The Science of Learning

2017 was an eventful year in many areas, and the world of education policy was no exception. With a new administration in the White House, there were many questions about whether previous federal initiatives would be continued, expanded, or abandoned, and how this might impact the classroom. While the full impact of many proposed changes remains to be seen, here is a look at where things stand and what can be expected in the next year. 1. Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) This was originally supposed to be the first school year that 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act would take effect, replacing the No Child Left Behind Act’s federal accountability mandates with state-developed proposals that would be approved by the Department of Education. However, several factors have delayed the law’s full implementation. Immediately upon inauguration in January, President Trump announced a regulatory freeze that included major parts of ESSA. Then, in March, the Senate voted to repeal regulations passed by the Obama administration that had set ground rules for state accountability standards. This left individual states largely on their own in interpreting the law and crafting their proposals – a process that has been hampered by staffing and budget cuts in state education departments. As of now, at least 14 states’ proposals have been approved, but Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s recent decision to undertake another review of ESSA’s Title I accountability rules, as well as Florida’s battle over the law’s requirements for accommodating English Language Learners, mean that implementation may drag well into 2018. Some of the main uncertainties going forward revolve around state achievement targets for special education. As mandated by ESSA, states must now separately track the performance of students with disabilities and develop plans for improving it. But based on what has been seen so far, […]

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accomplished reader. In fact, you’ve most likely forgotten by now how much work it took you to learn to read in the first place. And you probably never think about what is happening in your brain when you’re reading that email from your boss or this month’s book club selection. And yet, there’s nothing that plays a greater role in learning to read than a reading-ready brain. As complex a task as reading is, thanks to developments in neuroscience and technology we are now able to target key learning centers in the brain and identify the areas and neural pathways the brain employs for reading. We not only understand why strong readers read well and struggling readers struggle, but we are also able to assist every kind of reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and comprehension—a journey that happens in the brain. We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading. Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension. The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain […]

Eric Jensen here. If you have struggling readers, lean in and read closely. I am going to give you something worth thousands of dollars for free. Sometimes the things you and I take most for granted are actually among the most valuable. For example, are you a pretty good reader? Even though I used to teach reading, I somehow took it for granted that I read well. But it’s rarely like that for your students. For example, when your students struggle with reading, what are the most likely signals? Obviously, it hurts your school scores, but there’s more. Can you see and feel the discouragement, frustration and even the internalizing of the emotions (“I can’t do this” or “I hate reading”)? When students read poorly, they often generalize it to other subjects (“Maybe I am just dumb”) and most things in school can become overwhelming. That’s painful to watch. I would love to help you with your lowest performing students and there’s a solution that may work for you.  As a former reading teacher and science junkie, I’ve been shouting the praises of the Fast ForWord® reading intervention program for over 20 years. Follow the directions, encourage the students and it flat-out works. Fast ForWord has been validated by more than 50 published studies in peer-reviewed journals and over 250 school studies. I personally know the neuroscientists that developed the program and they are “rock star” pioneers in their field. There’s just one drawback. If you ever shop reading programs around by price, Fast ForWord is nowhere near the cheapest of them all. Unfortunately, when comparing programs, learning leaders (instructional coaches, principals, etc.) often fail to price out the real costs of the alternatives (e.g. using instructional aids, having students held back, tutors and intervention specialists, staff who get burned out, […]

Finding our way through life’s tangles and snares can be tricky.  It’s easier said than done.  But with determination, skills, support and a sense of direction, it’s possible. In the hit Broadway play Hamilton, playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda tells his story about rising above adversity in a song titled, “I Wrote My Way Out.” “I wrote my way out When the world turned its back on me I was up against the wall I had no foundation No friends or family to catch my fall Running on empty With nothing left in me but doubt I picked up the pen And wrote my way out.” How can a person write their way out, if they aren’t able to read, write and spell fluently?  Identifying a problem is a necessary first step to finding a resolution. Knowing where to begin solving a problem can be more elusive. Writing our way out of adverse circumstances is one thing, but writing our way out of learning to read – that requires specialized instruction and support. Without proficient literacy, how do we expect kids to someday align with opportunities, and write their own future?  To answer these driving questions, let’s look at dyslexia in the context of our educational system. October is dyslexia awareness month. Language-based learning disabilities affect age-appropriate reading, spelling, and sometimes writing, too. Effective, research-based practices have been identified and promoted for years. Everything necessary to provide learners with dyslexia with an appropriate education is available now, and has been for decades. Even so, too many kids are being left behind. Dyslexia screening is a hot topic among advocates, especially in California where the CDE recently published new California Dyslexia Guidelines. The desire for screening tools isn’t new. Schools have had access to screening tools for years. Two examples: the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen […]

Parents Know Everything, Right? There was a time in my late twenties when I was quite certain I knew exactly how I was going to raise my kids. I had it all figured out. So much so that I was already judging other parents. How could you let your kid do t-h-a-t? Oh, noooooo. Not in MY house. I had high expectations of myself AND my children. Of course, at the time, I didn’t yet have kids. It’s not until that bundle of joy is plopped into one’s lap that one realizes that parenthood is all about being a student. Our kids constantly globbering us with lessons. At some point, a very humbling admission occurs. We have a lot to learn. Special Kid Parenting Becoming a quick study of the nonexistent parental handbook is no easy task. That’s amplified when you have a kiddo with special needs or learning differences/disabilities. Depending on the special circumstances of the child, one might have to become an unofficial expert on all kinds of complicated subject matter. And given the number of struggling learners has risen exponentially in the last decade, many parents like me find ourselves needing to learn ALL about how our kids’ brains work, the intricacies of how they learn and how skills are broken down. As you can imagine, this can all be quite the challenge, so finding an intervention that makes navigating learning differences so much easier is extremely helpful. I Could Kick Myself We had a trusted practitioner in my son’s life suggest Fast ForWord about two years ago. It was more than a suggestion; it was “you must do this.” Problem was, at the time we were exhausted, depleted and didn’t have the bandwidth to consider anything new. We were five years into my son’s autism diagnosis […]

Along with smartphones and social media, fidget spinners are now somewhat of a punchline when talking about the habits of today’s kids. The small trinkets have been a consistent presence both on best-selling toy lists and in classrooms all over the country — to the frustration of many teachers who have banned or confiscated them. Of course, neither handheld gadgets nor teachers’ struggle against them in the classroom are particularly new. What’s novel about fidget spinners, however, is that they’ve been marketed not just as entertainment but as a tool to increase focus or relieve stress for people with autism, anxiety, or attention disorders. So do these toys really have therapeutic value, or are they just another trendy distraction? The answer is more complicated than you might think. For a long time, fidgeting behaviors like shifting in your seat, tapping your fingers, or twirling a pen wеre considered a sign of distraction, and children in school were constantly admonished to sit still. But the common wisdom had it backwards: fidgeting can, in fact, help to improve memory and concentration, though scientists still aren’t sure exactly how. A recent study by Julie Schweitzer found that children diagnosed with ADHD performed better on a cognitive assignment the more physical movement they exhibited during the test, while another demonstrated a similar correlation between movement and working memory. These results indicate that fidgeting could be a strategy to compensate for attention deficits by occupying understimulated regions of the brain. Even for those not diagnosed with ADHD, a simple physical activity like doodling may help to keep their focus from straying away from the main task at hand, as an earlier study has shown. Furthermore, better performance by students who take handwritten notes over those who take notes on their laptops suggest that incorporating physical […]

  Back to school already?  Our Professional Development Managers (PDMs) spend weeks - months - years(!) on the road working with schools all across the country. We asked these experts their top suggestions, ideas, and tips to make this the best Fast ForWord year ever. Have you tried all these yet?     1. What is the most creative way you have seen to motivate students? Ann and Sheila:  Wall of Fame!   Sheila: I worked with one 2nd grade teacher who displayed the whole solar system and all the planets along a very long hallway, and the students were each represented by a rocket ship so they went from planet to planet as their completion scores went up by 10% increments (the sun was included, as well as the former planet Pluto)!   Joel:  One teacher told me she can get her kids to do anything for a bag of chips.  Andrea:  One of my favorite things is a reward system that takes into account both Fast ForWord and general habits of mind/soft skills. I saw a secondary teacher in Starkville, MS who built structured free time into the class period on a Friday every three weeks or so. To attain this structured free time, students had to be up to date on their CAPSs (no flags), have no misbehavior in class (no infractions), and no disciplinary write-ups from any class (no referrals). I think it’s so cool because many of our students see social gains before they may see numerical/test gains, and this system is a great way to reward those social gains.  2. What’s your TOP piece of advice for schools getting started this fall?  Ann:  Communicate progress and struggles with the students through MySciLEARN reports. Christina:  Strategy! Strategy! Strategy! Take the first week of school to reintroduce Fast ForWord! Remind students of the purpose of Fast ForWord and […]

Reading fluency is understanding what you read, reading at a natural pace, and reading with expression. How will your students, or your child, become more fluent this year?  It’s tempting to think that reading more is the key. It turns out that silent reading does not build reading fluency in struggling readers. According to the National Reading Panel, “there is insufficient support from empirical research to suggest that independent, silent reading can be used to help students improve their fluency”. Knowing this, if the student isn’t proficient in reading, should they continue “reading” a not-right selection in the hope of becoming a better reader? I liken this to me learning how to paint. I have recently started to go to local painting outings. With some coaching/instruction, I am starting to understand the basic techniques. The instructor goes around to everyone to make sure they are doing what is asked of them. The instructor breaks each step down, section by section, and then checks back in with everyone as we progress. Shouldn’t we do the same with our students — making sure they are reading proficiently, every step of the way, similar to how my painting instructor goes to each student to make sure our technique will get us the end result that we want? If I stayed quiet and fumbled through my painting, would I get better in terms of technique and form? This is similar to having a student stay quiet when they are struggling with reading the text at hand. This being said, silent reading does have an important place in students’ lives. Once a student is a fluent reader, they should continue reading anything and everything that is available to them at their just-right level.  Here are the best practices for building reading fluency for those who struggle with reading: […]