Teacher / Author of 'What the Academy Taught Us', 'Education is Upside-Down', & 'A Total Ed Case' blog
Twin Cities, MN
Joined April 2014
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Eric Kalenze retweeted
Damn! Who’d a thunk?
Yglesias: Teachers should embrace showing kids how to tackle problems — and then make them practice until they get good at it on their own buff.ly/a3Pvhf2
Eric Kalenze retweeted
"Math needs a phonics-style reckoning: Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly." - @mattyglesias slowboring.com/p/math-needs-…
Eric Kalenze retweeted
Ditto. There are few figures in education I respect and regard as highly as @C_Hendrick. That said, our field has a long indulged rooting for failure to confirm our priors rather than investing time and effort to help new models.
Eric Kalenze retweeted
“The teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage” is one of the stupidest bits of advice in all of education.
If you know something your students do not know, your job is not to coyly hover nearby while they figure it out.
Teachers: teach them. It’s literally your job.
Eric Kalenze retweeted
In 2013 I wrote a book called Seven Myths about Education.
What is the most persistent myth, the one that is hardest to kill, and the one that has biggest implications outside education?
Transferable skills.
People think that you can teach things like critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, etc. But you can't.
But the idea is so persistent not just in schools but in universities, the corporate world and the British civil service.
Over the next few weeks, I will have a series of articles about it on my Substack. You can read the intro here and listen to me talking about it tomorrow on the @EconTalker podcast.
substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
Eric Kalenze retweeted
If your advocacy or activism rests on "there's something wrong with you if you don't see the problem with traditional schools and education," I am no longer interested in listening to you--even if you support ideas I agree with and admire.
Eric Kalenze retweeted
Learning needs friction. The brain is fundamentally resistant to cognitive friction (bone-lazy) and will always take the path of least resistance unless certain constraints are put in place. This is why discovery learning is so ineffective and why careful instructional design is so crucial. Also a nice illustration here why chatbots should be banned in the classroom. arxiv.org/abs/2603.10025
Eric Kalenze retweeted
No, I will not vote for your panel to be chosen for that Big Texas Bloviathon or other event. Panel pimping is unpaid marketing, and serious education conferences are not American Idol. It's like making reporters and writers work for votes to get their stories in the newspaper.
Alas...
After I built this out of necessity during COVID, I got a vision of just how @researchED_US could impact more widely. Possible partners didn't see it. Imagine that.
Here's to hoping the emerging partnership of rED US and @AEIeducation may get closer.
Six years ago... with @erickalenze and @New_Old_Paul @effortfuleduktr @patricebain40 @BarryGarelick @mpershan and many others!
Great PD - still available to watch for free!
researchedus2020.wordpress.c…
Eric Kalenze retweeted
There are two possible definitions of "equity" in education: E.D. Hirsch, Jr's definition. And incorrect ones.
That feeling when a student comes in to hug you for last night's reading assignment. Sigh.
#bestjobever
Good stuff from @rpondiscio:
My latest looks at education's tendency to chase the latest pedagogical fashion or fad. It's easy to assume that educators are quick to abandon what works and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong.
thenext30years.substack.com/…
Eric Kalenze retweeted
ED (Don) Hirsch should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His conttribution to American education is incomparable.
Across my six ELA classes, here are the books (okay, one is a play) being taught--yes, in their entirety--at this time.
I've always thought that getting Ss to engage with them is on ME, not the books...and most Ss do just that. Imagine. @rpondiscio
This post has been on my mind all day.
Obviously it makes me happy to read, but there's a lot of jibberish out there about "de-centering" the text & dropping books (too long; too difficult; couldn't we ask teachers to do something easier?)
When we do the opposite like Joe's done &re-center the book, we can curate the reading experience for students. We can bring the book to life by reading & experiencing it together... aloud for much of the time... infused with background knowledge. Then it becomes meaningful. And social.
And Ss will respond. They don't KNOW they'll respond because in many cases no one has done it for them. So of course they start out not wanting to work hard for it. But when we cause them to experience a book read right it changes them.
Getting students to read whole books isn't easy. But it's hugely important & done well it is a critical piece of the solution.
If you'd like to see a sample of our Reading Reconsidered curriculum please email [email protected]. It's not perfect. But it's serious about using learning science to bring books to life for students. Or please check out the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. It's subtitle probably should be: How to teach a book.
Eric Kalenze retweeted
Wrong,@JuliaEMcCoy Dismissing knowledge acquisition as "memorization" denies kids the foundation that lets you discern, create, and think—like the expertise behind this tweet. AI creates an illusion of learning, not real mastery.
thenext30years.substack.com/…
We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds.
We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers.
We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate.
The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best.
That's not education. That's sabotage.
The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying.
Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.
Eric Kalenze retweeted
The number of math curricula that are not aligned to cognitive science—that presume discovery learning as a design principle—is a quiet scandal in the US. Talking to a great district last week. They take the science seriously. They can barely find a math program that doesn’t design daily lessons around novice learners guessing inefficiently at solutions.
