Connecticut also publishes a list of ELA programs. It isn't as comprehensive as I'd like; in some districts, only the foundational skills program is listed, even if the district has other materials for comprehension. Also, I can't tell the timing of the list creation, but CT friends believe it's very new, so I'm guessing it reflects 2025-26 data, but it might be 2024-25.

Minnesota recently published data on the ELA curriculum used in most districts as of December, 2025, as required in its Read Act.

Ohio published a statewide survey of literacy curriculum, showing district selections for the 2022-23 school year. The state achieved an admirable 99% response rate.

Nebraska published a curriculum map that gave access to multi-year curriculum data for most districts, spanning ELA, Math, and Science. The website is "tempermental" so note the linked spreadsheet for 2024-25.

Unfortunately, some states have gone backwards. In 2021, Wisconsin published a curriculum map for ELA and Math, based on information reported by ~80% of districts. It was useful, but the state let the website domain expire, and the data went MIA. ( womp, womp) Wisconsin has a politicized education climate, including an elected state superintendent, and locals think politics are involved; the data was collected by the previous state superintendent, and the current administration seems to disown the work. Parent advocates retained the 2021 info, and you can find it here.

These curriculum maps are incredibly useful. In Massachusetts, they spawned a powerful investigation by the Boston Globe, which reported that "nearly half of all Massachusetts public school districts last year used a reading curriculum in their elementary schools that the state considers low quality." Another article captured a notable wrinkle: "Massachusetts's wealthiest school districts are also, strangely, the most likely to stick with a reading curriculum the state frowns on."

Ohio's list was also illuminating. I wrote about it, as did the Fordham Institute.

In our Curriculum Awakening Era, inquiring minds want this info. In fact, I'm writing this post partly to create a collection of these state maps, because I'm constantly asked for this information. I'll continue to maintain this list.

Given the interest in curriculum usage, we have to ask...

Why have only eight states published this data for ELA, and only four for math?

Why are the curriculum maps frequently incomplete, suggesting that districts aren't obliged to report such basic information?

Why do we usually get point-in-time maps that are quickly out-of-date in a swiftly-changing landscape?

Why are some these websites broken?

Simply put, we need annually-updated curriculum data sets for every state.

I would like to see curriculum transparency for all districts, for each grade, with the ability to track changes over time for research purposes, and the ability to understand the key supplements and assessments used in districts, in addition to core program selections.

State Departments of Education should collect this information annually, and make reporting mandatory. States require other forms of mandatory reporting; why should the materials at the heart of classrooms be exempt?

Ultimately, I'd like to see a national rollup of this information, published annually. Imagine a world in which researchers could do multi-year analyses to spot trends in performance based on curriculum use. Only a multi-year, multi-state data set would enable that kind of insight.

The Curriculum Awakening Era has spawned a growing chorus of demands - including my own - for districts to use curriculum that is proven to work. Yet this reasonable position bumps up against a hard reality: we have very few studies on the effectiveness of specific programs. Such studies are costly to produce, typically taking years to publish, so it will not be easy to get more studies quickly. We need to give the research community additional windows into curriculum effectiveness.

A word of caution: A district's curriculum selection is not an assured predictor of the quality of instruction in its classrooms. Many districts fail to create the conditions for successful implementation, because they under-invest in professional learning while changing curriculum. Often, schools fail to give teachers time to digest the new materials, which is best done collaboratively (yet collaborative teacher time is always at a premium). Schools can forget to train principals on the goals of the new materials, yielding mixed signals for teachers. Successful curriculum implementation is an art and a science, and schools don't always get it right. Then, of course, there is the age-old reality that teachers can close their doors and push the curriculum aside, clinging to old methods of teaching (one more reason the professional development is critical, to help teachers understand the benefits and design principles of the new materials).

None the less, a district's curriculum selection is a "tell." If a district selects a knowledge-building curriculum designed around rich, whole books, that tells us something about its goals. When districts continue to cling to Balanced Litracy curricula, long after the flaws in those programs have drawn national attention, that says a lot. If a district selects a bloated curriculum from a major publisher, it shows that the district isn't particularly savvy about its options, or that the district is happy to leave teachers choosing their own adventure in classrooms. And when a district has no curriculum, or its schools cobble together a bunch of things, that speaks volumes.

Advocates, parents, and researchers deserve transparency on these choices, with urgency.

You can find states where curriculum data is available, but not easily, publicly accessible. This is better than nothing, but doesn't meet the standard for transparency that I'm going for.

But, Georgia doesn't publish a curriculum map, so it's difficult for anyone to connect the dots between districts and programs. Why stop short on transparency?

I have also heard from educators in North Carolina and Utah that their state does collect curriculum usage data, and district leaders and/or regional education agencies have access to lists. I'm thrilled that the info has been gathered, but again, if journalists and researchers and parents and I can't find it, we're falling short of the transparency we need.

Please keep telling me if this data is out there in your state, I'll continue to update this post, so researchers and journalists and parents have leads. Yet we should all continue to call for more public dashboards.

The state lists aren't our only source of insight on curriculum usage in US schools.

Wisconsin advocates at Forward Literacy created an eye-opening state curriculum map, showing that Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study remains the second-most used ELA program statewide.

Please comment on this post with any worthy additions, and I'll gladly update the sources as the landscape evolves.
Sometimes the meme says it best, and this is one of those times: The Scorecard Version:

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Few states track and publish curriculum used in each district, and this needs to change ASAP

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Memo to state leaders: you need to provide a window into curriculum selections, to empower researchers educators, and parents alike.

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With a solid understanding of how people process information, teachers can use evidence-based strategies to guide student learning.

Benedetto Cristofani / The iSpot

Understanding how to best support students can be confusing and complex. To deal with this complexity, we develop naive theories and unscientific beliefs about what helps students learn. The science of learning has tested many of these beliefs, and evidence now shows that some of our most common beliefs about learners are wrong. These misconceptions about learning may cause us to waste some of our instructional time and effort-or, even worse, impair students' learning.

Below, I will describe three common myths about learning, debunk those myths, and reinterpret those ideas according to our most up-to-date evidence.

Myth 1: every student has a 'Learning Style'

Many teachers believe that students have individual learning styles and that students' learning is optimized when instruction is tailored to their style.

Learners often express a preference for a specific modality of encountering information. For example, some students may say that they are verbal learners, while others profess to learn best with visual information. Sometimes, people theorize learning styles even more broadly, including concrete or abstract learners; active or reflective learners; and analytic, creative, or practical learners. There are countless unscientific tests online that will assign students a learning style-schools can even purchase expensive tests that will divide students into different style categories.

Yet, no good evidence suggests that stable and useful learning styles of students exist. Furthermore, there is zero evidence that students learn better when information is presented in a way that meshes with their chosen preferences. According to research, trying to tailor teaching to match each learner's preferred mode of processing is a waste of time and resources.

Evidence-based concept: Instead, research suggests that students will learn, remember, and apply novel information better if they process that information in multiple different ways. Processing information in multiple and varied forms (including multiple senses, abstract and concrete representations, diverse examples, and varied activities) creates elaborated and detailed memories, which enhances the long-term retention and generalization of that knowledge.

Using it in the classroom: Students who learn fractions with math symbols, words, visuals, and kinesthetic experiences should master fractions better than students who only experience a single approach. Similarly, students processing French translations acquire the language better if they see, hear, touch, and taste food translations.

Myth 2: Testing should be used only to assess student learning

Teachers and students alike often view tests as a necessary evil-a means of assessing (both formatively and summatively) what students do and do not know. Indeed, tests are critical indicators of what students have mastered. But tests are useful for so much more!

Evidence-based concept: Numerous research studies now show that tests do more than just assess memory: Tests change memory. Tests exemplify a form of memory retrieval, in which students retrieve information from long-term memory to answer questions. Retrieving information from long-term memory changes the memory in a way that makes the information resistant to forgetting in the future. In fact, research shows that one of the best ways to ensure that you remember information is to repeatedly practice retrieving that information from long-term memory.

Beyond just helping students remember information, practicing retrieval helps students organize information in their minds, apply learned information to novel problems and questions, recognize what they have understood and what they haven't, and even learn more information from upcoming lessons.

Using it in the classroom: Teachers can prompt retrieval practice in countless and varied ways (which can also help teachers assess student mastery). Students can do a "brain dump," where they write down everything they remember at the end of a class, solve a start-up question from last week using just their memories, create a mind map from memory of a text, answer questions on personal whiteboards, draw an illustration of main ideas from the lesson from memory, and more.

Retrieval practice boosts learning whether it is graded or ungraded, whether corrective feedback is provided or not (but more feedback is better), and across many ages and disciplines. The only required feature is that students retrieve the information from memory (rather than rereading, repeating, highlighting, or recopying information). If we want students to be able to retrieve information in the future, it makes sense that they should practice retrieving that information now. Practice makes perfect, after all.

Myth 3: Concepts that are easily learned are easily remembered

Teachers and students typically believe that if ideas are quickly or easily learned, they will be remembered in the long term. This "easily learned, easily remembered" belief is widespread, and it affects teachers' and students' choices about learning activities. Learners choose study techniques that allow quick acquisition of new information, including rereading or recopying notes (rather than attempting retrieval), focusing on a single concept at a time (rather than mixing together similar ideas), and practicing an idea in a single learning session (rather than distributing practice across many sessions).

Evidence-based concept: Techniques that speed up the acquisition of ideas frequently speed up the forgetting of these ideas. In other words, research shows that easily learned often means quickly forgotten.

Using it in the classroom: Some difficulties during learning help students remember information in the long run. Slowing down learning by creating desirable difficulties can create better long-term retention than easier acquisition.

For example, practicing retrieval increases errors during learning and is more effortful than rereading or recopying notes, but it produces big learning benefits over time. Similarly, students who answer a series of the same type of math problem in a row (blocking instruction) make fewer errors during learning than students answering a mixture of different problems ( interleaving instruction). However, students who answer a mix of different problems ultimately remember more. Finally, studying a concept in a single session (massing instruction) feels easier and faster than spreading out that learning across smaller, distributed sessions ( distributed instruction). Even so, distributing practice across time is very beneficial in the end.

There are important caveats here, though. Struggle in and of itself is not useful. Introducing unnecessary complexity or withholding instructions increases students' struggle but does not support learning. In contrast, struggle during learning can be productive if learners are struggling over important aspects of the problem. For example, learning how to decipher between similar math problems is productive struggle because learning how to distinguish similar problems is important. Retrieving information from long-term memory is also productive struggle because we want learners to be able to retrieve information in the future.

To ensure that students appreciate the benefits of this extra effort during learning, teachers can help students interpret struggle to mean that they are learning and view wrestling with ideas as indicating growth (rather than as indicating a limitation of their abilities).

Supporting students' learning is a complicated challenge. We often develop intuitive ideas about what works best, but sometimes these intuitions can misguide us. Correcting learning myths and aligning our practices with evidence-based approaches can enable more effective and efficient instruction.

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3 Common Myths About Learning-and What Teachers Can Do Instead

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By exploring three common myths about how students learn, teachers can find find out more about how information processing and memory work.

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Rehearsal first; retrieval practice later – an important distinction.

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In December, Efrat Furst delivered a superb masterclass as part of our In Action series where she explained the stages of learning using the models used in her brilliant blog posts such as Within t…

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Science of Reading Classroom and Tara Hess and Sara Quinn

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ICYMI: Teachers Teach Teachers about “Getting the Gist”

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Here’s something that keeps me up at night.

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In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵

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In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵

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In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵
— Steve Hare (@sharemath) June 1, 2026

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In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵

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In 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯, Stanislas Dehaene—one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and winner of the Nobel-equivalent Brain Prize—identifies the 4 Biological Pillars of Learning. Without all 4 of these pillars in place, learning is fragile and will not last: 🧵

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https://www.edutopia.org/article/hexagonal-thinking-any-content-area/

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How to Use Hexagonal Thinking in Any Content Area

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This engaging activity supports students in organizing their thoughts in a multidimensional way, helping to cement their understanding.

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S5E31: Katharine Beals on facilitated communication and educational pseudoscience

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Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell. Education is filled with myths. Some are harmless. Others shape curriculum, teacher training, intervention programs, and the lives of students for decades before anyone seriously asks whether they work. One of the reasons this podcast exists is to challenge those myths and examine the evidence behind them. Too often, educational practices spread because of compelling stories, persuasive advocates, and wishful thinking rather than rigorous scientific testing. When that happens, bad ideas can become institutionalized long before they’re properly scrutinized. Few examples illustrate this better than facilitated communication. Introduced in the 1970s and widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, facilitated communication was presented as a breakthrough method for helping individuals with severe communication disabilities express thoughts that had previously been assumed inaccessible. Through physical support provided by a facilitator, individuals were said to be able to type messages, write, and communicate complex ideas. Parents, educators, and advocates reported what appeared to be remarkable transformations. Individuals who had never spoken or demonstrated conventional literacy suddenly seemed capable of sophisticated written communication. Stories emerged of hidden intelligence being unlocked, challenging longstanding assumptions about disability, cognition, and human potential. There was just one problem: the evidence ultimately showed that the messages were not coming from the individuals themselves. What many believed was a breakthrough in communication turned out to be an illusion. In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Katharine Beals, whose work has focused on language, literacy, autism, and the scientific evaluation of facilitated communication. We discuss how the method gained credibility, why so many sincere and well-intentioned people became convinced of its effectiveness, and the scientific investigations that sought to determine whether the communication was truly originating from the disabled individual or from the facilitator. Our conversation also explores the broader lessons this story holds for education, psychology, and disability advocacy. How should educators evaluate extraordinary claims? What role should evidence play when powerful personal experiences seem to point in a different direction? And why do ideas that have been extensively studied and criticized continue to reappear in new forms and under new names? Whether you are an educator, psychologist, speech-language pathologist, parent, or simply interested in the history of controversial educational practices, facilitated communication offers a fascinating case study in the intersection of science, advocacy, hope, and human judgment. It is a story that continues to raise important questions about evidence, ethics, and the responsibility we bear when making decisions on behalf of vulnerable individuals. Resources and Links Learn more about facilitated communication and related research: https://www.facilitatedcommunication.org/ Explore Dr. Katharine Beals’ books, articles, and research: https://katharinebeals.com/ 🚨 Tickets Selling Fast! 🚨 Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction - in New York City this summer. We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one. 🗽 NYC | July 27–31, 2026 👉 Learn more + register here: 🎟️ Explicit Teaching Institute registration Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching. Please give this podcast 5⭐️ and subscribe: Spotify YouTube Apple Podcasts

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Here is a reading list of 65 books about cognitive science and its application to the classroom. 2. Here are my summaries of a selection of these books. For each book there is a pdf of my summary a…

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The Science of Learning in Action: Mastering Attention in the Classroom When It Really Matters

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Brett Benson and Laura Stam with Helen Reynolds and Dr. Sarah Oberle

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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280917127