Instructional Specialist, Spanish teacher, CAS holder, news junkie, SU fan, dabbler in cognitive psychology, wife, mom o' 2. Sleep matters; start school later.
Joined March 2009
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Amy W Pento retweeted
This part is like a glass of fresh water. Critical thinking is the *outcome* of secure domain knowledge, not its replacement.
Amy W Pento retweeted
The closer you get to the impact of illiteracy in people's lives, the less you're willing to tolerate and stay silent about.
Amy W Pento retweeted
The new season of Sold a Story is coming tomorrow. I've seen speculation about it. I think there will be some surprises. I'm interested to know what you think.
First two episodes tomorrow. Then one a week on Thursdays until Nov 19. features.apmreports.org/sold…
Amy W Pento retweeted
An honest conversation with National Council on Teacher Quality. They rate US colleges on how they prepare educators to teach reading and math. Just released their 2026 report.
Principals, community groups, parents, HR Director, Sup, Board members...
tinyurl.com/NCTQspotify
Amy W Pento retweeted
"too many states have chosen to tell parents their children are on track when they aren’t" say Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings in a new Ed Week piece linked below.
These charts compare the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 4th gr reading and math reports with the state testing reports.
The discrepancies are surprising. If judged by national standards, students in most states are not as proficient in reading and math as the state tests say they are. Link to more charts below.
Amy W Pento retweeted
Sadly, I am fairly certain that is also true in USA.
💡A survey of Australian teachers found 88% believe in the learning styles myth, 38% believe students learn better through discovery than explicit instruction, 41% believe testing tends to detract from learning.
If you're taught neuromyths about learning from someone who is supposed to be an expert, you'll likely believe them.
The report rightly recommends strengthening initial teacher education, among other things.
cis.org.au/publication/knowl…
Amy W Pento retweeted
Restricting student access to phones is associated with significantly higher academic performance.
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Amy W Pento retweeted
💡A survey of Australian teachers found 88% believe in the learning styles myth, 38% believe students learn better through discovery than explicit instruction, 41% believe testing tends to detract from learning.
If you're taught neuromyths about learning from someone who is supposed to be an expert, you'll likely believe them.
The report rightly recommends strengthening initial teacher education, among other things.
cis.org.au/publication/knowl…
Amy W Pento retweeted
Let's just call this what it is: The Bloom's Taxonomy Hoax, one of the worst frauds ever perpetrated on American schools. The interlocking directorate of teachers colleges and professional development organizations misportrayed a learning framework that supported the centrality of basic skills as one that fundamentally undermined them.
Amy W Pento retweeted
Great idea. We can’t know the quality until we see the finished product, but definitely watching this space.
Today, Modern Classrooms Project is announcing that we have raised $12 million to build a free Tier 1 math curriculum for middle and high school, grounded in cognitive science.
The more time I spend in math education, the more concerned I get. Outcomes have been falling for more than a decade, and the steepest declines are among the lowest-performing students.
Meanwhile, many of the leading cognitive scientists and learning scientists have been sounding the alarm that their research is not being applied at scale in math classrooms. We think they might be right.
So we are building a curriculum that treats cognitive science as its north star. We plan to launch middle school in summer 2027 and high school in summer 2028.
Three things to know about what we are building:
1. It will be free. All lessons and materials, teacher-facing and student-facing, will be publicly available online, printable, and modifiable.
2. It will be built with the researchers. In the coming weeks, we will announce a research advisory committee of leading learning scientists. We will work as hard as we can to make sure the structure, design, and underlying content align with what cognitive science tells us about how students, especially struggling learners, master math.
3. It will work with or without technology. Modern Classrooms Project has spent years at the intersection of technology and classroom instruction. This curriculum will have two clear implementation pathways. One that is completely paper-based, built around whole-group, teacher-facilitated instruction. The other will be designed to leverage technology to enable flexible pacing, mastery-based progressions, and increased 1-1 and small-group support from educators.
Perhaps most importantly, we want to understand what works. While we have conviction that following cognitive science is the right path, we are deeply committed to trying to move the field forward so that students can achieve their full potential in math, particularly students farthest from opportunity.
To learn more about what we are building and explore ways to get involved, go to modernclassrooms.org/curricu….
Amy W Pento retweeted
Adam Boxer argues that instead of chasing big, complex education reforms, schools should focus on getting behavior right in every classroom—making lessons calm, quiet, and disruption-free. He says many teachers wrongly accept some disruption as inevitable, but some schools prove calm classrooms are achievable through consistent routines and behavior training. Better behavior, he argues, is the essential foundation for better teaching and learning.
carouselteachlearnlead.subst…
Amy W Pento retweeted
❓ What do the highest-performing education systems have in common? Excellent teachers, a knowledge-rich curriculum, demanding evaluations, and high expectations for students make all the difference!
Amy W Pento retweeted
This is a brilliant rebuttal of discovery learning
My favourite 2 minutes of this weeks pod with @daisychristo.
On what I consider to be the worst argument advocating for minimal guidance.
Search ‘Science of Learning’ wherever you get your podcasts from🎙️
Amy W Pento retweeted
Absolutely! This is the PISA paradox: designed to assess competences, it reveals that training students in applied problem-solving falls short, while building deep knowledge leads to good results
“In short, PISA is a screen-based test of problem-solving skills that requires limited specific curriculum knowledge. If you wanted to design a test that would be *least likely* to reward England’s educational approach, and *most likely* to reward the approach in Scotland & Wales, it would be PISA.
And yet, England are still doing better on it.”
🎯 🎯🎯
Amy W Pento retweeted
I am shocked 😱
88% of surveyed teachers believed in the learning styles neuromyth!
It's the myth that just keeps on persisting...
Australian teachers are being asked to deliver evidence-based instruction without being consistently equipped with the knowledge to do it.
That is the conclusion of Knowledge is Power II, a new Centre for Independent Studies Analysis Paper by Trisha Jha. A broadly representative sample of 377 Australian teachers was surveyed on 10 fundamental principles about learning and instruction. The average score was 4.53 out of 10, and only 4% answered eight or more correctly.
Among the findings: 88% endorsed the learning styles myth; 65% believe students learn little from lecturing or reading but a great deal from activities and teaching others; four in 10 believe testing detracts from learning; and only 30% correctly rejected the claim that students learn better through discovery than explicit instruction.
Crucially, overall scores did not differ reliably by age, gender or school level. The findings give little reason to assume this professional knowledge accumulates over a teaching career.
With explicit teaching mandates now in place in New South Wales and Victoria, the paper's central point is a practical one: a mandate changes what teachers are asked to do, not what they understand about why it works. Jha recommends ensuring the Strong Beginnings core content is genuinely assessed, reforming the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers along the lines of England's Early Career Framework, and moving from portfolio-based accreditation towards knowledge-based assessment.
Amy W Pento retweeted
Mathematical rot. It starts early.
It starts with things like, "we don't really need kids to memorize their multiplication tables."
But then, multiplication never becomes an effortless skill.
It always takes up a bunch of space in their brain, and they can't easily reverse it when it comes time to find factors and other stuff in algebra.
So algebra becomes way harder than it really needs to be.
And because it's so hard, because students are struggling so much more than they really need to, it gets watered down.
And then we let them lean on calculators and Desmos because they can't actually graph things.
They can't solve things.
They can't manipulate expressions by hand.
And now there's a weakness, a big weakness, a widespread weakness in their foundational skills.
A rot that's gonna collapse whatever type of knowledge structure they try to build on top of it.
And this weakness just climbs up the ladder with them.
You don't fix that in calculus.
You gotta get it at the beginning.
Further reading: justinmath.com/if-you-want-t…