Finally, I have a reason to be optimistic about American education.

As a teacher, both burnout and cynicism are easy to latch onto. On Saturday, 10/19/2024 I saw a group of optimistic American teachers presenting a clear plan to improve outcomes for American students. The ideas start on a school leadership level.

M-J Mercantani-Anthony, a principal of the Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy in the Bronx, significantly brought mathematics, reading, and science scores up for his students by making time for teachers to watch each other’s lessons and give each other weekly feedback. He and his administration team would cover lessons so his teachers could observe each other and give each other feedback. Meg Lee and her team in Frederick have been trying to use the lessons of cognitive science at scale in a 45,000 student school district and found success. Rod Naquin found that for instruction to improve, teachers need to be able to trust each other enough to have productive discussions. Instruction will only improve if teachers both know how students learn, and school leaders both tell teachers what the science of learning is, and give these teachers time to collaborate to improve their instruction. A school leader that gives time and attention to sustained, not one off, professional development can cause a school to improve. I met many people from the Red Clay school district such as Dr. Tawanda Bond and Mark Pruitt who embraced and supported the science of learning for their classrooms.? More and more school leaders seem to be embracing the science of learning.? All of the speakers had similar ideas on what works in the individual classroom.?

In order to learn, students must be able to pay attention to the information or skills being shown by a teacher. Teachers must present information in small steps and build on these small steps. If a student is not attending to the information, they will not learn the information. Sarah Oberle argued that a teacher must understand the working memory of a student to be effective. For example, if a student needs to understand and write the sentence about “bats are nocturnal,” that is fairly simple. However, if the teacher adds new material, different colored pencils, and has the student walking around the room, that will increase the load on working memory of the student, making it difficult to complete the intended task. Oberle’s big idea is that teachers need to simplify, get everything ready ahead of time, and always ask themselves “what is the most important thing for the students to learn?” here while removing what they don’t need.?

The back-to-basics focus on what teachers can do in the classroom showed up with both mathematics and writing. Sarah Powell, a mathematics professor in Texas, showed me that evidence shows that simply having students memorize math vocabulary will not help them that much on word problems because word problems are complex. Instead, teachers should have students understand that all word problems are one of five types: total, difference, change, equal groups, or set. If they can understand that idea, and break every word problem into the four steps of Understand, Plan, Solve, Check, they will be more successful.?

Personally, I have had success using the philosophy of the Writing Revolution. Alexandria Chalonec and Christine Teahan argued that teachers of all subjects must first start on instructing students on how to write an individual sentence before moving on to something bigger. That all writing should be about academic content taught. This strategy can work in

history and English, but it can work in science too.?

In terms of outcomes, Kimberly Berens showed with clear evidence how a direct instruction program can work for individual students who are struggling. Her Fit Learning works with younger students with autism or skill deficits to get them caught up to grade level rapidly. Her instructors track correct and incorrect answers, and over time, have the students build their skills and then move on to be able to generalize these skills. Her work shows that direct instruction is not just a teacher lecturing, but is a teacher giving information, then checking student understanding of that information in a clear, deliberate way.?

The funny part about these talks was that I have read most of the advice given by the “science of learning” on Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs, for students with learning disabilities. Every speaker was united on what teachers should be doing: ensuring students are paying attention, giving them information in small chunks, checking to see if students understood those small chunks of information, then slowly building the information into a larger body of knowledge. They should do it clearly, and make sure to only include information that students need to know. The types of teachers often siloed in the special education realm should be given to all students. It is just better teaching. Teachers need to strive to be clear.?