Daniel Willingham

What's your summer reading? Why not learn about Montessori education in a book club? http://www.implementingthemontessorimethod.org/book-club.html

We will make America great again if we make America read again.

I wouldn’t go back to this full time, even if I could. But tools shape thought, and sometimes the friction of analog pays off in the slow contemplation it invites.

When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a college mental health professional

Do Students Today Have Reduced Attention Spans? In this American Educator article, I argue they don't. (This piece is mostly a reprint of the one I published last year in Education Next.)

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Do Today's Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans? How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?

The main teachers' union in NY state took on the job of educating in-service teachers in the science of reading. They blew it.

New York promised to center phonics in reading instruction, but new course for teachers sidelines science of reading A New York State course intended to help educators use phonics and the science of reading effectively doesn’t do so and could impede students’ progress, literacy experts say.

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously.

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading Two champions of knowledge-rich instruction reflect on its current momentum

I still hear this justification re: AI in classrooms: “It’s out there & we can't be left behind.”
Friendly challenge: which happens more often?
1. Schools regretted waiting too long to adopt a technology.
2. Schools regretted adopting a technology before they fully understood how to use it.

Highly recommend subscribing to Karen Vaites's (weekly, I think) literacy round up on Substack.

The Latest in Literacy, 3/7/26 The left embraces the Southern Surge, Gavin Newsom spreads Mississippi Misinfo, buzz about that comprehension meta-analysis, and more.

Kim Kardashian said the moon landing was fake. Maybe your students should know that.

Kim Kardashian Says the Moon Landing Was Fake. There's a Lesson Here for Schools (Opinion) Teachers can use popular conspiracies to help students scrutinize what they see online.

"During the first 1,000 days, the brain builds itself at a breathtaking pace, forming up to a million neural connections per second..."

Q&A: Why are a child’s first 1,000 days so critical for brain building? Many parents think the school years matter most for neurological development, but a UVA expert says the biggest gains start much earlier.

Generative AI has been adopted in US workplaces more rapidly than PCs or the internet https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2025.02523