“Let's just move on" isn't a plan. It's an escape hatch. Kids didn't learn to read. Someone needs to say: We were wrong. Now that we know better, we're doing better. @MissyPurcell says it perfectly 👇 misspurcell.substack.com/p/i… #ScienceOfReading

There's a lot of talk about whether we can trust PISA scores or not. PISA is not the only international test. TIMSS & PIRLS are run by a different research group, and have a slightly different focus. They test reading, maths & science but with more of a focus on specific curriculum knowledge. England is also the only country outside East Asia to come in the top 10 on all the TIMSS & PIRLS tests too. More here. substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

What are the most effective methods of improving student achievement? An NYT investigation. For me, the data point in the bottom left quadrant is absolutely critical to understanding why student achievement goes wrong so often: teachers making up their own curriculum. nytimes.com/2026/09/28/upsho…

You can't persuade people that observation and coaching can and will be a positive experience - a professional, motivating discussion not a judgement or evaluation - unless that's actually true. It needs to be sincere. Teachers need a chance to share their thinking and ideas, not just be told what the observer thought. Once people experience that, they begin to value and trust it. But if you're relentlessly in 'drop in and tell them' mode, things won't change. It's no wonder so many teachers resist these things - because they've been burned by the stream of 'feedback' launched at them by a string of people who didn't think it was worth asking them first.

There are academics who have built their whole career on making the teaching of simple arithmetic unnecessarily complicated. Practice has been turned into a bad word in math & explicitly teaching is often something that’s supposed to be avoided. Children have suffered for it. Math has suffered for it. Universities and academia are partly to blame by often rewarding the publication of flawed education research. The problem is that these academics can be hugely influential on curriculum, textbooks, teacher education, and professional development. Because who would think an education expert isn’t really an expert? When someone has built their whole career on bad ideas, it’s going to be hard to get them to change course. That is why it is true that math needs a phonics-style revolution.

“Phonics is necessary but insufficient.” England’s results reinforce a critical truth: reading comprehension depends on knowledge. History, science, literature, geography, art, and music build the knowledge and vocabulary that make comprehension possible. nationalreview.com/2026/09/w…

It's difficult to overestimate how damaging this view of teaching and learning has been for so many kids. Virtually every teacher trained over the last 50 years was taught that knowing stuff is the least important part of thinking. This image taken from Utica University's assessment resources for faculty: utica.edu/academic/Assessmen…

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“Learning” information without practicing reproducing it is not really learning it. It’s really just “loading” the information into short-term memory. The fact that it’s in short-term memory can trick you into thinking it’s going to stay there. But in reality, it dissipates quickly, and the only way you can bring it back without reloading it from an external reference is if you’re able to retrieve the information from long-term memory. That's why learning really amounts to increasing your ability to recall information from long-term memory unassisted – an action that can be trained by repeatedly performing it in gradually more challenging contexts.

Instead of bringing in guest speakers to talk about teaching and inspire us with anecdotes, why not have them actually teach? Put them in a real classroom and let’s watch the magic happen. Let us see how they plan, how they adjust in the moment, how they respond to student questions, manage behavior, and assess understanding. Now that’s the kind of professional development that would actually inspire me.

Another take-away from @nhannahjones's piece...if you, consciously or unconsciously, think "the smart kids will always be okay," you're wrong. The smart kids need attention and good instruction too.

This may be the first time I can remember everyone on this site asking the right question about school discipline: At what point does one student’s right to remain in the classroom stop outweighing 25 other students’ right to learn? That it took people outside education to ask it should force those of us inside education to confront a much more uncomfortable question: Why have we been answering it wrong for so long?

This may be the first time I can remember everyone on this site asking the right question about school discipline: At what point does one student’s right to remain in the classroom stop outweighing 25 other students’ right to learn? That it took people outside education to ask it should force those of us inside education to confront a much more uncomfortable question: Why have we been answering it wrong for so long?

From this article, precisely the problem: "Mathematics education research — including by UC faculty — has guided us away from teacher-driven pedagogical strategies and toward more student-centered, collaborative ways of learning." Two points. 1. Math education research must be examined with a critical eye. Even peer-reviewed articles in education can turn out to be little more than philosophical musings dressed up as research. Bad ideas and weak evidence should not be driving policy that impacts thousands of kids. 2. We need more teacher-driven pedagogy, not less. Teachers need to explicitly teach students how to do math well, and they need to give them lots of practice. I also find it odd that the author disparages university profs who say they can tell within the first week who is at risk of failing. This does not mean profs want those students to fail. It simply means that after teaching first year university for years, profs are very familiar with the missing prerequisite knowledge that is going to hold those students back. Math is cumulative. It is extremely difficult for students to catch up on prerequisite math material that is necessary to learn the new material, while at the same time trying to absorb the new material. Profs are raising alarm bells that students are arriving unprepared and are at risk of failing because of it. It is the students who suffer when those warnings are ignored. edsource.org/2026/university…

I did quite well on my classroom observation a few weeks ago. But it felt fake. I scored well because I scaffolded the lesson like a madman. -Sentence stems on one board. -Key vocabulary on another. -Additional sentence stems for my ELLs. -Even the literary analysis we wrote was mapped out with sentence starters. The students cruised through the lesson. But I’d argue that it was over-scaffolded. The content was spoon-fed. And most importantly, the amount of preparation required to create that lesson was unsustainable. I believe much of what we consider “good teaching” is actually over-scaffolded. And the amount of preparation and differentiation expected for these lessons is unsustainable.