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I'm speaking at the Georgia Council for the Social Studies Conference on Friday, and already planned to mention your work. Thanks for the great timing.

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Nov 1, 2023·edited Nov 1, 2023

I have been extremely frustrated over the professional development I receive (or am required to attend) only to return to the classroom and having to stick to a packaged program. At times even my speech is dictated - really? How is that engaging to the students in front of you and effective way of learning when you are using a single approach to become "educated" and pass formative tests the district LOVES! Data is only as good as its input and what it is testing can be repeated with the same students with the same result. Coming from a Six Sigma GE Plastics background - education throws around "capturing data" like any of this data has reliability. Are we moving backwards as a society? Computer applications come about from developers stealing others work and our overall systems offer and do less than they did in the early years of computing. We have only become as sophisticated as the general population values and making money is not a value or a talent.

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Have we fixed what teachers are learning in college yet?

That seems like a great place for them to actually learn this stuff

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No, we haven't, and yes, it WOULD be a great place for prospective teachers to learn this stuff. Maybe someday that will happen, but it's likely to take a very long time. If you're interested in the reasons for that, you might want to read this article I wrote for a magazine called The American Scholar a while ago:

https://theamericanscholar.org/why-so-many-kids-struggle-to-learn/

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As usual, you cover a lot of important ground, so I hope you'll revisit the topic specifically with implementation science in mind. My district, like many, always stalls on the first stage of professional development: build knowledge. There's no follow-through with support to help teachers embed that knowledge in their practice, so even the motivated teachers are not quite sure how to make significant change in their classrooms, even when handed a good curriculum.

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I don't know much about implementation science, per se, but as I've tried to say in the post--and addressed at greater length elsewhere (https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/teachers-need-the-why-the-what-and)--teachers definitely need the "how" as well as the "why" and the "what" in order for change to happen.

From what I've seen, what can work well is to bring in an outside organization like TNTP that can provide ongoing support and coaching in delivering a knowledge-building curriculum. It's crucial to get that support from people who are deeply familiar with the particular curriculum being used--not just someone from within the district who happens to be able to spare the time. There's an organization called Rivet Education that can help schools and districts find outside support geared to implementing specific curricula.

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Edu conferences are overrated. People don’t learn this way. Often the speakers just bounce around and deliver the same slide deck. Almost any presentation can be found on YouTube or in an article.. for free

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I loved your presentation at researchED Chile, Natalie, and certainly think there’s tremendous value to communicating the science of reading comprehension! My intention in including a photo of you in my presentation was about saying that even expertise like yours needs to be paired with a coherent plan on an institutional level, and I hope you felt no disrespect. None was intended! One of my fears, as a long time lover of Hirsche and what’s now being called the science of reading is that our struggles with coherently training teachers will discredit important ideas because of poor implementation. There’s a lot of variables in this complex thing of making teachers better!

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Ben—I absolutely took no offense from the slide with my photo! As I hope you can see from the post, I think we’re very much on the same page with regard to these issues, and I thought your presentation was tremendously valuable.

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