Better curriculum and better instructional practices. Better curriculum and better instructional practices. Better curriculum and better instructional practices.

NGL, walking into a maximum security prison today to run a workshop orientation on my literacy program for a group of incarcerated men was a little unnerving! You can’t bring a phone or a watch or any jewelry. You can’t wear green or beige or particular items of clothing. I left everything in my car except for my key fob and my license. In the visitors’ waiting room, I ran into the rest of our team – the people I’ve been zooming with for the last two years about this project. We’ve never met in person before, but we all hugged! Eventually we landed into a conference type of room where about 20 men were waiting for us. The team had printed out my slide deck, and we passed that out and went through it. One of the members of our team is a formerly incarcerated person who now advocates for prison education. He had been at this particular prison so when we walked in, he knew a lot of the guys and was hugging them. (This man was amazing. I’m going to find his TED talk and post it.) My goal was to explain what the peer tutoring program was, what the training and tutoring would be like, etc. We talked about how this is a pilot which means it may be a bit wonky at times, but also that it’s so exciting because it has room to grow. These are all men who have received an associates degree or more inside of the prison system, and now they tutor GED, special ed and other programs— and, soon, basic literacy using my Volunteer Literacy Project curriculum. “This is the dream team,“ one of my associates said. They were indeed a great group. Interested, filled with questions, wanting to know more about how reading works, and in some cases asking questions about the literacy development of children within their families on the outside. Just incredible. One man wanted to know what would happen if he got parole as he’s apparently likely to get. I said he could take the certification outside and would have access to our tutor portal and could continue sharing the tools for acquiring literacy. It was… a very moving experience. Afterwards, everyone seemed very excited and eager to get started! The director of education in the prison, the team I’m working with, the men themselves—we all felt like it had gone as well as it could. We start the training in two weeks. 🙌

How many words should students read? @smorrisey’s 5th graders will have read >40,000. seanmorrisey.substack.com/p/…

Expert teachers do not simply “notice more”; they have routinised ways of scanning the class, briefly zoom in on the disruption, then rapidly re engage with everyone else. Novices, by contrast, show more scattered, exploratory gaze behaviour and are more easily pulled off their routine. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Keeping Great Teachers with @HughesHaili Mind the Gap, Ep.129 (S7,E2) piped.video/BKj6EBWmrx4?si=OngV…

Instead of an exit exam with clear knowledge and skills that students either know or don't, New York now has this absolute pile of vague, wispy aspirations and nice sounding words Does anyone really expect anything other than less learning and inflated grades?

Day 15 of #FishtankELA - it's hard to let go. Some teachers don't want to give up activities that they've invested in (sometimes literally $$$ to TPT). Part of this is the activity-driven teaching culture that sites like TPT fostered.

The field could do with knowing what the studies that do exist imply, along with utilizing existing analyses with a documented logical progression, rather than making it up or utilizing logically faulty sequences

📚 Just a reminder! Our September Educator’s Bookshelf discussion is tomorrow, September 24 at 7:00 PM ET. This month, we’re discussing All Things Being Equal by John Mighton and his belief that every student can learn mathematics with the right instruction. If you’ve been reading along, we’d love to have you join the conversation! 👉 Register here: freedomined.org/teachers-coa…

The evidence for phonics is settled but research does not yet tell teachers exactly which letter sound correspondences to teach, in what order, through which examples, or when to introduce exception words. (Although as @lifelonglit points out, there are no exception words) nature.com/articles/s41539-0…

Who is well-versed in the world of Special Education? I want to understand the concept of "exposure" to grade level standards -- most of the reasoning leads to testing. This makes no sense for a child who is well below grade level (i want my child learning and growing too).