Alison Gopnik has an important new article in the Wall Street Journal called “The Ultimate Learning Machines“. I recommend it, and I would add… The Ultimate Learning Machines Beings Human babies are the most powerful learners in the universe. So much so that state of the art machine learning is now learning from them. What […]
Back to Part 2: A Warning Shot from the Bush Administration Everyone we interviewed agreed: a significant component of the challenge of learning to read (English) is recognizing unfamiliar words fast enough to keep comprehension primed and flowing. What most challenges the brain and causes the processing delays that “stutter” the flow of reading, […]
Back to Part 1: Children of the Code Though most of our work was very well received, the more we explored the most common “brain processing challenge” involved in learning to read, the more we started to experience resistance. We first noticed this as we began to interview people who didn’t agree with the National […]
According to NAAL data, reading proficiency remains a significant bottleneck to social and economic progress for tens of millions of U.S. adults. Adults struggling with literacy (in their native language) are not only struggling with the inherent difficulties involved in literacy learning, they are struggling with what they learned in the past that is sabotaging […]
What we call their improficiencies are ours. Proficiency stats are mirrors that say more about our proficiency in stewarding their learning than they say about their capacity for learning.
This is an important step towards better understanding the underlying processing issues involved in ‘reading improficiency’ (affecting 6 in 10) as well as ‘dyslexia’ (affecting 1 in 10)
Until we attend to the culture of shame that surrounds learning errors, we will be only nipping at the edges of one of the greatest threats to our children’s education.
Refusing to speak or speaking in a whisper spares the child from the possible humiliation or embarrassment of saying the “wrong” thing.
Buying the ‘right’ program and training teachers to use it is not only insufficient, it misorients a school system’s learning.
Re: Making Sense of Teacher Professional Development / Misconceptions That Block Learning
