John Walker, Sounds-Write

The first edition of the Deans' for Impact "Science of Learning" document was hugely influential on me. Very excited to see a second edition published - all teachers should read this! H/T @New_Old_Paul deansforimpact.org/tools-and-reso…

Our colleagues at @deansforimpact just released The Science of Learning, 2nd ed! #TheScienceOfLearning2 includes updated research, pitfalls to avoid, and more, grounded in our best scientific understanding of how students learn. deansforimpact.org/thescienceofle…

What an inspiring day at @nurserywrldshow . Our team had brilliant conversations with early years professionals about supporting children’s first steps into reading. 🌟📚 We were there to showcase Sounds‑Write in the Early Years: Getting Ready for Reading — training designed for practitioners in early years and nursery settings who want to build the crucial foundations for reading success. It was a real pleasure to connect with so many dedicated practitioners and to share ideas, experiences, and a shared commitment to giving children the strongest possible start.

It’s already been an adventure ✈️🙂 I’m looking forward to visiting Lynbrook tomorrow 🌟

I was really moved by Noleen's speech this week at #TransformED. Her belief that all children have the right to the best possible education which means an improved curriculum, is deeply rooted in her local knowledge and experience. @Education_NI @Counsell_C

An endorsement like this is affirming and humbling in equal measure. Thank you @theeducakers 🌻

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

This young woman @MaeveHalligan understands how we destroy children’s lives IN SCHOOLS with encouraging them to be trans. Utterly brilliant speech on how gay people have been hounded for the last decade. MUST WATCH.👇

Love it when a non-educator drops stone-cold wisdom about how to learn to be good at something: learn the basics, not the outcome. Learn the things that lead to the outcome.

English reading comprehension apps are often poor because they inherit a flawed model of reading: the idea that comprehension can be taught and assessed through generic skills descriptors such as “find the main idea”, “identify key details”, or “make an inference" etc What that kind of architecture forces is a particular kind of item like this. A generic skill must, by definition, be assessable on any text whatever which means the only operation that generalises is one that does not depend on understanding the specific passage.

@skiistiredasf My goodness! They are beautiful. Congratulations!

Lyle Gittens (108) and Eleanor Gittens (107), a beautiful Black couple from Miami, Florida, are celebrating over 83 years of marriage. Married in 1942, they hold the Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest living married couple.👏🏿❤️

A fantastic last working day in Australia with the Valley Brook network of schools, talking about behaviour and culture. If you don’t run the room- the room runs YOU :) Thank you to everyone over the last 19 days for being such warm hosts and colleagues, and so open to dialogue.

At this U.S. visit to China dinner banquet, the most eye-catching figure in the prime center seat between Musk and Cook was Lansi Technology founder Zhou Qunfei—from a rural factory girl to China's richest woman, with absolutely no background to rely on, building everything from scratch through her own grit. She was born in a small village in Hunan Province. At age 5, her mother passed away, and her father became disabled and blind from a work injury, leaving the family in dire poverty with nothing to their name. At 16, unable to afford school fees, she was forced to drop out and head to Guangdong to work in a factory, grinding glass on the assembly line—working days away during the day and furiously self-studying at night, earning certifications in accounting, computer operations, and other skills. That's how she spent a few years, until she scraped together 20,000 yuan from her wages, rallied eight relatives including her brother, sister, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law, and started a small workshop in Shenzhen doing watch glass processing. She handled machine repairs and sales runs single-handedly, grinding away like that for another four years. By the 2000s, the mobile phone industry began booming on a massive scale. By a stroke of luck, her watch glass factory landed an order for TCL phone screens. She spotted the huge potential in the phone glass market and quickly founded Lansi Technology, specializing in the production, R&D, and sales of phone glass. At first, they only handled domestic phones and knockoffs, but everything changed when she went after a Motorola order—foreign companies had insanely strict quality standards. She bet nearly all her resources to meet Motorola's demands and snagged the V3 order, which sold over 100 million units worldwide, catapulting Lansi Technology straight to industry leadership. From there, she smoothly secured deals with Nokia, Samsung, and other foreign giants. The pivotal turning point hit again in 2007, when Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, revolutionizing phones toward full-glass touchscreens. Jobs' obsessive craftsmanship demands left the whole world scrambling for a supplier that could meet them. Zhou Qunfei keenly sensed this was another massive opportunity, so she led her team in a three-month joint push with Apple engineers, breaking through key processes to mass-produce the first-generation iPhone glass panels. That locked in a long-term Apple contract, and soon after, nearly all Apple gear—from iPads to MacBooks—went to Lansi Technology for production. It also propelled Lansi to become the world's top player in touch glass panels. That's why she got to sit next to Cook. But why was Musk right there beside her too? After dominating global glass panels, Lansi Technology branched into more diverse smart devices, including car cockpits and robots. In autos, they've already locked in deals with 30 carmakers like Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, and Li Auto for windows, center consoles, and more. In robotics, they handle joints, sensors, and other components—areas with deep overlap in Musk's businesses. A girl who dropped out at 15 with just a junior high diploma, emerging from rural Hunan to build an empire from nothing and become China's richest woman—forty years later, stepping into U.S.-China talks, seated between Musk and Cook. That's Zhou Qunfei's story. - @hihongjie

Happy Friday everyone🌻 ICYMI: my recent blog post on bringing cognitive load theory and trauma-informed practice together has had nearly 7K views and some thoughtful engagement here, on the blog site itself and on other social media platforms. pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2026/05/cognit…

While everyone’s offering their two cents on the decline of reading and math achievement in the United States over the last decade, here’s my unvarnished take: for years, inconsistent instruction was often cushioned by strong academic support at home with parents reading to their children, discussing current events, taking them to museums, and building background knowledge through everyday life. That support helped compensate for instructional approaches that often expected students to infer too much, discover too much independently, and learn without enough explicit teaching or shared knowledge. As academic engagement at home has declined, those instructional weaknesses have become much harder to ignore. For decades, too much of our system was accomplishing less with more—more background knowledge, more vocabulary exposure, and more literacy experiences outside of school. Now we’re trying to accomplish less with less, and the cracks are becoming impossible to ignore. So what’s the path forward? We start doing better with less: explicit instruction, knowledge-rich curriculum, retrieval practice, and teaching informed by cognitive science. In other words, instruction intentionally designed around how learning and memory actually work.

Looking forward to my trip to New York City on Sunday with my wonderful colleague @MissSEYFS_Year1 to visit Lynbrook Public Schools on Long Island.

@Frisky_gaijing @japan_nobunaga @naomirwolf In the 1960s, even in professional workplaces, ‘new hires’ made tea for everyone, ran errands, performed simple everyday tasks. It was the first step on the ladder and, if you had been to a grammar school, it taught a bit of humility.

As an American, I went to work in Tokyo for a Japanese Architect. They told me that in traditional Japanese architect offices the new hires would just rake the gravel in the Zen garden for a time before being promoted to drafter. Funny story. When I began, I was instructed I would be making the tea for the visitors when we had meetings. Jokingly, I objected, thinking it was because I was a woman and said “we women have been liberated from such gender subjugation in my country!” Then I found out it was because I was the new hire, not because I was a woman. 😂🤣😂

In Japan, children clean their own schools. Every day. After lunch. About twenty minutes. Classrooms. Hallways. Toilets. Not because the schools are too poor to hire someone. Because in 1947, this country decided that cleaning your own space is part of becoming a person. The cleaning rag is on the school supply list. Right next to the pencils. Egypt teaches it now. So does Indonesia. So does Mongolia. Think about the last time you watched a seven-year-old mop a floor without complaining. Japan does that in every elementary school in the country. Not as punishment. As education.

@AllForProgress_ @SWLiteracy Lovely tribute to Boslem! The Pottery owners helped to kill the sector off by failing to invest; but even Wedgwoods who did, couldn’t avoid the inevitable. I count myself lucky to have known all six towns in the 1950s and 1960s and enjoyed “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns.”