Aishwarya

Find me on @bluesky bsky.app/profile/teachi…

Strange to think how different your brain is at night. You wake in the dark & are prone from that darkness & perhaps the veil of lingering sleep to wild imaginings & dark prescriptions. Things seem hopeless. A tiny comment takes on vast importance. A grand & implausible scheme glows like tiny flame. You are an utterly different you until the sun rises. I have no purpose in mentioning this except to note that it’s fascinating & perhaps to observe that the dark of their room at night is a horrible place to leave your child alone w a cell phone.

@C_Hendrick I wrote about this a few years ago: teachingtenets.substack.com/p/the-curious-…

The students most harmed are the same ones harmed by strategy-heavy reading instruction: those who arrive with the smallest knowledge base. 🧵

The student who can't write a coherent paragraph about photosynthesis doesn't have a "paragraph structure" problem; they have a photosynthesis problem.🧵⤵️

Women’s superpower is how deeply they care for others. But for women in education, sometimes that dedication manifests as organizing their lives around not letting everyone else down. Dr. Jessica Hoffmann put language to something schools make impossible to miss: women still become the default for invisible and gendered work, while girls are praised for being “so put together.”  That is how one generation’s overextension becomes the next generation’s script. If we want girls to have a healthier relationship with power, voice, and self-trust, they need a wider vision of womanhood. #WomenSupportingWomen #WomensHistoryMonth #RULER #EmotionsMatter

New Post on Substack! teachingtenets.substack.com/p/explicit-voc…

🚨 new blog 🚨 Over on @EduPulseCo More and more I’m hearing conversation along the lines of: ‘Teacher decision making is exactly where we need to focus. Our best teachers deserve that.’ But, decision making is every teacher’s business. Here’s why edupulse.co/post/why-teach…

My favorite line (so far) in this great, very important book: “Strong offline skills transfer easily to the digital realm, but the reverse is almost never true.” - Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, page 155

10 years! I truly cannot list the ways in which Twitter has transformed my career. Grateful to so many, many kind people I've met here!

I could convince myself that we should stop talking about "teaching kids to read" b/c we're reasonably successful at getting kids to "decode," which is what most people think reading is. The trouble is we're *not* good at teaching reading comprehension and unlikely to become good at it because we're reluctant to do what it would require: stop trying to teach reading comprehension as a discrete "skill" (or suite of skills) and embrace a fairly prescriptive, knowledge-rich curriculum across disciplines that accepts language proficiency for what it is, not what we wish it to be. E.D. Hirsch has been right all along: literate writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. That's how language works. You can't wish it away even if it's unfashionable or rubs the wrong way our ideas about "culturally responsive" education. The only way I can conceive to improve outcomes broadly is to see reading comprehension for what it is: not a skill to be taught but a condition to be created by ensuring that every student has access to the same store of knowledge and vocabulary.

I used to teach critical thinking courses, at a big state party school and also at a "dropout factory"-type community college hours away. At the time, I did my honest best and enjoyed the work. But, as I've gotten older, I've come to regret ever involving myself in that wretched critical thinking enterprise. "Critical thinking" done wrong isn't just pointless, it's harmful. The truth is I couldn't even tell whether my students had enough antecedent knowledge to do the "critical thinking" upon because the courses were basically designed to obviate the need actually to know anything. When isolated from a broader curriculum, "critical thinking" ends up focusing on things like logical validity, formal and informal fallacies, evaluating source credibility, cognitive biases, media literacy, maybe a little scientific method. But you can't teach or assess these as separable skills without making the examples and questions based on toy examples - you know, "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man..." Fake advertisements printed in an overpriced textbook, cartoonish ad hominem vignettes, etc. So, not only did these critical thinking courses crowd out some general education curriculum, they also offered a false sense of security about one's reasoning abilities. Oops!

*NEW* Offering! Resources & Teacher Training for Teaching Reading - for students who are behind grade level - suitable for schools, teachers, parents & volunteers - efficient, yet presents the facts of the English spelling system accurately - teaches both spelling & reading 👇

Having watched @EduPulseCo @CoachingUnpack episode 2 last night, I felt inspired to have a proper go with mapping mental models with 2 of my amazing coachees today. We started by examining a moment in the lesson where the students were practising melodrama and had to freeze...

ok I wrote this up into a post: carlhendrick.substack.com/p/why-most-edu…

Are we approaching a Turing Test for Teaching? A deep dive into the evidence on AI tutoring. Link in reply ⬇️

A thread about why I told a student no when she asked if we could “do something totally different” today and what that moment says about working memory, novelty, and the engagement trap many students and teachers fall into. 🧵1/10

@nkgrock Thank you!

@teachingtenets Better to get in touch with Vaidikas who perform Shraddha rituals. These are not do-it-youtself rituals.

@nkgrock any recommendations for books on Shraaddha? This is specifically so I can learn to do it for my grandmother who didn't have any sons.

It's easy to spot BS in education if you imagine it coming from an athletic trainer: "Let's go to the gym, do a single pushup, write about how we felt / what muscles we used / how we controlled them, and then call it a great workout." "Okay, hockey team, we're only gonna use a quarter of our limited ice time for skills this year. The other half we'll use for creative exploration, like sweeping up the snow off the ice and building a snowman." "You're gonna do a backflip. Don't worry about mastering subskills along any sort of progression, that's for losers. Just jump really high and do a flippity-flip in the air. Right now. Oh, what's that, you don't know how to get your legs up? You keep smashing your face into the floor and now you want to quit? Well then I guess you're either incapable, lazy, or both."

I've been saying for years that DuoLingo is fundamentally useless as a language learning tool. It is optimised to solve the problem of boredom, not learning languages. The cognitive activities with which is asks you to engage are guaranteed to predictably lead to no learning. It is a waste of time. Unless, you want to cure your boredom. It didn't start out that way, but, alas, it's where it ended. Thanks to @daisychristo for pointing out @Doug_Lemov's perspicacious thread.

I’ve been using language learning apps for a while but have recently switched from @duolingo to @Busuu & (hooray) my Spanish has gotten dramatically better. As someone who’s pretty into learning I thought I’d describe why I gave up on Duo & why Busuu is IMO so much better. 🧵