Dylan Smith

A new trailer for my book, "Ready to Learn: A Crash Course in Development, and How Children Experience School." Thank you for sharing. Available now at Friesen Press BookStore: books.friesenpress.com/store/title/11… The book will become available in the coming days at your fav bookstores.

@C_Hendrick Many educational thought leaders are unable to agree on how to effectively coordinate the design of curriculum, instruction, and learning. My question: Why should anyone believe AI can get it right when we already know AI gets things wrong?

This cannot be emphasised enough. Kids at Alpha are strictly NOT being taught by chatbots. However, behind the scenes, AI is helping to shape the design of curriculum, instruction and learning in incredibly powerful ways that I never thought possible.

@karenvaites What is cueing?

You mean "Original Post"? A well-known approach to reading instruction called "3-cueing" fell into disrepute with a cross-section of educational stakeholders because they believed it was absolutely wrong, mostly but not only because it insufficiently prioritizes the graphonemic cuing system which allows children to decode the phonemes (speech sounds) symbolized by letters. This faction attacked the use of 3-cueing and lobbied school systems to adopt programs that strongly prioritize phonics instruction. Now, a few years later, many are coming full-circle to realize the inadequacies of phonics-only instruction in helping youngsters decode *meaning* from text—the true purpose of reading. Today, with so much misinformation and strong opinion swirling, there remains a lack of clarity and consensus on early reading instruction.

@warmMagnet @karenvaites I’m confused. The OP is that there’s no more cueing taking place. So what remains in its absence?

So many conversations in US education go like this: Someone: "Cueing is Over. Schools are NOT using cueing any more! I can tell." Large-scale Fordham study: 30% of teachers are still using cueing. There are 13,000+ districts in the US. Talking categorically them is practically impossible. Someone can be correct locally but mistaken, writ large.

@objkshn @karenvaites No, they work together. When you write, you use symbols to “encode” meaning onto a page. When you read, you attend to various kinds of cues to “decode” the symbolically encoded meaning.

@warmMagnet @karenvaites Oh okay. It’s cueing vs decoding? The two are mutually exclusive?!?

@objkshn @karenvaites As we read, we attend to various kinds of mutually supportive cues to predict word identities and build meaning.

One of my takeaways from all this—I hope those who know better than me will correct me if I’m off track—is that in addition to serving up more concrete and easily recognized categorical percepts, our current context activates the profile of abstract perceptual, action, and affective cues that came to contribute to our acquisition of that context's associated concepts. Awkward sentence, I know.

@MrLeeBates Check out this fascinating passage from Kemmerer (2019) on neighbouring regions in the anterior temporal lobe associated with perceptual-related and social/emotional-related (but not motor-related) conceptual processing…

Interesting study with predictable but important finding: Word meanings acquired at earlier grades tend to be concrete and word meanings acquired at later grades tend to be abstract. Muraki, E. J., et al. (2023). The development of abstract word meanings. doi.org/10.1017/S03050…

@JohnHolbein1 Google: "Is cognitive reappraisal real or a scam from psychology?"

Growth mindset may just be the most widely adopted scam finding from psychology.

@cbokhove It does seem that way in this instance. More generally, I am finding that the academic credibility of trad-sponsored views on this platform has been on a steady decline. Increasingly preposterous personal views.

Agree. But I think the function is to pretend to be smarter than they really are.

Ontario’s School Effectiveness Framework is more appreciative and participatory than evaluative in any traditional sense. No time to read this document? Scan pages 6-8. onted.ca/school-effecti…

@dylanwiliam @mathillustrated District leader A: "Let's identify the best bandaid to apply to all staff for tonic improvement. What do the RCTs say?" District leader B: "Experience and collaboration also count so let's decide how we'll leverage social capital in our schools to support each teacher's growth."

@mathillustrated In the economics of education literature, teacher quality is often defined as a combination of teacher talent and teacher effort, and because teacher talent is believed to be fixed, the conclusion is that teacher quality can only be improved by increasing teacher effort.

Apparently teachers are not working hard but will if threatened with punitive measures, according to some

@cbokhove That doesn't sound snobbish. It's fair and reasonable limit-setting.

My job description does not say I have to educate those who, intentionally or not, have not read up enough on a topic. Does that sound snobbish - probably yes. But if you're truly about debate, show some initiative please when I point in certain directions.

An interesting phenomenon for myself is that most discussions on current twitter have already been done ten years ago. I did not get to the number of total tweets I have now by not engaging then. But some seem to think it never happened then.

Mark Seidenberg on "The 'Too Much Phonics' Question." seidenbergreading.net/blog/the-too-m…

@alephlove Happy to help you!

@warmMagnet I enjoyed you tweeting about learning for all the other day. quickly skim it a bit and find some ideas that are useful. thank you

@teacherhead Tom, check this out: x.com/warmMagnet/sta…

Myth: inspections are an objective reliable way to evaluate and compare schools against clear criteria. Truth. Inspections are a ludicrous bias fest where strangers guess judgements against an absurd range of criteria; fudged impressionistic feels are passed off as objective .

@mathillustrated Are social-media inspired edus losing the plot on reading instruction? Too much att'n to influencers and quick fixes to reverse the pendulum. An organic shift from literal to inferential comp is ready to begin mid-Gr2 with complex sentences, att'n to context. Ease up on phonics.

Learning to read and comprehend text is not the same as learning procedures and understanding concepts in maths, of course, but I wonder about the definitions and measures of comprehension.

@cbokhove @mathillustrated Yeah, I really don't know... Transfer is the Holy Grail, but Greg will need to speak to his phrasing and rationale.

@warmMagnet @mathillustrated I also don't really understand -based on the tweet not the blog- how conceptual knowledge and transfer are allegedly mutually exclusive.

I’ll wait for the book. 😆