No natural disasters in our classrooms thank you🌋 Lesson 1 of Tectonics for Year 8 = explicit teaching of the vocabulary we will & won't use whilst also recapping two examples from our Year 7 curriculum.

Dylan Wiliam I'm no expert. But it struck me that balanced literacy (or whatever you call it) practitioners treat decoding as if it were natural and comprehension as if it must be taught, when the opposite seems more reasonable to me.

Andrew G. Biggs Dylan Wiliam We see that pattern with ed “progressives” all the time. According to them, children need to be taught teamwork, collaboration and how to play by an adult. Meanwhile, they can figure out how to solve quadratic equations, conjugate verbs & compose essays all on their own.

Circulating busily is to teachers what busy work (assigning random worksheets) is to students. They are alert, doing something all the time, but to what end other than monitoring whether students are on task? Circulating is not differentiation.

Don't burden young, idealistic teachers with "differentiation" when you have no systems and strategies to offer them. Becoming an excellent tier 1 teacher takes 4-5 good years, and that's a great investment. It decreases the number of students in tier 2 and 3 automatically.

Curated social media strategy is not for me. I wish I find a way to leave as many platforms as I can. At the moment, it doesn't feel possible.

Expertise isn't about having more working memory, it's about needing less of it. Experts automate many components in long-term memory and can recognise meaningful patterns instantly, bypassing the need to process individual elements. ⬇️ 🧵

For example, the multiplication tables aren't memorised for their own sake, but because automated arithmetic facts free working memory for algebraic reasoning.

This reveals a fundamental paradox in learning: to begin thinking at higher levels, we must first stop thinking about lower levels.

When students struggle with complex tasks, the solution isn't to simplify our expectations or assume lower ability. Instead, we must examine what foundational components require conscious processing and systematically work to automate them. The goal isn't to make learning easier,

"Regardless of diagnosis or labels, the same methods are required. Where systematic and explicit instruction is given, with high standards of fidelity to best teaching protocols, we can expect good progress."

New post, on the professional discipline of saying "No". Inspired by some recent conversations with Sarah Cottinghatt researcherteacher.home.blog/2025/07/23/the…

Sarah Cottinghatt’s wonderful ideas about meaningful processing are a great example of how much work we have Ss doing that is a poor proxy for learning. Sure, they may be writing but what about and for what purpose? Are they meaningfully explaining how old and new ideas connect? 🧵👇

Many teachers I speak to feel frustrated that they spent a long time in their teaching using practices they now recognise may not have been supporting student learning. But they need to know…

Not all wrong answers are equal. I used to think students just needed the right information to fix misconceptions but then I read the work of Michelene Chi🧵⬇️

Carl Hendrick This is why Brent Davis' distinction between evaluative and interpretive listening—jstor.org/stable/749785—is so important. The evaluative listening teacher is listening for the correct answer. All incorrect answers are equivalent; they just mean the student didn't get it.

Carl Hendrick The interpretive listening teacher, on the other hand, sees different incorrect responses as different, because they signal different reasons for the students responses. This shift is one of the most significant shifts in teachers adopting formative assessment.

This September, if you are looking to improve your classroom practice, one of the highest-leverage but underused strategies to try is HIGH-FREQUENCY questioning. Not note-taking, not copying definitions, not retrieval starters. What do I mean? 1/

"What you demand of her now is all she'll ever be." - Annie about Helen Keller in the movie 'The Miracle Worker'.