This has been a great year for education research. I thought it could be fun to review some of what has come across my own limited radar over the course of 2023.
The method I used to create this wrap-up was to go back through my Twitter timeline starting in January, and pull all research related tweets into a doc. I then began sorting those by theme and ended up with several high-level buckets, with further sub-themes within and across those buckets. Note that I didn’t also go through my Mastodon nor Bluesky feeds, as this was time-consuming enough!
The rough big ticket research items I ended up with were:
Multilinguals and multilingualism
Reading
Morphology
The influence of physical or cultural environment
The content of teaching and learning
The precedence of academic skills over soft skills
In my last post (yeah, it’s been a long time. I don’t get paid for these, you know), I made the case for the importance of phonics instruction, while acknowledging it should be just about 30 minutes a day in the early grades. But I also pointed out that the quality of that 30 minutes can be highly variable.
Even when you have a program that sequences phonics instruction systematically and explicitly, it needs to be acknowledged that this is only a small part of what is on most teachers’ plates each day. Kindergarten – 2nd grade teachers usually teach most core subjects, and may be drawing upon a panoply of programs they are supposed to be experts in, while managing a bunch of young homo sapiens who have not yet fully developed a prefrontal cortex and the ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. It’s exhausting, to say the least.
Why do I keep harping on the importance of explicit, systematic phonics instruction? I know it bugs some people.
Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?
*Back in 2013, I wrote a series of posts for the Core Knowledge Foundation blog that were titled, “Promethean Plan: A Teacher on Fulfilling the Intent of the Common Core.” Unfortunately, they don’t appear to be available there anymore, so I thought it could be fun to re-post them collected here as one post, both to archive it and also to see whether the mistakes I outlined were indeed part of the squandering of the opportunity presented by the CCSS.
My 2013 classroom self, as you will see, was a bit more grandiose, but methinks I made a few good points. I’ll leave the rest to your consideration.*
This has been a great year for education research. I thought it could be fun to review some of what has come across my own limited radar over the course of 2023.