Pamela Snow

My previous account (@PamelaSnow2) was hacked so please disregard that handle and join me here 🌻

@greg_ashman This is very meta - "instant readiness" is more than a myth. It's a straw man. We don't talk about new graduates in any discipline as possessing so-called "instant readiness" but we should be able to expect basic competency and safe practice......shouldn't we?

Teacher trainers draw on Foucauldian jargon and a case study of one individual to explain why they can't be expected to prepare student teachers for the classroom. Not all education research is created equal.

That this even needs to be stated in 2026 🤦🏻‍♀️ ……

We could use an (effective) body like this in Australia.

Knowledge-building and vocabulary-building are not separate goals. The words students learn are tied directly to the content, concepts, and ideas they encounter. Knowledge matters because language grows through it. 🔗open.substack.com/pub/enserm/p/t…

This! Using evidence based instructional practices and learning principles should be the starting point. They ought to be non-negotiable.

The soft bigotry of low expectations, presented as empathy, compassion, and tolerance, is a 1st order threat to our children’s education - trapping them in illiteracy and lifelong dependency.

“This gets to the heart of what we believe schools are for. Should they be safe spaces in which we allow children to tinker about at the margins of human culture, maybe discovering something useful for themselves? Or are they, as education professor Michael Young has said, places that should ‘enable young people to acquire the knowledge that, for most of them, cannot be acquired at home or in the community.’ The first choice is a Darwinian jungle in which those fortunate enough to have wealthy, educated parents will thrive and the devil take the hindmost. If you believe in social justice and giving children a fair chance to escape the constraints of this lottery, using schools to promote effective social learn­ing is the only option”.

@ssiakew has nailed something important in this question. 👇

You may have seen the 2nd Ed. of the @deansforimpact report on the Science of Learning is out! Now includes pitfalls + self-regulation. Here's a summary - probably most useful AFTER you've read it, then a handy guide to look over as you plan! itsalearningcurve.education/cogsci-book-su…

Absolutely fantastic news! 🎉Independent research confirming the powerful impact of @ReadingDoctor on letter sound knowledge-a huge win for educators, parents & kids. Programs like this unlock potential at school & home. Excited to see more as the research is published!

One of the trickiest questions in vocabulary instruction is deceptively simple: Which words should we explicitly teach? After years working with schools on vocabulary, I explore that challenge here: alexquigley.co.uk/selecting-voca…

@mathillustrated @AmmarMerhbi As I recall that thread it stemmed from someone dismissing replication studies as a lack of original thought.

@PCSnow1604 @AmmarMerhbi Recall the recent kerfuffle about replication and reproduction. Some were very quick to use it to trash educational research.

It's really odd that SoL books discuss half a century of research in psychology and neuroscience but entirely exclude educational research. It's the intersection, not the exclusion, that matters. By definition, the Science of Learning (SoL) is an interdisciplinary field meant to harmonize neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education. It isn’t supposed to exclude anything. Yet a massive translation gap persists. Pure SoL literature heavily privileges lab-controlled randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Because field-based educational research relies on qualitative and observational data, purists often dismiss it as "low-quality." But applied learning science shows why this exclusion breaks down. A lab can map the mechanics of working memory, but it cannot account for sociocultural context dependency. Classrooms are complex ecosystems where peer dynamics and environmental factors dictate whether a cognitive mechanism actually functions. Without educational research, lab findings lack ecological validity. They remain "laboratory curiosities." True evidence-informed pedagogy doesn't look at the classroom's messy variables as noise to be filtered out. SoL can only fulfill its true promise at the intersection: where pure science identifies the mechanisms of the mind, and educational research provides the realities of the classroom.

I think that’s an over-reach Ralph. I happily look at and critique research from any discipline and weigh its contribution. I expect and am interested in rigour, notwithstanding the fact that this looks different in different paradigms. The word “rigour” should not be problematic. Even within a paradigm there’s stronger and weaker methodologies at the level of individual studies.

@AmmarMerhbi They believe educational research is largely invalid

I regularly hear comments along these lines from teachers. Perplexing and frustrating for them in equal measure.

Fads, influential academics with misguided ideas, and poor standards around what constitutes ‘evidence-based’ maths teaching have derailed student outcomes for years, leading expert in maths education @rastokke says. educationhq.com/news/maths-tea…

Luke Morin uses lily pads as a metaphor. 🪷 Readers need enough support to make progress through a challenging text, but not so much that the thinking is done for them. 📖 🧠 ow.ly/qROL50Yu6oq New episode w/ Luke drops TOMORROW!

Thanks @New_Old_Paul for re-sharing these ideas on aligning trauma-informed teaching and the principles of cognitive science (aka effective teaching for all). We can ease the cognitive load for teachers and students alike when we start with first principles.

Student teachers at La Trobe University are learning to teach writing across subjects early in their degrees and AERO's School Writing Instruction Framework is helping make that happen. Read the full story: 🔗edresearch.edu.au/other/articles…

🆕 Our new discussion paper, Teaching practices to support Autistic students and students with ADHD, is available now. Read the paper: edresearch.edu.au/research/discu… Image: iStock/SolStock

@mathillustrated @caiti_wade Who here referred to evasion?

@PCSnow1604 @caiti_wade Medicine is also subject to politics. And when that’s involved, it should be brought up. It’s not an evasion.

"Politically motivated" is a tired trope in education debates and it's also an own-goal. "Political" comes from the Greek {polis} meaning "a city or the overarching community of citizens". Everyone in education has an ethical responsibility to endorse practices that optimise outcomes for the overarching community of students. Personal ideology and political allegiances need to be called out and take a back seat. @rastokke does a great job of addressing this here.