Robert Rogers

@DTWillingham Being unable to read - going to school day after day feeling defeated and stupid, is an adverse childhood experience. It's a shame it isn't included on the ACE questionnaire.

When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a mental health professional.

@jayphoward @Doug_Lemov Sure - if they used the Mississippi model, if you’re held back, you can’t go back to the situation that failed to teach you the first time. Catch up is possible and should be expected.

@Doug_Lemov That's terrible. I'm not convinced that that student being held back a year when he was eight would have made a huge difference. Do you believe it would have?

When I got my masters at a large state university I tutored for the football team. They assigned me a player who needed “a little more help”... I asked him to write a paragraph about himself. Not a single correct & complete sentence. He read at the 3rd grade level. The worst part was that he was such a gentleman. All he wanted was to do work hard & be successful. But he failed out & went home, his dream crushed. he never knew “what he’d done wrong”. But the reason was in fact that he was such a lovely kid. And one of the best football players in the history of his HS. And no one wanted to crush his dream by failing him because he couldn’t read or write. All that time they told themselves they were being kind & doing him a favor. This was when I discovered the immense risk of perverse incentives.

New Post: What You Might Not Know About Project Follow Through educationrickshaw.com/2026/01/31/wha…

@Doug_Lemov Graduation rates are meaningless.

Let’s play a little game. I removed the title from this recent graph in the Economist so you could propose a title of your own for it. Go!

Teaching children to read is one of the most important things we do in education. When we get it wrong, the consequences stay with them for years. What worries me most is how often we cling to methods we know don’t work. Researchers, teachers and parents keep pointing it out. Yet the system barely shifts. We can do better. And our children deserve better.

@MmeLockhartLDS @ErinCKing Improvement at scale is completely dependent on administrator knowledge. I dream of what would happen if every elementary principal were to read “It’s Possible” (not to discount the other great books you highlighted). @SchoolsCubedLLC @AngieHanlin

Oh

"Every initiative lives or dies on the principal's desk." - Becky Sullivan

If you care about public school governance, this post by @rpondiscio is definitely worth your time. A school board trustee should have high expectations for student outcomes. No longer should the trustee use the demographics of their district as an excuse for poor performance.

@Kress_Sandy @KendallGPace @AustinISD @HeathKeri @TexasTribune @KUT @Matias_AISD @teainfo @tgrierhisd Dang - thanks, but I can't make it back to FW in time for a meeting that evening.

@choirdoc @KendallGPace @AustinISD @HeathKeri @TexasTribune @KUT @Matias_AISD @teainfo @tgrierhisd In Austin. On the UT Campus. At the Thompson Learning Center. It’s just supposed to be for members of the OLLI extended learning program. But I can probably bring some guests, if you or others here are interested. It’s on November 3 at 2:30 pm.

@Kress_Sandy @KendallGPace @AustinISD @HeathKeri @TexasTribune @KUT @Matias_AISD @teainfo @tgrierhisd Will your talk be open to the public, Sandy? If so, where and when?

I’m giving a talk soon on how schools could get dramatic rates of academic improvement by using research-proven strategies. That’s what AISD should do IF it cared about equity, students & their future and economic stabilization. Not expecting any interest, though I charge a lot less than this dude. 😆

#TRLCONF2025 Next time you hear that teachers are not vested in growing and doing better for their children. Show them this picture of everyday teachers who left their homes and family and traveled far to attend a reading conference with the sole purpose of growing and doing better for their students.

@BenisonMrs @lifelonglit She’s brilliant (and entertaining!)

So excited to listen to ⁦@lifelonglit⁩! #TRLconf2025 #TRLCONF2025 #trlconf2025

@BenisonMrs I’ll be looking for you!

I am so excited about next week's Reading League Conference in Chicago. I look forward to hearing from many presenters and putting faces to some Twitter friends. My ed hero, Dr. Anita Archer, is going to be there, and I am over the moon about the opportunity to meet her. I hope I get to take a picture with her. Be warned that I will be tweeting a lot next week.

@Dale_Chu @andyjacob Low expectations dominate education.

This is what ‘no urgency’ looks like in action.

@marylynnpruneda Fellow Texans, this is a competition we want to win - it’s more important than an FBS championship 😳. We’re not in the race yet.

More good data on the Southern Surge 👀

@KendallGPace @Moms4FAPE @AustinISD @statesman Inexcusable and horrendous.

@KendallGPace Plus, since there will no longer be an “apples to apples” comparison, we won’t be able to know if schools are improving (or worsening) in teaching reading or math. Years of arguing over grade-level standards to come. It’s not about the kids.

@thismomloves Great episode, Kate!

The RRT season finale is always bittersweet: Yay, we did it…but that means it’s done for another season…and time for back to school! We are going out on a high note with some serious expert impact in this episode. Check it out, and thanks again to our amazing guests!

@BenisonMrs Excellent!

What a great episode...37 minutes of pure gold!!! "Often, the motivation for adding fluff is actually to make it more engaging for the teacher... But I think if more teachers realized that they were actually making things more difficult for their students, they would very likely take a completely different approach. Even with the best intentions, adding fluff to a lesson can obscure the stuff that you want your students to be focused on. So if you want your students to learn this stuff, you really need to cut the fluff." -Dr. Holly Lane "What matters is automaticity. You can't generalize something unless you know its automaticity. So acquisition, fluency, generalization, and then lastly, adaptation or problem-solving. Get them accurate; they're slow and inaccurate. Get them accurate. Lots of direct instruction, lots of explicit instruction, lots of feedback. Then, in the proficiency, which we got to do, practice, practice, practice to build automaticity. Then they're in the generalization phase and work on helping them generalize it to apply it. And then lastly, they can use the information to solve problems. Those four phases can really drive instruction." --Dr. M. Burns