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https://vimeo.com/1162991724/19def94454?fl=pl&fe=cm

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https://vimeo.com/1162991692/6cb7d36d74?fl=pl&fe=cm

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https://vimeo.com/1162991641/2dc5804cb4?fl=pl&fe=cm

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https://vimeo.com/1162991578/041e96c44d?fl=pl&fe=cm

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https://vimeo.com/1162991431/9161d1a945?fl=pl&fe=cm

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https://vimeo.com/1162991497/e23fb5d71d?fl=pl&fe=sh

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How my diagnosis changed the way I perceive myself | Kaelynn Partlow

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“Characteristics of students with dyslexia change over time, depending on the grade level and/or stage of reading that the individual has reached. The following are some signs of dyslexia at different grade levels:”

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Red Flags for Reading Difficulties - IDA Massachusetts

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Excerpts from, "The Dyslexia Puzzle"... (Kaufman and Hook, 1998) "Characteristics of students with dyslexia change over time, depending on the grade level and/or stage of reading that the individual has reached.

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Through My Eyes - Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia

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Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. Understand their challenges and find tools to support them.

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Through My Eyes - Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia

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Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. Understand their challenges and find tools to support them.

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Literacy Intervention Menu (feel free to adapt to your needs!)

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Literacy Intervention Menu (feel free to adapt to your needs!)

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"The cruel irony is that the kind of education most loudly justified in the name of equity is often the one that most reliably privileges the already privileged."

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In the late 1990s, web designers fell in love with mystery. Navigation menus shed their labels in favour of cryptic icons; buttons became abstract shapes that revealed their purpose only when clicked. The user experience community came to call this "mystery meat navigation," named after the unidentifiable protein served in school cafeterias: you don't know what it is until you bite into it, and by then it's too late.

Such interfaces were sharply criticised at the time. Vincent Flanders, writing on Web Pages That Suck, described the phenomenon as "mystery meat navigation": designs in which users had to click or hover simply to discover basic functionality. The approach was seductive because it looked clean and won design awards, but it transferred cognitive burden from designer to user. Over the following years, usability research vindicated Flanders' critique, and the practice largely faded from professional web design, replaced by explicit labels and descriptive text. What seems elegantly minimal to the expert is often baffling to the novice.

In education, a similar conflation of experts and novices has been far more persistent, and far more consequential. For decades, the dominant view in Western educational thought has been that children learn best through discovery, exploration, and the construction of their own understanding. In many systems, minimal guidance has moved from a pedagogical option to a default stance. This orthodoxy is embedded in curriculum frameworks (the OECD's competency frameworks provided a template for national curricula worldwide) and propagated through teacher training programmes where constructivism is taught as settled science, and culturally enshrined in TED talks that valorise creativity while dismissing "traditional" education as a relic of the industrial age.

Embedded in this orthodoxy is a category error: the conflation of an outcome with a process. We all want students to be discovering knowledge for themselves as independent learners but in instructional design terms , independent learning is a bad way to become an independent learner. The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not a starting condition; it is an achievement, built through the systematic acquisition of knowledge and skills that make independence possible. To demand independence before providing its prerequisites is to mistake the destination for the route.

Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark put it plainly: problem-solving search is an inefficient way of altering long-term memory because its function is to find a problem solution, not alter long-term memory. Learners can engage in problem-solving activities for extended periods and learn almost nothing. The worked example effect, one of the most robust findings in educational psychology, demonstrates this: students who study worked examples consistently outperform those who solve equivalent problems themselves. Not because problem-solving is unimportant, but because for novices, the cognitive demands of problem-solving actively interfere with learning.

Paul Kirschner also makes an excellent point in this article about the broader paradigm of Constructivism is an epistemological claim about how knowledge is formed and justified, not a pedagogical prescription for how novices should be taught. The error, Kirschner argues, lies in assuming that because knowledge is constructed, it must therefore be learned through unguided construction. This is again, a category mistake. How experts generate knowledge is not how novices acquire it. Constructivism constructs nothing for those who arrive without materials.

Minimally guided approaches like Discovery learning rests on an often unexamined assumption: that all children come equally equipped to discover. They do not. Discovery learning asks children to find what some of them already have. It's a mode of instruction that overwhelmingly favours those who already know what to look for.

When we ask students to figure things out for themselves, to construct understanding through exploration, we're not providing a level playing field. We're hosting a race where some children start near the finish line while others begin several miles back, blindfolded. Consider what a child needs to successfully "discover" a principle in science, or intuit a pattern in mathematics, or develop sophisticated comprehension strategies in reading: Relevant prior knowledge to connect new information to existing schemas, a vocabulary rich enough to encode and manipulate concepts, Bbackground knowledge that makes problems meaningful rather than arbitrary, metacognitive strategies for monitoring their own understanding and the luxury of cognitive resources not consumed by decoding basics.

Where do children acquire these prerequisites? Largely at home, long before they cross the school threshold. Consider the child of professionals who grows up marinated in language. Dinner table conversations expose her to argumentation, abstraction, and academic register. Her parents scaffold her thinking without realising they're doing it; asking questions that push her reasoning, providing explanations calibrated to her understanding, modelling curiosity and intellectual engagement.

She's visited museums, watched documentaries, had books read to her nightly. By the time she encounters photosynthesis in a discovery-based science lesson, she already has mental hooks to hang it on: half-remembered nature programmes, a conversation about why leaves change colour, the time she asked why plants need sunlight and her father actually explained it. For her, discovery learning is a pleasant confirmation of things she half-knows already. The teacher's carefully designed exploration helps her formalise intuitions she's been building for years.

Now consider her classmate. His parents work multiple jobs; there's little time for elaborated explanations of how the world works. English is a second language. Books are scarce. The television plays, but nobody discusses what's on it. He arrives at school with a fraction of the vocabulary, a fraction of the background knowledge, a fraction of the metacognitive toolkit.

For him, the same discovery lesson is an exercise in bewilderment. He lacks the prior knowledge to generate productive hypotheses. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. He can't discover what he has no foundation to discover. Minimal guidance therefore does not fail equally. It sorts.

In classrooms, this sorting is often misread as engagement or ability. Some students thrive. They contribute readily. They appear curious and capable. Others withdraw, become dependent on peers, or quietly give up. The usual explanation is motivation or confidence. Rarely is the design of curriculum, instruction and assessment itself questioned.

As Rebecca Birch argues, exploration and self-discovery are often treated as inherently virtuous. These approaches are no longer just instructional strategies; they are treated as moral goods.

" What is natural is considered good; student failure has no real consequence to the teacher, who is publicly affirmed for their beliefs about the inherent capability of the child to learn by osmosis. "

And when students fail, the failure is rarely read as instructional. It is absorbed into a broader narrative about how "the system" is unjust, the curriculum outdated, or the assessment regime misaligned. The design of instruction itself remains largely untouched. Ironically, all of this is framed in the language of equity and social justice. Minimal guidance is presented as respectful, inclusive, and empowering. Whereas, to intervene too strongly is cast as deficit thinking; to explain too clearly is framed as limiting autonomy.

Yet this moral framing obscures a basic asymmetry. Learners who arrive with background knowledge, language, and cultural capital can navigate exploratory environments with relative ease. Those who do not are left to struggle in the name of fairness. Equality of experience is mistaken for equity of outcome, and the very students these approaches claim to serve are quietly disadvantaged by them.

From an equity perspective, I've always found Zig Engelmann's position far more powerful (and demanding of us as educators); "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught-that's not a slogan, it's an operating principle."It's demanding precisely because it denies education systems the comfort of developmental or moral excuses. Learning failure becomes an instructional design problem, not a child problem. Responsibility is not softened by good intentions or progressive language; it is sharpened by outcomes.

There is a peculiar cruelty embedded in much contemporary educational thinking. It masquerades as liberation, as respect for the child, as faith in natural curiosity. But beneath its progressive veneer lies a mechanism that systematically advantages the already advantaged while abandoning those who need explicit guidance the most.

When we withhold clear instruction from novice learners in favour of discovery, exploration, or "authentic" problem solving, we create a learning environment that only works for students who already possess the prerequisite knowledge, the cultural capital, and the cognitive resources to navigate it. For everyone else, minimal guidance is not empowerment; it is abandonment dressed in the language of care.

The persistence of this idea in the face of contradicting evidence is a phenomenon worth pausing over. It suggests that something other than empirical findings is driving the attachment. Douglas Carnine , writing over two decades ago, argued that education remains an immature profession precisely because it privileges ideology over evidence. In medicine, he noted, the Thalidomide disaster led to requirements that drugs be proven effective and safe before prescription. In education, by contrast, we routinely implement approaches based on intuition, ideology, or romantic appeal, testing them only after widespread adoption, if at all.

The frustrating truth is that we have a good sense of how to do this. Decades of research in cognitive science and instructional design have given us a robust understanding of how novices learn: manage cognitive load, sequence content from simple to complex, provide worked examples before independent practice, build automaticity in foundational skills before demanding their application, ensure high success rates during initial instruction, and space retrieval over time. These are not controversial findings; they are among the most replicated results in educational psychology. The problem is not that we lack the science. The problem is that the science is unfashionable. It doesn't work well as a TED talk.

This moral framing does not arise accidentally. It is sustained institutionally. Much of the resistance to explicit, evidence-informed instruction does not come from classroom teachers grappling with real constraints, but from education academics and policy actors who shape what counts as legitimate pedagogy. As Professor Pamela Snow observes:

"Much of the opposition to explicit teaching of knowledge comes from education academics (rather than teachers themselves) and is veiled in the language of academic freedom, teacher autonomy and a vague need to 're-imagine' schools and schooling. Unfortunately, this is often a fig-leaf for 'we don't like the evidence on the impact of explicit teaching on student academic and wellbeing outcomes'."

When we design instruction that works only for those who already possess substantial prior knowledge, we systematically disadvantage those who do not. And who lacks prior knowledge? Overwhelmingly, it is students from disadvantaged backgrounds, those whose homes contain fewer books, whose parents lack university degrees, whose early environments provided less of the vocabulary, the concepts, the background knowledge that schools assume rather than teach.

The research is compelling on this point. Clark's review of aptitude-treatment interaction studies showed that minimally guided instruction systematically disadvantages lower-aptitude and lower-prior-knowledge learners, sometimes producing negative learning effects. Higher-aptitude learners, by contrast, are better able to cope with unstructured environments, masking the instructional failure for those who need guidance most.

The science of learning is not mysterious; it is simply difficult to implement at scale with teachers facing thirty children with vastly different starting points. Into this space comes adaptive environments powered by AI and it's clear now that LLMS have drastically changed the calculus in terms of how it can augment instructional design, but only if we design these systems according to what cognitive science tells us about how novices learn, how knowledge is structured and the kinds of learning episodes that lead to a durable change in long-term memory, rather than encoding the same constructivist assumptions that have conferred privilege on those who already have it. The risk is that we build digital discovery environments that replicate the inequities of their analogue predecessors, now with adaptive algorithms. The opportunity is that we finally build something better.

Any design of learning that assumes knowledge it doesn't provide is not progressive. It's a mechanism for smuggling privilege through the school gates under cover of child-centred rhetoric. Discovery learning asks children to find what some of them already have, and overwhelmingly favours those who already know what to look for.

The advantaged child discovers her way to understanding; an understanding her home has prepared her to reach. The disadvantaged child discovers mainly the limits of what discovery can do for those who lack the prerequisites. The cruel irony is that the kind of education most loudly justified in the name of equity is often the one that most reliably privileges the already privileged.

Clark, R. E. (1982). Antagonism between achievement and aptitude treatments. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(6), 747-754.

Kirschner, P. A. (2025). Epistemology or pedagogy: That is the question. Unpublished manuscript / white paper. (Available via kirschnered.nl)

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

Mayer, R. E. (2004) Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning?
American Psychologist, 59(1), 14-19.

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The Progressive Case for Explicit Instruction

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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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Answering the Internet's Questions about Dyslexia

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Answering the Internet's Questions about Dyslexia

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Answering the Internet's Questions about Dyslexia

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The gift of dyslexia: what is the harm in it?

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The gift of dyslexia: what is the harm in it?

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The gift of dyslexia: what is the harm in it? - Annals of Dyslexia

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Dyslexia, characterized by word reading and spelling deficits, has historically been viewed through a medical model of disability. However, a countermovement has emerged, emphasizing the strengths and abilities of neurodiverse individuals, including those with dyslexia. The concept of neurodiversity, which was initially introduced to help inform understanding of a mild form of autism, has expanded to include dyslexia.

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"The conflation of the Zone of Proximal Development with scaffolding has arguably been the most consequential misreading of Vygotsky in Western education....

For Vygotsky, the zone was not primarily about collaboration or scaffolding. It was about the transformative power of systematic instruction. The teacher’s role was not to facilitate discovery but to transmit the tools of scientific thinking, to lift learners from spontaneous, everyday concepts to systematic, disciplined thought. Collaboration and dialogue were means through which this transmission occurred, not ends in themselves."

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How the Zone of Proximal Development Became Education’s Most Misunderstood Idea

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What is a functional behavioral assessment (FBA)?

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When a student has behavior challenges, schools may use a process called functional behavioral assessment (FBA) to understand what’s causing the behavior. Learn more.

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Lessons to build parenting skills and manage challenging behavior

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Overwhelmed by your child’s outbursts, tantrums, or meltdowns? Try these self-paced lessons made especially for families of kids with ADHD and learning disabilities. Learn how to prevent and manage challenging behavior. Get evidence-based strategies to strengthen your relationship with your child.

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Through My Eyes - Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia

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Step into the world of kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. Understand their challenges and find tools to support them.

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Speech and Language UK: Changing young lives

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Speech and Language UK: Changing young lives

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© 2018 by Boys Town National Research Hospital and DLDandMe.org Collaborators

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At a glance

Dysgraphia refers to a challenge with writing.

It impacts skills like handwriting, typing, and spelling.

There are many ways people with dysgraphia can improve their writing skills.

Dysgraphia is a term that refers to trouble with writing. Many experts view dysgraphia as challenges with a set of skills known as transcription. These skills - handwriting, typing, and spelling - allow us to produce writing.

Trouble expressing your thoughts in writing isn't formally recognized as part of dysgraphia. That's a learning disability known as written expression disorder. But when people struggle with transcription, it can get in the way of thinking about ideas and how to convey them.

For example, people with dysgraphia may write more slowly than others. That can affect how well they express themselves in writing. Plus, they tend to have trouble with spelling because it's hard for them to form letters when they write.

Dysgraphia isn't a matter of intelligence. The challenges are often caused by trouble with motor skills. Those skills can improve with help. And people with dysgraphia may also be eligible to use accommodations at work or at school.

About the author

About the author

The Understood Team is made up of passionate writers and editors. Many of them have kids who learn and think differently.

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Charles A. MacArthur, PhD is a professor emeritus of special education. He researches writing instruction, self-regulated strategies, and assistive technology.

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Dysgraphia is a writing challenge that affects skills like handwriting, typing, and spelling. It's not technically a learning disability, but it can affect learning.

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Dysgraphia is a Greek word. The base word graph refers both to the hand’s function in writing and to the letters formed by the hand. The prefix dys indicates

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Oliver Caviglioli

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Devoted to visualising educational concepts and processes.

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How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice

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How Learning Happens introduces 32 giants of educational research and their findings on how we learn and what we need to know to learn effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably. Many of these works have inspired researchers and teachers all around the world and have left a mark on how we teach today.
Now updated to include a new section on Memory and Cognition with five new chapters, this revised second edition explores a selection of the key works on learning and teaching, chosen from the fields

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How Teaching Happens: Seminal Works in Teaching and Teacher Effectiveness and What They Mean in Practice

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Building on their bestselling book How Learning Happens, Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick are joined by Jim Heal to explore how teaching happens. The book seeks to closely examine what makes for effective teaching in the classroom and how research on expert teaching can be used in practice. Introducing 30 seminal works from the field of education psychology research, the learning sciences, and teaching effectiveness studies, each chapter takes an important work and illustrates clearly and co

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Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching | Hachette Learning

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Education begins here. Together, we unlock every learner’s unique potential with high quality teaching solutions and services that raise the standard for education worldwide.

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Why Don't Students Like School? [Willingham, Daniel T.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Why Don't Students Like School?

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Life on the Bridge: Linking My World to Yours as an Autistic Therapist

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Life on the Bridge: Linking My World to Yours as an Autistic Therapist [Partlow, Kaelynn] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Life on the Bridge: Linking My World to Yours as an Autistic Therapist

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Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know (The Way I See It)

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Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know (The Way I See It)

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Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know (The Way I See It)

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Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know (The Way I See It) [Grandin PhD, Temple] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Autism, Sensory and Behavior: Everything You Need to Know (The Way I See It)

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hannah@erinkentconsulting.com

EKC Research + Innovation Specialist & Senior Strategist

Background in Elementary Ed, Special Ed, Bilingual Ed, and TESOL

Formally:

Migrant Educational Outreach Teacher

Bilingual Educator (Spanish/English)

Bilingual ICOT (Integrated Co-taught SPED)

Literacy Coordinator

Head of Student Support Services

English as a New Language (ENL) Teacher

New York/China

Cheese-maker

Traveler

Pun-lover

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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Literacy Consultants & Consulting Services | Erin Kent Consulting

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EKC provides literacy consultants, consulting services, and literacy professional learning for schools.

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Effective Universal Instruction: An Action-Oriented Approach to Improv

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This accessible volume helps school leadership teams accomplish the crucial yet often overlooked task of improving universal instruction--Tier 1 within a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS).

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About the Book: Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd Edition
From Dr. Sally Shaywitz, one of the world's preeminent experts on reading and dyslexia, the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and practical book available on identifying, understanding, and overcoming reading problems-now revised to reflect the latest research and evidence-based approaches.
Dyslexia is the most common learning disorder on the planet, affecting about one in five individuals, regardless of age or gender. Now world-renowned expert Sally Shaywitz gives us a substantially updated and augmented edition of her classic work: drawing on an additional fifteen years of cutting-edge research, offering new information on all aspects of dyslexia and reading problems, and providing the tools that parents, teachers, and all dyslexic individuals need. This new edition also offers:

New material on the challenges faced by dyslexic individuals across all ages

Rich information on ongoing advances in digital technology that have dramatically increased dyslexics' ability to help themselves

New chapters on diagnosing dyslexia, choosing schools and colleges for dyslexic students, the co-implications of anxiety, ADHD, and dyslexia, and dyslexia in post-menopausal women

Extensively updated information on helping both dyslexic children and adults become better readers, with a detailed home program to enhance reading

Evidence-based universal screening for dyslexia as early as kindergarten and first grade - why and how

New information on how to identify dyslexia in all age ranges

Exercises to help children strengthen the brain areas that control reading

Ways to raise a child's self-esteem and reveal her strengths

Stories of successful men, women, and young adults who are dyslexic

Click here to order your copy today.

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From Dr. Sally Shaywitz, one of the world's preeminent experts on reading and dyslexia, the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and practical book available on identifying, understanding, and overcoming reading problems-now revised to reflect the latest research and evidence-based approaches. Dyslexia is the most common learning disorder on the planet, affecting about one in five individuals, regardless of age or gender.

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When you return to your classrooms and teams and try something new, be sure to snap a picture and share with us.

Tell the story of your learning and help other educators around the world! We love to see what's transferring to the classroom!

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Don't forget to use the #EKCLiteracy 🤓

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EXAMPLE Strategic Group Planning Form (Tier 2)

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UFLI Foundations: Progress Monitoring and Differentiation

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How Learning Happens: A Simple Model of Memory

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Presenting a sketch of a person’s head to help us organise our thinking about learning and memory

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This groundbreaking resource details the most successful classroom practices and interventions based on more than 900 meta-analyses and offers teacher…