The NGSS standards encourage some weird practices, and science programs are often built for inquiry (which is particularly harmful for students with LD) but they can be modified to include the core components of explicit instruction journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/ld…

Frontier is fortunate to have Mr. Penberthy both as a teacher and coach. His impact is enormous both in and out of the classroom. Plus, he's a good dude to work with.

You can remove a math memorization requirement from the standards, but you can't remove it from reality.

See the tweet below for my favorite icebreaker to do with my high school students on day one:

I'm going back to this one. I can't stop scribbling notes on how to help my Ss better and how to scale up teacher knowledge in PD sessions.

There's no sector like education for "Finding a really good idea (like students in rows) and ditching it in favour of someolthing a million times worse (like whatever these abominations are)"

I really appreciate how Dianna Townsend placed connective words as a category of academic vocabulary. Words such as consequently and despite are as important to teach as words such as feature, function, and structure, probably more so. Don't neglect connectives!

After explicitly teaching Ss new vocabulary you must provide multiple exposures afterwards. Here is one way to do it using metaphors. The goal is to make kids THINK. Any guesses what grade level this is geared towards. #WordMappingProject

"More complex vocabulary leads to more complex thought"

Next in the Knowledge-Building for Teachers Series: Math Loved doing this post! I’m completely fascinated with the logic and beauty of math. open.substack.com/pub/lstam/p/ma… Image: Johnson, Crockett. Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. 1965. National Museum of American History

Bookworms training with Dr. Walpole is fantastic! Today is a great day!

Student packets ready for Unit 1 of the Word Mapping Project. Big thanks to Sean Morrisey for all his hard work on this.

A recent blog entry from Thinking Reading discussed that a sophisticated vocabulary leads to sophisticated thoughts. Using shades of meaning exercises can produce more sophisticated thoughts. Think of 2nd graders just using scared in their writing. How scared?

Every single morning I get hit by the same bike. It's a vicious cycle...