This interviews two students in my essential learning theories class about their perspectives as teachers.

This is an interview with YouTuber Sven Johnson about learning, learning theories, and life as a youtuber.

As you read this page your eyes do not move from left to right, letter-to-letter, word-to-word in a straight, steady line. Your brain simply gives the impression that they do. Eye movement research shows that your eyes move unevenly across the page, going back occasionally, skipping some words, and fixating on others. The small, rapid, jerky movements that your eyes make are called saccades. Where your eyes stop is called a fixation. A regression is when your eye goes back to check on a word.

While this concept of fidelity may be appropriate for experimental research where control and treatment groups need to follow strict parameters in order to isolate a variable; it is neither effective nor appropriate when educating real students in the uncontrolled confines of the real world. , it would be a form of educational malpractice to insist that teachers follow a recipe with “fidelity”. In fact, this would prevent them from being able to adequately meet the needs of their students.

Parents are wondering how to handle reading at home during the COVID-19 or during the summer months. This podcast offers some simple tips.

Learning theories are the basis for all that is. This is an interview with one of the outstanding students in my class, Tyler Danielson.

Large unit phonics is based on the brain’s natural inclination to notice patterns and complete configurations based on partial data. When we look at words on the page, we tend to notice letter patterns much more so than individual letters. This podcast describes two activities: shared reading for large unit phonics and word sorts.

There are three types of phonics instruction: synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, and large unit phonics. In a meaning-based approach to word work, they should all be included.

This podcast described scaffolded oral reading (ScORe) and provided some tips for using the language experience approach.

The language experience approach, or language experience activity, is a powerful strategy to use with struggling or beginning readers. Here readers practice reading using words and concepts within their experience.