Progressively Incorrect

I’m thrilled to be sharing this special episode with you, the Season 5 Finale of Progressively Incorrect. I’m joined by Dr. Anita Archer, one of the most influential voices in explicit instruction and effective teaching. For decades, Anita has helped educators translate learning science into practical classroom routines that improve student success, and her work has shaped the instructional practices of schools around the world.

Our conversation explores what great teaching actually looks like in practice. We discuss how expert teachers plan lessons, sequence learning, reduce unnecessary cognitive load, and make complex ideas accessible through clear explanations, guided practice, and carefully designed questioning. Anita explains why effective instruction is far more than simply presenting information—it requires deliberate decisions about examples, pacing, responses, feedback, and opportunities for students to experience success.

We also take a deep dive into explicit vocabulary instruction, discussing how educators can move beyond definitions to help students develop durable, usable word knowledge. Anita shares practical routines for introducing, reviewing, and reinforcing vocabulary while explaining why repeated, meaningful encounters with words are essential for long-term learning.

Finally, we discuss the enduring principles behind explicit instruction, how those principles continue to evolve alongside advances in the science of learning, and what teachers can expect from the upcoming NIFDI Institute. Whether you’re new to explicit instruction or have spent years refining your craft, this conversation is packed with practical wisdom from one of education’s most respected instructional experts.

Love what you heard? Come to The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.

In this episode, I’m joined by Sean Morrisey, creator of the Word Mapping Project, for a conversation about how students learn words—not just as spellings to memorize or definitions to recite, but as connected units of sound, spelling, and meaning.

Sean spent eight years as a school psychologist before becoming a classroom teacher, and that background shapes the way he thinks about memory, retrieval, language, and comprehension. We talk about the classroom problems that led him to develop the Word Mapping Project, especially the challenge of students who can decode words but still struggle to understand and use them flexibly.

Sean walks us through what word learning looks like in practice, including word sums, matrices, prefixes, roots, suffixes, fluency passages, sentence composition, explicit instruction, retrieval practice, and independent practice. We also discuss where vocabulary instruction often goes wrong, why daily structure matters, and what kinds of evidence suggest that students are building word knowledge that lasts and transfers into reading, writing, science, and comprehension.

Love what you heard? Come to The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.

I’ve always been fascinated by what teaching looks like in remote and challenging contexts. That interest goes back to my own time working in places like Sudan, where the namesake of this blog, Education Rickshaw, comes from. So when I was invited to present at Alaska’s MTSS Conference, I was eager to learn more about the unique realities of teaching and learning across the state.

In this episode, I’m joined by Doug Gray, the organizer of the Alaska MTSS Conference and an educator who has spent years working across Alaska, including in bush communities.

Doug shares what first drew him to Alaskan schools, what daily life was like teaching in the bush, and how local culture, close-knit communities, isolation, weather, travel, and limited resources shaped his approach as an educator. We also talk about the future of Alaska schools, MTSS, and the promise of evidence-based teaching practices for supporting students across such a diverse and extraordinary state.

Love what you heard? Come to The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.

Education is filled with myths. Some are harmless. Others shape curriculum, teacher training, intervention programs, and the lives of students for decades before anyone seriously asks whether they work. One of the reasons this podcast exists is to challenge those myths and examine the evidence behind them. Too often, educational practices spread because of compelling stories, persuasive advocates, and wishful thinking rather than rigorous scientific testing. When that happens, bad ideas can become institutionalized long before they’re properly scrutinized.

Few examples illustrate this better than facilitated communication. Introduced in the 1970s and widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, facilitated communication was presented as a breakthrough method for helping individuals with severe communication disabilities express thoughts that had previously been assumed inaccessible. Through physical support provided by a facilitator, individuals were said to be able to type messages, write, and communicate complex ideas.

Parents, educators, and advocates reported what appeared to be remarkable transformations. Individuals who had never spoken or demonstrated conventional literacy suddenly seemed capable of sophisticated written communication. Stories emerged of hidden intelligence being unlocked, challenging longstanding assumptions about disability, cognition, and human potential. There was just one problem: the evidence ultimately showed that the messages were not coming from the individuals themselves. What many believed was a breakthrough in communication turned out to be an illusion.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Katharine Beals, whose work has focused on language, literacy, autism, and the scientific evaluation of facilitated communication. We discuss how the method gained credibility, why so many sincere and well-intentioned people became convinced of its effectiveness, and the scientific investigations that sought to determine whether the communication was truly originating from the disabled individual or from the facilitator.

Our conversation also explores the broader lessons this story holds for education, psychology, and disability advocacy. How should educators evaluate extraordinary claims? What role should evidence play when powerful personal experiences seem to point in a different direction? And why do ideas that have been extensively studied and criticized continue to reappear in new forms and under new names?

Whether you are an educator, psychologist, speech-language pathologist, parent, or simply interested in the history of controversial educational practices, facilitated communication offers a fascinating case study in the intersection of science, advocacy, hope, and human judgment. It is a story that continues to raise important questions about evidence, ethics, and the responsibility we bear when making decisions on behalf of vulnerable individuals.

Resources and Links

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.

Executive functioning has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in education, yet it remains one of the most misunderstood. Teachers are increasingly expected to help students manage attention, organization, memory, planning, and self-regulation, but questions remain about what these skills actually are, how they develop, and what schools can realistically do to support them.

In this episode, I’m joined by Sarah Oberle and Mitch Weathers, co-authors of Executive Functions for Every K–3 Classroom. Their work focuses on helping educators understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful learning and on creating classroom environments that make those processes visible, teachable, and sustainable for young learners.

The book explores practical approaches to supporting working memory, building organizational habits, and establishing the conditions that allow students to focus and engage in learning. It also raises larger questions about the role schools play in developing these foundational capacities. Are executive functions best understood as skills, habits, dispositions, or something else entirely? How much can they be taught directly? And what would it look like for schools to approach executive functioning not as an intervention for a few students, but as a core component of teaching and learning for all students?

Whether you’re a classroom teacher, instructional coach, school leader, or simply interested in the science of learning, executive functioning sits at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and school culture. It is a topic that has implications far beyond student organization or classroom management, touching on some of the most fundamental questions about how learners become increasingly independent and capable over time.

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Dr. Zach Groshell. Today I’m bringing you an episode from the Direct Instruction Podcast—one that I think anyone interested in instructional design, curriculum development, or evidence-based teaching will find fascinating.

I’m joined by Owen Engelmann of Engelmann-Becker Corporation, the curriculum development organization founded by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley Becker that has spent decades designing and field-testing Direct Instruction programs. Owen has worked extensively in the development and revision of DI materials, carrying forward the engineering tradition behind some of the most thoroughly tested instructional programs ever created.

This episode is an inside look at field testing—the process at the heart of how instructional programs are actually built. Owen walks us through how an initial field-test version is created, why programs are only written a few weeks ahead of the field, and what happens when real students encounter a lesson sequence for the very first time. We get concrete about the revision cycles that shape programs lesson by lesson: who’s in the room, what gets recorded, how student errors are interpreted, and how a single moment of confusion can trigger a rewrite of an example, an exercise, or even an entire sequence.

We also explore the deeper diagnostic challenges behind the process. How do developers distinguish between a flaw in the script and a flaw in delivery? What kinds of student errors signal a local issue versus a deeper structural problem in the program design? And what standards of evidence are strong enough to justify a revision?

Along the way, Owen shares stories from the field—moments where a student’s unexpected response exposed a hidden ambiguity or forced developers to rethink an instructional sequence entirely. Whether or not you have any connection to Direct Instruction, this conversation offers a rare look at what it means to treat teaching as an engineering problem rather than an artistic one. It’s a reminder that effective instruction doesn’t emerge from intuition alone—it emerges from observation, testing, revision, and a willingness to let reality have the final say.

If you’re implementing Direct Instruction—or simply want to learn more about one of the most extensively researched instructional models ever developed—I strongly recommend connecting with NIFDI, the National Institute for Direct Instruction, at www.nifdi.org. They remain the leading source for training, coaching, and implementation support.

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell, and today we are talking about teaching, coaching, and the strange language of modern education.

One phrase that comes up constantly in education is “student-centered learning.” It gets used so often, and so vaguely, that it’s started to mean almost everything and almost nothing at the same time. Usually, it signals a rejection of explicit instruction in favor of discovery, personalization, or loosely defined engagement. But underneath the rhetoric is a more important question: what does it actually mean to center students in the work of learning without abandoning the responsibility to teach well?

So I wanted to sit down with someone who has spent years thinking about that question from inside classrooms, schools, and coaching systems.

AJ Pettway didn’t take a traditional path into education, and part of what makes this conversation interesting is how grounded his perspective is in actual classroom experience across very different contexts. Over the course of his career, AJ has taught and coached in a wide range of school environments, experiences that shaped the way he thinks about learner variability, instructional quality, and what teachers actually need in order to improve.

In this episode, we talk about AJ’s path into teaching and how his thinking about instruction evolved over time. We discuss the reality of learner differences and how schools often misunderstand what effective differentiation actually requires. AJ explains why he has become increasingly critical of the phrase “student-centered learning,” what people usually mean when they say it, and where the idea often breaks down in practice.

We also get into instructional coaching — specifically the fears and challenges that come with moving from the classroom into a leadership role. AJ reflects on his early years as a coach, including the insecurities that came with trying to support teachers while still refining his own understanding of instruction.

Finally, we tackle a question that sits underneath almost every school improvement effort: do school leaders actually need to be instructional experts? AJ makes the case that without a deep understanding of instruction itself, leadership too easily drifts into managing culture, compliance, or systems while the core work of teaching remains untouched.

Along the way, we talk about pedagogy, coaching, professional growth, and the tension between educational slogans and the reality of what it takes to help students learn.

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell, and today we are talking about Montessori.

I’ll admit, I came into this conversation skeptical. Most of what gets sold as “Montessori” today is a watered-down, follow-your-bliss version of what Maria Montessori actually wrote. The popular caricature— that Montessori is a free-for-all where kids drift between activities and nothing systematic ever happens — turns out to be just as wrong. Reading Montessori’s own writing, especially The Discovery of the Child and The Absorbent Mind, and you find a much more rigorous, structured, an determinate method than the caricatures capture.

There are scripted presentations. There’s a sequenced curriculum. There are mastery expectations.

So I wanted to sit down with two people who actually take Montessori seriously as a method and who have thought hard about how it intersects with the stuff we usually talk about on this podcast.

Matt Bateman has been building Montessori programs nation wide for many years. Laura Mazer is a former surgeon turned educator whose work focuses on the integration of Montessori practice with adaptive learning technology and on translating Montessori’s approach into a model that can be rigorously evaluated and scaled.

Together, Matt and Laura run Montessorium, an elementary school model that combines a full Montessori environment with the Timeback adaptive learning platform. My daughter is enrolled at their school, which gives me a unique vantage point: I’m not just talking to them as a podcast host, I’m talking to them as someone preparing for what their model will do to my kid.

In this episode, we discuss what Montessori actually said, as opposed to what people imagine she said. We work through the question of how Montessori is compatible with what cognitive science tells us about how children learn — including the role of explicit instruction.

We then get into how a Montessori environment can be enhanced — and arguably completed — by explicit instruction delivered through adaptive software. The Montessorium model uses a two-hour computer-based learning block built on Engelmann-style mastery principles, with the rest of the day spent in a traditional Montessori environment. Matt and Laura make the case for why this isn’t a compromise but an improvement.

Along the way, we talk about what genuine Montessori looks like in practice, what gets lost when the brand drifts, and what it means to take both Montessori’s genius and the explicit instruction evidence base seriously without letting either tradition off the hook.

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell, and today we are talking about…. PE!

I’ll admit, I’ve often taken a dim view of PE as a subject. At its worst, it’s often just games and activities that don’t appear to build toward much, and that, frankly, could be led by someone without much expertise at all.

So I was genuinely curious to sit down with Ste Robinson.

Ste is a PE teacher and department leader who has been rethinking what physical education can look like when it is treated as a serious curriculum subject rather than just a series of activities. In this episode, we discuss his approach to building a knowledge-rich PE curriculum, how he applies ideas like mastery learning and skill-based grouping, and how he has led his department to think more carefully about progression, instruction, and what it means for students to truly improve.

Along the way, we talk about what it takes to move beyond activity for its own sake and toward a model of PE where students actually master skills over time. We also discuss how to make high-quality PE accessible to the students who need it most.

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect, a show about the teacher-centered and the student-centered, the traditional and the progressive, in education.

My guest today is Jamey Peavler, literacy leader and instructional expert focused on building coherent, science-aligned systems of reading instruction. Jamey has worked extensively with schools and districts to design and implement structured literacy models that move beyond fragmented, exposure-based approaches toward systems that ensure every student masters foundational skills.

In this conversation, we dive into one of the most persistent tensions in education: the difference between giving students exposure to grade-level content and ensuring they truly have access to it. Jamey brings clarity to this distinction through the lens of constrained and unconstrained skills—a framework often discussed in literacy research, where foundational skills like decoding are finite and sequential, while language comprehension and knowledge-building are broader and ongoing.

We explore why many current instructional models unintentionally prioritize exposure over mastery, and what it takes to design systems that guarantee access—ensuring students receive targeted instruction that builds up to them being able to access grade-level content. We also address a common concern: when schools organize instruction to ensure mastery, how is that different from tracking—and what makes it more effective?

Throughout, the conversation stays grounded in a central question: What would it look like to build school systems where access and mastery—not just exposure and overload—is the default for every student?

Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration

I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.