Intermediate elementary teacher. Passionate about explicit instruction and dodging edu-trends.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined December 2008
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Erica Sandberg retweeted
The teacher who gives a failing grade has to explain it to the student, the parents, and the principal.
The teacher who gives everyone an A has a quiet weekend.
Still confused about how grade inflation has gotten so bad?
Erica Sandberg retweeted
There was something special about being a kid when adults didn't feel the need to entertain you every minute of the day.
Your parents could take you somewhere incredibly boring, and you were just expected to deal with it.
The bank. The hardware store. Your mother's friend's house, where you sat on a couch covered in plastic and weren't allowed to touch anything.
Nobody handed you a screen. Nobody worried about whether you were having fun.
You studied the wallpaper. You read the same magazine three times. You stared at the clock and wondered if the second hand had stopped moving.
And if you made the mistake of asking, "Can we go now?" your mother gave you that look.
You know the look.
The one that could end your entire afternoon without a single word being spoken.
I swear, we developed half our imagination simply because our parents refused to entertain us.
Looking back, I think being bored was one of the best things that ever happened to us.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
I’m not interested in hearing about your “passion for social justice and equity” if you promote inquiry-based learning over explicit instruction, believe ambiguous, skills-based education is superior to knowledge-rich, content-focused education, and advocate for restorative circles instead of clear, consistent discipline.
You can’t say you’re passionate about social justice and equity while supporting practices that perpetuate inequitable access to knowledge and policies that harm students who are victims of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of their peers.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
When a child doesn't learn as a result of instruction provided, isn't that a question we should be asking about the instruction instead of making it about that child's inability to learn?
Sold a Story Season 1 felt like a reckoning over how we teach reading. But the conversation is much bigger. It’s about how we teach, period.
“If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” — Zig Engelmann
Season 2 is here! 🎧
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Erica Sandberg retweeted
“Schools have bigger issues to deal with than the dress code!!!”
Yeah, they have those bigger issues because they refuse to hold the line on smaller stuff like the dress code
Erica Sandberg 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.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Unpopular opinion:
I don't go out of my way to build relationships with students.
I intentionally maintain professional distance.
I've found that when I focus on teaching well, maintaining boundaries, and creating a productive classroom environment, the relationships take care of themselves.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
There are lots of views about how to improve our education system. Not enough of them focus on the classroom. We pursue big structural solutions, when we should be looking at how to create calm, quiet, peaceful classrooms.
New post, please share!
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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.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Being too short to ride a rollercoaster isn’t a ‘punishment’ or ‘losing a reward’. It’s a consequence of circumstances.
Being banned from an event because your behaviour is unsafe isn’t a punishment. Nor is it ‘losing a reward’. It’s a consequence of being too high a risk to oneself, others, and the event.
Students aren’t banned from eg a trip to a theme park for ‘forgetting their pens’ or ‘not trying hard enough in maths.’ They are banned for acting dangerously, aggressively, or chaotically. People who work in schools understand this more than people who visit them as tourists.
Imagine it’s coming up to the end of the year, and your employer runs an annual fun day for employees and their families. It’s something that gets talked about throughout the year, and it’s a chance to see people out of their work clothes and to meet their kids. It’s a community building event.
Your employer announces that there’s a change of policy this year. It’s going to become the annual Rewards fun day. In order to attend, you have to ace your appraisal, get good 360 feedback ratings from all your colleagues and not have taken too many sick days. They send round a motivational email, telling you all to do your best and reminding you how much fun the day is going to be. They tell you that this is to help you all achieve your best and remind you that it’s not just you, it’s your whole family who stand to lose or gain by this.
If you don’t make the grade, you’ll need to come to work as usual and put in a full working day whilst your colleagues enjoy themselves elsewhere.
You’ve had a hard year and you don’t always see eye to eye with your manager. Your appraisal doesn’t go well. You are told you can’t come.
How do you feel about your employers now? Would being excluded motivate you to do better next year? Would it improve the relationship between you and your manager? Would it help you learn how to be a better employee?
And if not, why would we think that it would be any different for our children?
Erica Sandberg retweeted
A parent complains about a teacher enforcing a school rule, and the administrator calls the teacher in to discuss what they could have done differently.
The kid broke the rule, but the teacher is told to improve.
The parent and kid now have the administration helping them make the teacher’s enforcement of the rule the problem.
Next time, that teacher has a good reason to let the behavior slide, and so does every teacher who knows what happened.
The administrator bought peace with one parent at the expense of order in everyone else’s classroom.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
👏 The Globe & Mail editorial team absolutely nailed it with this. People are paying attention. No more excuses. Canada has an education problem and we have to fix it.
Summary:
🔸 Canada's education scores are declining on both PISA and TIMSS
🔸 We have way more low performers and fewer high performers
🔸 Canada spends significantly on education and needs to better allocate those resources
🔸 Downward trend started before COVID
🔸 Movement away from methods that work, like explicit instruction, has likely had a negative impact
🔸 Rampant grade inflation, with a mention of U of Waterloo instructor, Dan Wolczuk
🔸 Open door to tech in the classroom has not helped
🔸 Teachers unions have pushed back against things that could help like early screening for reading
🔸 Faculties of education have not always been on board with equipping teachers with the tools that will help teachers teach effectively
🔸 Look towards England, which has managed to buck the trend. Regular phonics screening, a times table check, calculator ban on standardized tests, etc.
🔸 Provincial governments must take action.
Last paragraph is amazing:
"PISA might seem like a test for Canadian school children, but it’s really a test for policymakers and educators on how they are running the schools. Right now, they are failing. In order to turn around test scores, and put children back on the path of achievement, they need to fundamentally change how students are being taught."
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Sold a Story Season 2 is coming October 15th.
youtube.com/watch?v=4YDq-AB_…
Erica Sandberg retweeted
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.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Many are asking me to support my statements about F and P...Here is a starting thread...
Everyone...please feel free to add more...
Erica Sandberg retweeted
The New York Times: No puedes “gamificar” una educación real.
La obsesión por hacer que aprender sea siempre “divertido” ha llevado a llenar las aulas de pantallas, juegos y estímulos rápidos. Pero educar no es entretener: es exigir atención, esfuerzo y pensamiento profundo.
La tecnología debe ser una herramienta complementaria, no el centro del aprendizaje. nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opini…
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Differentiation is essentially a staffing problem dressed up as a classroom strategy.
Instead of putting smaller groups of students with similar levels of academic readiness in different rooms with different teachers, we shove everyone into the same room and tell one teacher they can meet every student’s needs if they just plan carefully enough.
It’s a lie.
And every teacher who has taught a class with truly disparate levels of ability knows it.
Erica Sandberg retweeted
Left w/o comment…@MrZachG @BarryGarelick @New_Old_Paul @rastokke @greg_ashman @C_Hendrick @DTWillingham @S_Oberle @FixingEducation @SoLInTheWild @SciInTheMaking
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