Meet Tara Hess, a fellow S2P educator. Tara is a wonderful educator who has learned how 2 accelerate growth & continues to work on refining her teaching skills year after year. Read her story in the thread⬇️ @D99Cicero @tara_deann @ReadSimplified @SoRclassroom

Education research the least likely to replicate according to a huge new paper published by Nature

Habit Assemblies: Accelerating culture for learning The more complex a school, the more attention and effort is required just to maintain it… attention and effort that could (should) be going into improving learning. Ruthless simplicity (doing fewer things) and collective alignment (doing those things the same way) are two powerful levers for reducing this complexity. Most schools pursue collective alignment by focussing on teachers... practising agreed routines and norms together, then implementing them back in classrooms. This is great... BUT, the schools that do it best go one step further. They also practise with students. All together. At once. A kind of *habit assembly* Imagine 200 year 7s in the hall, all practising how to turn-and-talk. How to answer questions. How to treat others with respect. How to sit and act in ways that optimise attention. Without this, we have to build culture from scratch, in isolation, 30 students at a time. With habit assemblies, students arrive in our classrooms already primed. We just need to stick to the plan. The rationale for this is social norms. Our behaviour is shaped less by what we're told to do and more by what we see others doing. In a habit assembly, every student sees every other student doing the same thing. They don't just learn the routine... they internalise the norm… this is how we do things around here. And culture compounds: once routines are internalised, each lesson reinforces the norm, which makes the next assembly even stronger. Most schools already have the time for this. Existing assembly slots or collapsed tutor/form time can be repurposed without adding to the timetable. Of course, this only works if it's done with students, not to them. Roll it out heavy-handedly or without buy-in and things'll backfire fast. The more we build habits together, the stronger the culture we end up with. PS. Video of habit assemblies in action coming soon...

Paging educators 🚩🚩🚩 This is the second time in 2 weeks that @JonHaidt has called to get Ed Tech out of classrooms by September: "I hope that many elementary schools will remove devices by Sept., or create an analog path for parents who want that. Let's see if kids do better with books and paper" Haidt drove the cell phone ban legislation. What are the odds his words carry in a similar fashion? Are we doing enough to signal this shift to districts? 1/2

Still more evidence that EdTech harmed American education: Across states, the year that the state imposed mandates requiring computers/tablets, that's the year that test scores stopped rising and in most cases started falling. From Jared Cooney Horvath thedigitaldelusion.substack.…

Linguistic Phonics has been a topic buzzing around lately. Here’s what it can look like. Link ⬇️ @SoRclassroom @ReadSimplified @EBLIreads @D99Cicero @ReadingLeagueIL

Day 29 in a hs class of struggling readers: The queen of using every instructional minute for maximal benefit is @ReadSimplified. I channeled my inner Marnie today to transform a day of working on presentation slides into literacy instruction - spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc. It’s like sneaking veggies into your dinner entrees. 😜

Tonight, @ReadSimplified talk state curriculum lists. Why are they such a mess? Sneak preview of one of the key themes: