My favorite part of the teaching day is when I'm teaching students a pair of contrasting words like civil and hostile. I enjoy this part of the day because it teaches students new words AND students try to connect these new words to previously learned ones. I use a script. At the end of the script students have to discern between the contrasting word pair. I provide a sentence and students choose which word by spelling it on their mini white boards. For example, students discern between the words civil and hostile. I encourage students to quickly write words that are associated with either civil or hostile underneath. The words don't have to be synonyms, but should be related in some way. I'm trying to get students to solidify word networks so to speak. Here is an example from one of my students on Friday. What I like about this routine is that it is pretty quick. Students learn two new words through pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. They also are building word networks by retrieving previously learned vocabulary. There seems to be a lot of student thinking going on in this short amount of time. I might quickly ask the class to turn and talk and discuss how these words are related. I might come up with a paragraph describing how these words are related with examples for the entire class to read the following day. This has worked exceptionally well over the years. Students are not only learning words, but linking them to other ones, AND getting a lot of spelling practice with both newly learned words and retrieving previously learned words. Just for context, students previously learned the words benevolent & malevolent during novel study (Walk Two Moons) and learned belligerent earlier in this Word Mapping Project unit through Structure Word Inquiry working with the matrix and base bell meaning war.

People like FdB talk about education like the only meaningful outcome is everyone ready for Harvard—which does rest on individual academic talent. I’d like to talk about widespread 8th grade level education. How do we get there?

What are "levels of evidence" and why do we need to talk about them in education? New Snow Report blog post: pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2026…

There's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks in edu circles about whether the trad education movement has failed, what it needs to do next, etc. This article is just the latest in a succession of examples that shows how us edu-trads have not been nearly as successful as we hoped in altering elite consensus on education. We have obviously seen with all the Labour party policies that we completely failed to convince Labour. But actually, it's not like we've really convinced the Conservatives either. This is Dan Hannan, major figure in Brexit, major figure in Conservative politics, presumably has some idea of who Michael Gove is - and here he is in the Telegraph confidently asserting that we no longer need to know things because we can look things up. (The ironies in this piece abound, by the way. He argues for lessons in spotting bad bogus arguments at the same time as building an article around the argument that memory doesn't matter any more. He argues that "identifying improbable claims" is a generic skill that can be taught in the abstract, at the same time as claiming that handwriting and geography are obsolete. He says that you can always just look up what you need, whilst signally failing to look up any of the evidence on the role of long-term memory...I could go on.) I wrote a few weeks ago that there was some evidence journalists at the Financial Times were waking up to all the evidence on cognitive science, its implications for schools, the international test evidence. But the elite understanding of this is a very thin layer, absolutely skin deep. The mass of second-hand dealers in ideas are still distilling their frenzy from Romantic pedagogy. Depressing. I honestly don't know what else we can do. We wrote the books. We had the debates. We built the schools. We aced the tests. And then it turned out nobody cared. Right now it is definitely a bleak time to be a trad. It feels like we are on Athelney Marshes, beset by vandals without and dissension within. BUT we have to keep the faith. Reality is an undefeated champion. Despair is a sin! What we do works! It may well be that for now, the New World with all its power & might etc., is going to have to step in to save our bacon for a bit. Maybe the momentum is shifting to @ehanford and Sold a Story, @rastokke and Chalk & Talk, @jettybe3 , etc. We have got to dig in. As Declan Rice said, it's not done!

Devastated by the scenes in France, my heart bleeds for them. This isn’t protest, but the chaotic brawl of the mob, electrified by the thrill of violence and power. Civilisation demands order as its first principle.

Our book, Routines for Reading Results, includes routines based in Direct Instruction - the approach and programs described in @ehanford’s new season of Sold a Story. routinesforreadingresults.co…

"Sold a Story" made @ehanford a hero to teachers by exposing how they'd been misled about reading. Season 2 will be a harder sell: it challenges the profession's deepest convictions about what good teaching is. My review of the first four episodes: thenext30years.substack.com/…

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This is great to hear. We're creating discussion guides for Season 2. Draft versions here: righttoreadproject.com/sold-… You can help us improve them by sending feedback after you try them! The final version of the guides will be on the Sold a Story website with Episode 7, Nov 19.