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Coming off a nice, long (much needed) holiday, I have returned to my typical, educational reading, and stumbled across an interesting piece by Adam Boxer in which he states instructional coaching might not be all that it is cracked up to be. It’s a provocative and timely claim, since many states have turned to instructional coaching…
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Not Just Background Knowledge: The Case for Literary Touchstones I read an interesting quote the other day from the RAND Corporation, which claims that math teachers reportedly use at least “one standards-aligned curriculum material” which is “twice as high as the percentage of ELA teachers” (Doan et al., 2025). This statistic doesn’t surprise me. I…
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Are High-Quality-Instructional Materials Actually Quality? I have been part of or have led curriculum adoptions for two school districts over the past four years, and one thing is abundantly clear: high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) are not always as high quality as one would hope. As is often the case with curriculum adoptions, the procurement process is mired…
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In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, there is a lovely analogy to help the audience conceptualize prior knowledge and biases: in the children’s story by Leo Lioni called Fish is Fish, a fish imagines birds as fish with wings and cows as fish with udders because he can only understand the world through the lens…
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The Myth of Personalization: Why education keeps outsourcing the work of Teaching Rebecca A. Huggins If Winston Smith were real, and not a figment of George Orwell’s 1984, he would undoubtedly be wary of any education or civic institution that outsourced epistemic authority to platforms. Seventy-seven years after the publication of Orwell’s dystopia, the worry looks less…
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A New Battle for the Mind: Can Critical Thinking Be Taught in the Age of AI? Rebecca A. Huggins When I graduated from a small, private liberal arts college in the Appalachian foothills two decades ago, there was already an unsettling whisper that majoring in the humanities was a career-killer. I was twenty-one, idealistic, and…
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Is Disciplinary Knowledge All You Need to Be a Good Teacher? In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, philosophy professor Paul Schofield discusses the appearance of a relatively new trend in post-secondary institutions called teaching-and-learning centers. The core argument Schofield asserts is that “evidence-based” pedagogy is often unreliable, that what counts as effective teaching varies by…
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The High Cost of Unproven Reforms: How Ideology and Weak Research Have Shaped Decades of Costly Education Policy Rebecca A. Huggins When I was a graduate student in education nearly twenty years ago, I recall a professor telling me that there wasn’t any good research on educational impacts because you can’t really control groups when…
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We’ve Misdiagnosed Adolescent Reading Struggles In a recent Education Week report, Stephen Sawchuk highlights that large numbers of middle and high school students struggle to read grade-level texts with confidence and fluency. The article notes that training for adolescent literacy is limited, while screening and intervention taper off after elementary school, leaving teachers to close years of gaps in…
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We Don’t Need More SEL Programs. We Need Better Teaching The SEL outcomes schools value most—confidence, motivation, belonging, and resilience—are byproducts of effective teaching, not programs teachers must add to their already full plates. In recent years, school districts have sought new ways to support what they call the “whole child,” expanding their focus beyond…