Michael Zen retweeted
Handwriting assessment scores provide information about students’ handwriting fluency levels, including legibility and rate. But what should educators look for when assessing legibility? Find more scoring guidelines and recommendations on the IRRC Handwriting Hub: irrc.education.uiowa.edu/han…
ALT What are key aspects of handwriting legibility? Although there are varying degrees of what might be considered “legible” depending on the scorer, we recommend focusing on a few key aspects of students’ letter formation to support overall legibility (Feder & Majnemer, 2007; Datchuk, 2015).
ALT Size Appropriate letter size can be determined by using lined paper as a guide. For beginning writers, consider using paper with a dotted midline to support students’ development of both lower and uppercase letters. Spacing Letters or words that are too close together or spread apart will affect legibility. When assessing spacing, consider the ease of readability.
ALT Shape and Direction Shape and direction refer to letter formation accuracy. This may include letters that are not fully formed (e.g., a lowercase “e” that appears as a “c”) or reversals (e.g., a lowercase “d” in the place of a lowercase “b”). Generally, if the letter is accurate enough to be read easily, it can be considered legible.
Michael Zen retweeted
Spelling isn't the "poor relation" of language arts—it drives reading accuracy, writing fluency, and phonological awareness.
Dr. Louisa Moats, coauthor of Spellography and LETRS and, according to Time Magazine, the "woman winning the reading wars," breaks down the science behind how students really learn to spell. Learn more: 95pg.info/4yNEinh
Michael Zen retweeted
The whole discussion about DI seems focused on the US. Wonder how this way of teaching differs from what they are already doing in China, Japan,Singapore etc? Very different or did they reach some similar insight independently?
Michael Zen retweeted
Calculators are for those who have already mastered the calculation. Using tools to bypass understanding is just borrowing intelligence at a high interest rate.
Michael Zen retweeted
Not being able to read or do math is the quickest way to ensure disengagement and poor well being. By contrast, few things feel as good as mastery!
Michael Zen retweeted
Can you hear the problem? Do you see what kind of teachers they are hiring nowadays? Saying “like dude” all the time? That is the problem. My parents never taught me a damn thing and I was in honors courses. I was a very smart student. These people cannot hang and do not even have a vocabulary to speak of. They are teaching these kids how to be ghetto by projecting their own speech patterns and too easily overwhelmed emotionally. We used to have hard-core teachers. No nonsense. They had an elaborate vocabulary and would make you bring out a dictionary and look up a word yourself if you couldn’t follow along. That is the difference. They had a higher standard.
Michael Zen retweeted
Breaking down big words into smaller parts is how spelling works, not memorizing a sequence of letters.
I’m continually shocked by how many adults I meet in adult ed programs—even pretty good readers—who don’t know this.
How have we gotten to this point, where the most basic and obvious way to understand something very important was completely deprioritized and then forgotten?
Anyway, The Word Mapping Project is blowing their minds! 🙌 @smorrisey
Michael Zen retweeted
There is a big difference between being able to find something and actually knowing it.
For centuries, students memorized poetry and Scripture, because education was supposed to leave them with something they could carry around in their own minds.
You can try this with (almost) anything you read.
When you find a paragraph that you know you will want again, spend a few minutes committing it to memory instead of assuming you can always search for it later.
Information is easy to access.
That does not necessarily mean we know more of it.
As Samuel Johnson wrote:
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
Michael Zen retweeted
Some of my children’s least favorite teachers have been the most effective. One in particular would make my son constantly rewrite his work more neatly.
Of course I also enforced that at home and had him in OT, but this teacher absolutely had a huge positive difference in my son’s life. In the moment he hated her, now looking back just two years later he realizes what a blessing she was.
Adults need to remember to be in charge. Children do not know what they need to be prepared for the world; it is our job to set the standard and hold the line.
Michael Zen retweeted
This is a must-read post for any teacher of English Language Learners
Stop Doing Dictation Backwards: What the Research Says Beginners Actually Need
I wrote this post out of growing frustration with the amount of non-research-informed advice on dictation I keep coming across online: random claims about what teachers should or shouldn’t do, or lists of activities presented in an equally random order, with little consideration of the cognitive processes that successful dictation actually involves.
So I decided to go back to first principles. What has to happen cognitively between hearing a sentence and successfully getting it onto the page? And, once we understand that, how should we scaffold dictation with beginners?
The post proposes a principled progression with specific activities going from speech perception and discrimination through segmentation, lexical access and sound–spelling mapping to supported and, eventually, independent transcription. I then show how the new Language Gym Dictation Trainer was designed to embody that progression.
In short: not a list of dictation activities, but a rationale for why they should come in a particular sequence.
gianfrancoconti.com/2026/10/…
Michael Zen retweeted
Part of the answer to this question is organizations like the NCSS abandoning their push for inquiry-first, inquiry-second, and inquiry-last social studies instruction and curriculum. States and districts have followed their lead, minimizing the importance of building domain-specific knowledge in long-term memory as a prerequisite for the critical-thinking skills and mindsets they believe they are developing—skills that ultimately have to be built on something.
🎙️How can we help students think critically about the information they encounter? @JoelBreakstone, a leading voice in history education and digital inquiry, will share his insights with #NCSS2026 attendees!
➡️ Register today: hubs.li/Q04tKnM90 #edchat #inquirybasedlearning #historyed @InquiryGroup
Michael Zen retweeted
Logic was once considered one of the foundations of education because students were expected not simply to know things, but to understand why they believed them.
Grammar taught students how language worked, while rhetoric taught them how to use it.
Logic stood between the two, teaching them how arguments were constructed and how bad arguments could be recognized.
Together they formed the trivium, which remained at the center of Western education for centuries.
Before students were expected to specialize in a particular subject, they were first taught how to learn and how to think.
As Dorothy Sayers wrote:
“The sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves.”
Michael Zen retweeted
Tolstoy - start w The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Then Anna Karenina. Then War and Peace. At some pt be sure to read My Confession
Dostoevsky- start W Crime and Punishment. Then Notes from Underground. Then I’d probably do The Idiot. Brothers K should be read later in life 😂
Michael Zen retweeted
Creativity can come after the fundamentals are mastered. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in education that creativity is treated as such an important thing to cultivate, over and above skills or knowledge. Here, just splatter paint and express yourself! It would be better to actually teach them some drawing techniques.
Michael Zen retweeted
Especially in math. So many elementary teachers really struggle with math and don't know how the topics fit together. A good curriculum and good resources that spell out exactly what to do and what to teach would go a long way to improving primary math.
Michael Zen retweeted
NEW POST: You can't apply the science of learning to materials that weren't designed for it. Retrieval practice is a curriculum property, not a teaching technique.
Michael Zen retweeted
If you want to “build relationships” with students, try teaching them something.
Give them difficult work, teach them how to do it, and expect them to follow through. Some will still fail. But when students accomplish something they initially thought was beyond them, they learn something about their own capabilities. They learn something about the teacher whose instruction helped them get there, too.
Over time, it gives them a reason to trust your instruction and take your expectations seriously, even when they don’t like the assignment.
You might not be friends after, but you’re not supposed to be. You’re their teacher.
Teacher–student IS a relationship, and it’s the proper one between you and your students . Communicating, implicitly or explicitly, that you’re their buddy corrodes that relationship and is, frankly, inappropriate.
You can earn their trust and respect by doing the job you’re there to do. That ought to be what “building relationships” means in a school.
