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stevechiger.bsky.social
Director of Literacy, Uncommon Schools; Co-Author, Love & Literacy and Gram & Gran Save the Summer; unrepentant nerd: loves ELA, cog sci, research, media lit, pedagogy, medieval marginalia; he/him stevechiger.com
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🧵How much does prior knowledge really matter for learning? A new study challenges one of the most foundational ideas in education: that the more you know, the more you can know. The results are pretty shocking. Here's why it really surprised me ⬇️

Attention is often referred to as the gateway to cognition. Securing attention should be a major focus! But you also have to give students something to attend to. Faultless communications are also necessary. Registration is open for this free webinar! educationrickshaw.com/2025/05/19/h...

At the very least, English teachers made our mark on the writers at The Onion. 😂

Love this! Lateral reading and SIFT are critical skills. Our generation may be catching up now, but we owe it to our kids to build this into the K12 experience.

Hello friends! You're keen to spend a week this summer studying memory, attention, and learning? I've got just the workshop for you... We'll be in Boston this July for our 7th summer; I hope you'll join us. Reach out if you have any questions. Cheers

SUPER proud of my partner Charell Star for publishing her memoir today! It’s one thing to write about what you know, but it’s another to write about what you’ve experienced. Powerful, moving, and full of lessons in joy & resilience to live by. a.co/d/dZT8OLf

This is precisely why @hibitus-habitus.bsky.social and I wrote Gram and Gran Save the Summer. Kids need to develop skills in #medialiteracy from a young age. (Plus, who doesn’t love solve-it-yourself mysteries?)

Even though my funding was cut, I’m still committed to helping people build media & digital literacy skills. I’ll keep sharing research summaries, practical tools, and continue my own work—however I can. If you're interested in my work, follow along via my newsletter: matthewfacciani.substack.com

Probably the most first important step in driving change and adopting the science of learning is the challenge of creating a shared understanding of how learning happens within a school community. 1/4

Join me for a free webinar next week on using writing instruction to boost reading comprehension--and learning in general. Sponsored by The Writing Revolution. For more info and to register, click here: bit.ly/3G6n9P5

I am SO excited to watch this! What a get!

Happy 1-year book birthday to Gram & Gran! Curious about a book of solve-it-yourself #medialiteracy mysteries for kids ages 8-12? Have I got one for you! Written by educators, endorsed by experts, we hope you’ll check us out! @teachergoals.bsky.social #tlsky #edusky www.amazon.com/Gram-Gran-Sa...

Had such a blast at #rEDNYC today. Grateful to be a part of this day: as a speaker, an attendee, and most importantly as part of a community dedicated to the deep moral charge to do our best for kids. Some materials from my talk: stevechiger.com/researched/

Jill Barshay reports: New study by Harvard's Philip Capin finds evidence-based reading comprehension methods rarely used in classrooms, despite decades of research showing their effectiveness. hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

In which @carlhendrick.substack.com takes aim at the forgetting curve and how it might lead to reductive understandings of retrieval and learning. (Either you just read that and kept scrolling or you just read that and were like “heck yeah!” 😎) It’s a great post.

Teacher training programs are changing, moving towards a model based in evidence that looks more like medical residency. Better preparation helps students but also helps teachers—giving them more confidence and making it more likely they'll stick w/teaching. www.the74million.org/article/trai...

I think David Didau is spot on here. The curse of knowledge may mean that it’s harder for experts to understand how novices learn, but the ironic solution is more knowledge (content+pedagogy), not less.

Terrific post — and with a cliffhanger ending! I’ve been highly influenced by Tim Shanahan over the years. He was offering research-driven takes before it was cool. (J/K it was always cool.)

An interesting piece on long-tail data searches (for lit reviews) and AI. File under: No, it’s not time to use AI as your search engine.

Here's the rub: weak strategy instruction, or disconnected knowledge work, aren't going to move the needle on reading comprehension. Our approach needs to be text-based and comprehensive, and that's really hard! Shout out to all everyone trying to bridge this gap.

Fascinating research profile from Jared Cooney Horvath: multitasking while reading at home correlates with comprehension challenges at school. Reminds me of some of the arguments in Maryanne Wolf’s terrific Reader, Come Home. youtu.be/T-awpwNL5Kk?...

Here’s what a researchED conference feels like — coming from an expert! (Those of you here in the US, we have one occurring in NYC later this month. Consider attending—they are truly great days!)

ICYMI — a strategy for continuing to teach novels. If you are sad that teaching books has come under question, join me in advocating that we hold onto them in our curricula! #tlsky #edusky #booksky hechingerreport.org/teacher-voic...

Had a blast talking to folks at @researchedbrum.bsky.social about student discourse (and how it’s not the same as conversation). A great, engaged group who make me so proud to play a tiny part in their success story! #rEDBRUM

Terrific piece on adaptive teaching from Jade Pearce and the good folks at @innerdrive.bsky.social. Using what we know about learning, we can make smart, helpful adjustments to lessons so they are responsive to our kids. www.innerdrive.co.uk/blog/adaptiv...

I’d never have guessed reading novels in English class would be position with even a whiff of debate, but here we are! A colleague and my piece in today’s @hechingerreport.org. #edusky #tlsky

Great piece by @hollykorbey.bsky.social on working memory, definitely on my list of top 5 things teachers should know. www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

Take note: turns out that correcting people on mistaken ideas about learning doesn’t appear to work. But an asset-based approach (or at least a less confrontational one) just might! www.nctq.org/blog/How-to-...

I’d never have guessed reading novels in English class would be position with even a whiff of debate, but here we are! A colleague and my piece in today’s @hechingerreport.org. #edusky #tlsky

A new report finds 40% of kids under 2 have their own tablet. By 8, about 1 in 4 have a smartphone. This is why media literacy education isn’t a triviality that can wait until HS. www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/defaul...

👇🏼Terrific post on interleaving & a perfect example of why we need to be thoughtful about not reducing research findings too much. It’s helpful when students have foundations & are trying to distinguish similar concepts. That’s a specific use case. open.substack.com/pub/carlhend...

Slowing down to be thoughtful about AI adoption isn’t abdicating our responsibility to kids. It’s the very definition of courage and care. Kids — especially our youngest kids — deserve an approach that centers their welfare before anything else. Faith has a thoughtful take. 👇🏼

This feels like a slam dunk sign-up. If you know Carl’s work, you know why. If not, here’s your chance!

Great thread below on PD! Where I work, we use the framework see it-name it-do it to structure PD. (Peps also has a terrific framework I like a lot.) Bottom line: we can’t get better at what we haven’t practiced and we can’t practice what we don’t understand.

It was a pleasure to join! I love taking shop. 🤓

I live seeing so many local libraries running media literacy trainings for adults. Hoping to start seeing more programming geared at kids, too! As someone who attended computer camp as a kid (and ran a journalism camp as an adult), I could totally imagine some fun summer programming. #tlsky

Great post. Is fluency work helpful in English class? Yes. Are strategies like round-robin or popcorn reading helpful? Nope. As Alex explains, there are better approaches.

It feels to me like a high-quality, knowledge building curriculum serves the goals of media literacy in similar ways to literacy in general. The analytical skills we want kids to have get built by knowing enough about the world to ask questions when people make claims about it.

Love this piece in USA Today: prepping K12 students to understand newsfeed bias is crucial & under-addressed. We have a full chapter on it in Gram & Gran—about a screwball amusement park that only has ring toss booths! (gramandgran.com if you’re curious about teaching media literacy to kids) #tlsky