I’m a huge fan of the Economist. Read it every week. It’s thoughtful balanced & technical. But I realized this morning that one more reason I love it is that it constantly reminds me: things I think are not intersting are often only so because I don’t know much about them… …I try to deliberately read a few articles each week about things I’m not interested in. If it sounds boring I make myself read about it. More often than not I find that it is not boring…sometimes fascinating. Once I start to understand I am quite usually interested…

Teaching in applied & unpredictable environments. A tiny 🧵:

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing two medical doctors who are also medical educators for the Sweat the Technique Podcast.

One of them, @rabob, was talking about "rounds," which are when a doctor goes... ...from room to room with a group of students & junior physicians & teaches based on what presents itself in those rooms.

"Ok, with this list of symptoms what are possible diagnoses?"

What's important to think about when we're dealing with a case like this?"

etc....

Just finished @MrZachG's excellent guide to direct instruction, Just Tell Them.

Here's a 🧵of pithy and useful quotes: "As teachers we must be painstakingly meticulous in how we gain attention, sustain attention & eradicate distractions from the learning environment. The more our students’ precious, precious working memory space is occupied by things that are irrelevant or unrelated to what they’re supposed to be learning, the fewer mental resources are available for dealing with the demands of the material."

The belief in transferable skills is perhaps the most common chimera (i.e. a magical belief we want desperately to be true) among teachers of reading.

A tiny 🧵with an excerpt from the forthcoming Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading... Imagine a handful of universal tools we could teach students & in so doing allow them to understand every text they read. Who wouldn’t seek out “the key to all inferences,” for example, knowing that once mastered this skill would allow them to unlock what was unspoken in every story?

Attention, ‘cognitive endurance’ and reading: a 🧵:

In our forthcoming book on the Science of Reading, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I discuss the importance of attention to reading... Short version: if nothing else, the smartphone, having fractured the attention of millions, has taught us that attention is malleable. This is especially important in reading, which places such intense demands on students’ ability to sustain periods of focus attentiveness.

Some news: Alongside my (amazing) co-authors @EricaWoolway & @ColleenDriggs I've just finished a new book, "The TLAC Guide to the Science of Reading." Here's a bit more about it: It's about what the research tells us about how to teach reading "post-phonics"--that is after students have developed strong letter-sound correspondence via systematic, synthetic phonics. To be clear, that is job one in the early primary grades, but...

For coaches:

A tiny 🧵 on improving training.

One of the best habits you can have to get better at training is an "After Action Review" or a "Hot Debrief"... As soon as the session ends a five minute huddle with fellow coaches to ask discuss... ...'How'd we do from a teaching POV? What could have been better? What should we replicate? Do we think players learned and/or behavior changed? Why or why not?'...

It's so important for teachers to understand the implications of Cognitive Load Theory & the limitations of working memory for their students. But it's just as important for them to understand the importance of those things for themselves... A🧵 First its critical to recognize that as a teacher, your working memory is almost always going to be stressed while teaching... you are trying to think about the content you are teaching, the next pedagogical decision you'll make...

Just thinking a bit about coaching athletes' eyes to help them see and decide better- a mini 🧵

There are (at least) three types of behaviors i coaches might try to socialize in players to help them see and succeed... 1) Identify a cue: Directing an athlete to attend to a specific cue that we know is critical to decision-making. "I want you to read my front foot." [here you are playing the role of the defender]. This is useful when you know what a decision making cue is. e.g. that attacking the back side of the defender's front leg will unbalance him....

A quick thread on some interesting and useful research on the idea of "attention contagion": 🧵 We know that attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors.

The curse of expertise is the idea that people who teach/coach are usually experts in their content area, & this makes them relatively blind to what people they are teaching (who are not (yet) experts) do not & will not understand... 1/x In particular experts are prone to think things are obvious or self-evident when they are emphatically not so to others, especially novices....

This paper by Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum on interruptions to learning time is fascinating.



Some initial thoughts and reflections...

🧵journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… "The typical classroom in PPSD is interrupted more than 2000 times per year and these interruptions and the disruptions they cause result in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. Administrators [and everyone else?] appear to systematically underestimate...

A 🧵:

I’ve written a lot recently about schools & phones… specifically how schools can only do the job that’s laid out for us post-pandemic—namely to maximize learning &belonging—by restricting cell phones.

You can read more about that here:
educationnext.org/take-away-thei…

Or... ...in Reconnect, where Denarius Darryl Hilary & I lay out the case more extensively.

amazon.com/Reconnect-Buil…

We present the case for cell phone restriction, in part so that schools can use it to make the case to parents, some of whom might be skeptical of why it matters...

Here's a note from a colleague who is the principal of a school. He & his staff decided to take the challenging but important step of restricting phones this year. They were worried about push back & implementation challenges.

🧵 "I wanted to share more about how the cell phone policy is going at my school as I’ve been pretty impressed by the results. We ultimately decided to collect phones this year – that is, students turn in their phones at arrival and get them back during dismissal...

If you read my article on cellphones in @EducationNext this week and want to read more, here are some suggestions for further reading:🧵 My journey into studying the effects of cell phones on teens began as i watched my own kids change. Fortunately the issues were academic. They stopped reading for pleasure. And I noticed their concentration diminishing.

Tweeted yesterday to ask coaches to weigh in on pregame & half time talks. Lots of people shared insights. For that, thanks- to everyone!

A couple of themes emerged that I really like... 1/ ...One is about limits. Working memory—what you are consciously thinking about—is extremely limited & if you max out its capacity you may actually disrupt perception other aspects of execution. (This is because working memory is critical to perception &thus decision-making). 2/

Spent a lot of time talking about video w @darrenlewis8 of @codexanalysis & ended up writing a post on 'rules of thumb' for using video. It's written for coaches but I think applies to teachers who are, say, showing a video in History class too.

Here are my 5 rules of thumb: @darrenlewis8 @codexanalysis 1. Play the video more than once. Show it once to let students/athletes get the big picture. Then go back & study the details. Or just let them watch it twice to see twice as much. The whole point of video is to develop a perceptive understanding and...