First, my complaint:  I don’t like the direction that reading instruction has taken in this country, moving as it has toward lock-step teaching of phonemic awareness, incessant teaching of reading comprehension ”skills” (e.g. finding the main idea, making inferences etc.), and ”close reading” strategies (where the child is restricted to just what is in the...Read More

William Shakespeare is generally regarded as the greatest writer of the English language.  All too often, though, he is taught at the secondary school level in a way that does not endear this brilliant man to high school students.  I remember being bored by Shakespeare when I was in school.  What can be done to...Read More

This blog post of mine, entitled ”What If Great Minds Ran Our Schools?” based on my book If Einstein Ran the Schools: Revitalizing U.S. Education, first appeared in the blog TeachThought on May 1, 2020: The long-awaited test results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in, and although there’s something there for...Read More

Many educators and parents have been worrying that the interruption in school being experienced by so many students nationwide (and worldwide) as a result of COVID-19 will result in significant ”learning loss.”  That is, by not having previous learning reinforced, and by not adding new learning to their experience, students will backslide in their academic...Read More

I’ve been reading a lot of posts on Twitter from parents who are not happy campers. They didn’t plan on serving as ad hoc teachers for their out-of-school students during this pandemic.  Some are discouraged, others are exhausted, still others don’t know where to start.  For those parents who have these burn-out symptoms and can manage...Read More