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I’m thrilled to announce that my new book with Keith Fickel is available for pre-order!
Cultivate & Activate: Building Teacher Capacity for Instructional Leadership
Ships May 2026
a.co/d/09pc4IKs
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Justin Baeder, PhD
47.1K posts
Justin Baeder, PhD
@eduleadership
Education philosopher & instructional leadership author. Creator of Repertoire, the professional writing app for instructional leaders.
Heber Springs, AR Katılım Mart 2009
11.8K Takip Edilen26.6K Takipçiler
@charowhipple Sure but they also go away after a few minutes.
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@eduleadership Distract them from their emotions with learning? Strong negative emotions consume working memory and attention, the very cognitive resources needed for learning. So no, emotional distress will prevent kids from learning.
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Yes Marc, emotions disappear. They are temporary.
Schools should not get into the therapy business.
When students have bad stuff going on in their lives, fix what you can—and for what you can't fix, distract them from their emotions with LEARNING.
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Oh. Oh wow. Not good. We’ve gotta turn this around.
Chris Williamson@ChrisWillx
Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book. Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story. A study analysing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet.
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@adamislucky Shopping with your family has its privileges.
I call foul if they’re making two separate transactions (that’s a chat-n-cut), but this is totally fair game otherwise.
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I just experienced a new form of Costco villainy.
A family member with a full cart pulled up in front of me to join the queue with their already in line partner, who had a full cart of their own.
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@realEstateTrent The Right Honorable Lord Lande must be addressed by his proper title 😅
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I reached out to a property owner to ask them if they would consider selling - and shared our track record of 46 deals purchased.
This was the response I received:
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@eduleadership @5Naureen Its not "on hand", it was bought to give out one each, presumably because they know how many students they have. What are the schools options for not being in a losing position? Buy twice as much? Then a kid takes five, are we buying five times as much? Remarkable logic.
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A lot of people I respect and usually agree with are siding with the school. Maybe this is a cultural difference.
Where I live, it gets really hot, and water is not something to be stingy about. We have kids overheat and die every summer (usually football).
Sam Strickland@SamStrickers181
When schools hand out items they aren’t free. The school has paid for them. If a pupil is offered 1 item then the child shouldn’t take 2 & run away when challenged. This shouldn’t be defended. It’s theft.
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@oliviajune82 Strategy instruction can be misleading because students can exhibit use of the strategy, and we take that as encouraging feedback.
But that doesn’t tell us anything about whether their underlying capability has changed.
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@oliviajune82 Super interesting nuance to get into.
A skill is an actual capability. Gross motor skills are the cleanest example, and the paradigm falls off as we get farther from that archetype.
For SEL, it matters, whether the underlying capability can be improved by instruction.
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You can teach students a strategy for, say, calming down when they're upset, but that doesn't mean the underlying issue is a teachable skill.
We waste a lot of time and effort—and full-time staffing!—trying to teach things that aren't teachable skills.
Justin Baeder, PhD@eduleadership
We are especially loath to admit that some students are simply better or worse at something like emotional regulation *and it may not be teachable.* We hate acknowledging this—when all you have is a hammer (teaching), everything looks like a nail (teachable).
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@Liz5833 I agree, and I think it’s reasonable to address that.
But defiance can only occur when an adult gives the student something to defy.
Getting into a power struggle over a single bottle of water is an unforced error. You end up looking like the villain no matter what.
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@eduleadership It’s not the two waters, it’s the defiance that’s the problem
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@karenvaites It's 100% a grift and it makes me so mad I blocked the guy years ago. I can't even engage.
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The biggest issue: Mentava is being marketed to parents, who won’t have an eye for the difference between explicit and implicit instruction. (To be fair, many educators bought into whole language theories, so the issue isn’t isolated to parents.)
Mentava has a hefty price tag and claims to be “essentially a private tutor.” mentava.com/blog/why-menta…
Yet it’s an implicit learning app at best. At most, 20% of students will piece it all together themselves. The vast majority will require some explicit instruction in phonics.
I’d put it in the practice app category: adequate practice for a child who has already learned phonics.
I’m a little shocked that I have never seen anyone question this, in all the discussion I have seen of Mentava.
Then again, its brand story mirrors most Ed Tech. Sounds good, spreads based on vibes, and only later does the instructional reality get a hearing.
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Folks, you need to look at Ed Tech with your own eyes to gauge its quality.
I was surprised to find that Mentava contains no real explicit instruction. It’s basically an implicit learning app for 2-5 year olds.
When asked about it, Niels sounds a lot like Lucy Calkins.
Niels Hoven 🐮@NielsHoven
Kids don’t learn to ride a bike by listening to instructions, they learn by practicing Reading is similar. Learning happens best through active practice, not by being lectured at We design our lessons to minimize the amount of passive listening (which little kids just tune out anyway) and maximize the amount of active practice For example, that’s why we teach silent E by training pattern recognition of a split digraph, rather than trying to teach a logical rule of “magic E makes a vowel say its name”
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@kmspeaks9 It's not cake.
I'm trying to help people understand why this goes over so poorly with parents.
You can be technically right and still lose the moral high ground.
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@kmspeaks9 If the teacher is trying to get the class to calm down and instructions the students to breathe slowly, it's absurd to accuse a student who breathes quickly of "stealing air."
Air, like water, is an entitlement, and it's incoherent to say a student took too much.
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@helenrey @SamStrickers181 And I suspect parent culture has shifted more toward the "everyone needs a giant water bottle all the time and needs to drink gallons of water a day" norm in the US than has UK school culture
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@eduleadership @SamStrickers181 Having lived in both the UK and the US this is a cultural difference.
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We are especially loath to admit that some students are simply better or worse at something like emotional regulation *and it may not be teachable.*
We hate acknowledging this—when all you have is a hammer (teaching), everything looks like a nail (teachable).
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Whenever someone uses the term "skills" casually, it's wise to be skeptical about whether these skills actually exist.
Not everything is a teachable skill!
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@kmspeaks9 Drinking water isn’t a bad behavior. The bad behavior (not following directions, running away from an adult) can be addressed without reference to the water, and should be. That’s my point.
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@DavidAstinWalsh @razibkhan @campusreform Oh wow. Interesting. But why is it spelled differently? Kind of ruins the pun as well as the historical reference.
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@razibkhan @campusreform The syllabus for this course, for anyone interested. (I've taken the liberty of scrubbing dates/times/my own office number):
docs.google.com/document/d/e/2…
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My course is listed as a divisive, identity-politics-driven class by our local conservative advocacy group here at UVA.
This irritates me for several reasons.
jeffersoncouncil.org/news/uva-engag…
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@5Naureen I would say students are definitely entitled to two bottles of water if that’s how much they need on a hot day.
Limiting them to one each may have seemed reasonable given how much they had on hand, but it puts the school in a losing position.
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@eduleadership This water wasn’t free (these were water bottles which had been bought by school) and pupils weren’t entitled to an unlimited amount of.
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@SamStrickers181 This may be technically correct, but providing water is the school’s obligation, so yes, it is free to the student, and there are no water stations outside.
There is no way to come out looking like the good guy here.
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@eduleadership A bought bottle of water isn’t free. Taking more than you are supposed to & running away is both stealing & being defiant.
Taking your water bottle to the water station to fill it up would be a different matter & no school would deny a child access. This is very different.
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