Over the past decade there’s been a lot of debate about whether Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is valid as an approach to guide instruction.  I’m going to take up the points of this debate in a future post.  But right now, I want to argue for the most persuasive reason why every teacher...Read More

Everybody is born with a love for learning.  Look at a baby. She wants to explore everything around her, tasting, touching, smelling, feeling, hearing – learning all about the environment (including her own body).  Nature set things up that way so that we’d always be learning, growing, and adapting to an ever-changing environment. Something, however,...Read More

When I was in school, a long long time ago (sounds like the start of a fairy tale!), we had these Science Research Associates (SRA) reading programs that came in a box.  The box contained scores of laminated pages (like the files in a filing cabinet), each of which had a story on it with...Read More

Once a student has learned to decode (e.g. read the actual printed words on the page or screen), then reading teachers (and remedial teachers) launch into an enterprise called ”reading comprehension.” Taken at face value, this really just means being able to understand what you are reading.  There are rare cases of individuals who are...Read More

In an earlier post, I pointed out how over the course of millions of years of human evolution, reading and literacy have occupied only the last 5000 years of human existence.  Consequently, our brains did not evolve any brain regions specifically for reading, but must make use of preexisting structures of the brain to make...Read More