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We're in the thick of spring statewide testing for IL high schools, often followed by well-meaning, but ill-conceived "literacy data skill" analysis. We can't be wasting precious educator time like this. Good time to repost Timothy Shanahan's blog. shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/my-princi…

Thank you Raquel McGee for the article recommendation!

Raquel McGee I can't tell you how many times I have had to "unpack the standards" in a PD without even knowing whet the hell I was doing or why.

Now here’s a throwback to my early facilitating days… excited for more facilitation in my future! Ashley B. Stewart what a find! Thanks for documenting all those years ago! Cc: Baltimore City Public Schools Sonja Santelises Wit & Wisdom English

I'm not going to say that I'll never use AI because life has a way of making a liar out of you...but I am currently very opposed to outsourcing my brain. There's a Jamaican proverb my grandma used to say that goes "my head is not just for hats" and that's how I feel.

Raquel McGee Thank you. Keep sharing! This book is incredible.

“Research suggests a close link between writing and reading overall, including a strong relationship between the development of early writing and reading skills, such as spelling and word reading.” (Kim et al., 2024) SORticle #19: Handwriting, Beneficial to Reading and Often

Random thought: Admin can promote direct instruction as part of the institutional culture, but they're still operating w/ a statewide teacher evaluation rubric that prizes "guide on the side," student-centered teaching. How do you resolve this tension?

Raquel McGee discusses reading intervention in a secondary classroom, instructional coaching, and how she manages both roles. This Wednesday on Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works. Raquel McGee Kyair Mark Combes Zach Groshell tesscg.com

When is pretesting a good strategy? I've been skeptical about this as I think there is a fine line between activating knowledge and just randomly guessing stuff but this new study gives some useful insights. So pretesting is most effective when the questions are related to

End of the year benchmarking is my favorite time of year! One of my students was reading 34 words per minute with 83% accuracy on a grade level text. Today? 110 wpm with 99% accuracy. Structured literacy is the way! 💫

5 minutes of prep could yield a solid 15-20 minutes of thinking and applying and comparing/contrasting and intelligent classroom discussion. This provides an honest assessment of knowledge for both student and teacher.

I've learned not to belabor the prediction strategy. We've read Dr. King's 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech and now we'll read the NYTimes response. We'll read the title ("Dr. King's Error"), Turn and Talk for 2 mins about what they expect to read, and now they're primed to read.

Doing some research on a district's strategic plan, I got 5 web pages deep before I realized I was looking at a similarly named district in a different state. Which begs the question: Are these strategic plans worth anything at all if they're this generic and interchangeable?

Until teachers are trained to recognize the characteristics of different instructional approaches, the charlatans will continue to profit from the repackaging of constructivist methods, and teachers will keep having these approaches forced on them under new labels.

When teachers understand the science of learning, they’re inoculated against sales pitches and snake oil #scienceoflearning

NEW VIDEO: "I was asking students to read a college level textbook...& come to class with an understanding of those concepts. At some point, I started wondering if I was asking them to demonstrate mastery of a skill on which they had yet to develop proficiency."

It was such a pleasure to have this conversation with Gene! Please give it a listen, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.