Maths teacher. MEd. Studying Ed Doctorate in Mathematical cognition. šØāš« Resource developer @AddvanceMaths ā Interested in CogSci, SoL.
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Joined March 2018
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Will Mac retweeted
That's why I think opportunity cost is the single most important idea in school improvement. Every hour our teachersāand our studentsāspend on one thing is an hour they don't have to spend on something else. And this matters most of all for students who find learning hardest...
Will Mac retweeted
One of the things that always bothers me is the fact that many ppl think "green = nature" without any consideration for anything else
An ecologically dead field instead of an affordable supermarket for residents, yeah well done you're really saving the planet
Will Mac retweeted
Amidst all the talk about oracy (and indeed inclusion) one thing that seems to get missed is that too many girls in too many classrooms arenāt talking.
Did you know they get asked fewer questions, have shorter wait times & get interrupted more?
Probably best to start with that.
Will Mac retweeted
This needs to go. Implied accusations of prejudice should never be injected into conversations about pedagogy.
Whatever the intent, the impact has been a weaponization of SJ language to promote techniques that are enormously *inequitable*.
Will Mac retweeted
What would my priorities be?
1. develop teacher subject knowledge
2. support schools with discipline + culture
3. improve training in explicit instruction
4. get kids off tech
5. develop robust pastoral support that allows pupils with needs to eventually thrive without it. 5/
Will Mac retweeted
I'm getting really worried now. We need to focus on improving the basics of numeracy, reading and writing. Schools that were set up with oracy at their heart failed embarrassingly. Where is the oracy success story?
Education secretary @LucyMPowell says oracy will be given āequal statusā with reading and writing in the revised national curriculum
tes.com/magazine/news/generaā¦
Will Mac retweeted
No schoolās TL priority should be Oracy if you are dealing with the below issues.
Sort out BFL & embedding routines first.
Will Mac retweeted
The lessons for me re growth mindset:
1. Books/TED talks lacked nuance
2. Null results & failed replications get less coverage than initial studies
2. Educators oversimplified interventions
4. Later positive findings got little coverage once people decided GM was ādebunkedā
Will Mac retweeted
This is really exciting!! Off-the-shelf math curriculums are often (usually) actively out of alignment with principles of cognitive science. It's hard to find a math curriculum that doesn't assume guided discovery as step one and that is serious about interleaved retrieval. Or frankly that isn't tech-for-tech's sake. Great news to see this project come to fruition!
Today, Modern Classrooms Project is announcing that we have raised $12 million to build a free Tier 1 math curriculum for middle and high school, grounded in cognitive science.
The more time I spend in math education, the more concerned I get. Outcomes have been falling for more than a decade, and the steepest declines are among the lowest-performing students.
Meanwhile, many of the leading cognitive scientists and learning scientists have been sounding the alarm that their research is not being applied at scale in math classrooms. We think they might be right.
So we are building a curriculum that treats cognitive science as its north star. We plan to launch middle school in summer 2027 and high school in summer 2028.
Three things to know about what we are building:
1. It will be free. All lessons and materials, teacher-facing and student-facing, will be publicly available online, printable, and modifiable.
2. It will be built with the researchers. In the coming weeks, we will announce a research advisory committee of leading learning scientists. We will work as hard as we can to make sure the structure, design, and underlying content align with what cognitive science tells us about how students, especially struggling learners, master math.
3. It will work with or without technology. Modern Classrooms Project has spent years at the intersection of technology and classroom instruction. This curriculum will have two clear implementation pathways. One that is completely paper-based, built around whole-group, teacher-facilitated instruction. The other will be designed to leverage technology to enable flexible pacing, mastery-based progressions, and increased 1-1 and small-group support from educators.
Perhaps most importantly, we want to understand what works. While we have conviction that following cognitive science is the right path, we are deeply committed to trying to move the field forward so that students can achieve their full potential in math, particularly students farthest from opportunity.
To learn more about what we are building and explore ways to get involved, go to modernclassrooms.org/curricuā¦.
Will Mac retweeted
There are academics who have built their whole career on making the teaching of simple arithmetic unnecessarily complicated. Practice has been turned into a bad word in math & explicitly teaching is often something thatās supposed to be avoided. Children have suffered for it. Math has suffered for it.
Universities and academia are partly to blame by often rewarding the publication of flawed education research. The problem is that these academics can be hugely influential on curriculum, textbooks, teacher education, and professional development. Because who would think an education expert isnāt really an expert?
When someone has built their whole career on bad ideas, itās going to be hard to get them to change course. That is why it is true that math needs a phonics-style revolution.
Will Mac retweeted
We had a model of instructional design that demonstrably worked for teaching early reading/Math since the late 60s. Then education academics spent the next 50 years demonising it and training new teachers to do the exact opposite - skills-based/choose your own adventure curriculum design, minimally guided instruction, contempt for standardised testing etc and now we are where we are.
Will Mac retweeted
We had this in England in the early 2010s.
Inspectors would go around criticising teachers for using explicit instruction. They would never praise them for it.
This would be excused with the claim that they were only highlighting a problem, they weren't against explicit instruction per se.
With mainstream articles on education and Sold a Story 2 coming out, we are about to experience a period of intense gaslighting.
Itās already started.
We will be told, repeatedly, that nobody isāor has ever beenāagainst explicit teaching. Which is easily falsified, but these falsifications will be dismissed.
We will be told, repeatedly, that all teachers use explicit teaching. Which is true to some extent because the alternatives are so ineffective. But theyāre using it without knowing the research and often under pressure to do something else.
Why do people try to deny the debate in this way? Why donāt they just come out and make an honest argument?
Will Mac retweeted
With mainstream articles on education and Sold a Story 2 coming out, we are about to experience a period of intense gaslighting.
Itās already started.
We will be told, repeatedly, that nobody isāor has ever beenāagainst explicit teaching. Which is easily falsified, but these falsifications will be dismissed.
We will be told, repeatedly, that all teachers use explicit teaching. Which is true to some extent because the alternatives are so ineffective. But theyāre using it without knowing the research and often under pressure to do something else.
Why do people try to deny the debate in this way? Why donāt they just come out and make an honest argument?
Will Mac retweeted
š My new Teaching for Attention Playbook is a 70+ page, evidence-informed guide that breaks down the science of attention and provides 6 practical strategies to support teachers.
It covers how to:
šÆ Secure Attention: Create the conditions for students to focus
šÆ Direct Attention: Guide students towards important information
šÆ Orchestrate Attention: Manage where attention goes as learning unfolds
š Want a free copy? REPOST and comment ATTENTION below, and Iāll DM you the link.
ā° Available free until Wednesday 30 September at 11:59pm AWST
Will Mac retweeted
Your app is built on the work of people like Maryanne Wolf studying the fundamental mechanics of reading over decades under proper scientific conditions.
I have been fighting against "common sense" in education because you end up with neuro-myths like learning styles and worse still, flawed reading instruction. The science of learning gives us the clarity to tell truth from vibes and has made a huge difference in the lives of children who are now taught to read properly.
Most education academia is nonsense and I have done more than most to call it out. It's 3rd rate sociology and activism. But the scientific study of reading is not the same field and calling those people morons reflects very badly on you.
Will Mac retweeted
Love how the towers glow over the pool at night. The gallery on Sheikh Zayed's life is the one I would take my time with. Glad you had a good evening there.
Will Mac retweeted
If someone says āThey behave for meā they often mean:
1. āI tolerate more misbehaviour than you do.ā
2. āI allow them to work and learn less than you do.ā
3. āI am oblivious to their behaviour.ā
If they really do ābehave for themā, ask to observe their amazing lessons.
