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I don’t often write about my personal experience with my children’s schools. However, this post comes at a unique time in our nation when more and more families are experiencing questions of quality and trust in the public school system. I have always been an adamant advocate for public schools, and ensuring all students receive […]

I had the pleasure recently of presenting to a school district on the topic of implementation science, and how we can move systems forward in utilizing high-impact instructional practices. One of the interesting things about this session was that I had anticipated quite a lot of administrators, coaches, and system leaders to attend. Who I […]

Back-to-school is generally one of my favorite times of the year. Teachers come back feeling—for the most part—refreshed, classrooms are freshly painted, people look tanned and rested, and there’s usually a lot of positive feeling in the air. It also is one of the busiest times of year. My school year generally starts with a series […]

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 […]

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 was a high school English teacher for most of […]

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 in bureaucracy, bidding requirements, and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 working as a radio personality on the local Top-40 station. I assumed the world would unfold […]

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 discipline, and that subject-matter experts—not generalists—are the real teaching experts. While […]

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 people are involved. That claim echoed a broader skepticism about randomized experiments in education that Thomas Cook (2006) and others […]

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 content-heavy courses. As a secondary […]

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 academics to include social-emotional competencies like self-awareness, emotional regulation, perspective-taking, […]

In 1983, Howard Gardner introduced his theory of multiple intelligences in his landmark book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner argued that intelligence is not a single general factor. Rather, human beings possess a plurality of “intelligences” or modalities (e.g., linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic). His theory advanced four core claims: Since […]