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I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful.
Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links.
This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts.
Here are this week’s sentences:
The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit—after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?
Evidence-informed should not be reduced to evidence-dictated.
Across four studies, participants with stronger “dangerous world beliefs” overestimated the likelihood of harmful events, and viewed unfamiliar faces as more threatening and less trustworthy.
But in a world where it is often hard to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else, the challenge of explaining the world to a 10-year-old, or designing a jar that an octogenarian can open, is sometimes just a prompt to do a better job of what we were trying to do in the first place.
This means, in part, that the pushback on ed-tech is framed in terms of “bans” — that is, in terms of an absence or a lack — rather than as an opportunity to do something else with the limited amount of time that one has in a class, in a day, in a week, in an academic year. There’s always an opportunity cost in any curricular or instructional decision; educators know that. But ed-tech proponents make it sound as though the cost of not using technology means that there is somehow nothing in its place. See The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech
Research has found that a willingness to ask for help is crucial to achievement.
“The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.”
Studies simplify reality; classrooms are messy and complex. Teachers shouldn’t just follow research like a recipe—it should sharpen their judgment, not replace it. See The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven” and The Best Resources For Understanding How To Interpret Education Research
Today, Aroneanu said, movements are built not necessarily on what people think, but instead on what they feel.
Researchers found that simply repeating a decision can reshape what we prefer, causing familiar choices to feel better than alternatives.
When people let a chatbot do their writing—even if they’re guiding and carefully reviewing its work—they might not realize that it’s doing some of their thinking too
A few years ago, I edited an essay by the children’s-book author Katherine Marsh that identified one reason young kids were less motivated to read: Schools often push them toward a “hyperfocus on analysis” and give precedence to individual paragraphs and sentences rather than entire narratives. But, Marsh argues, “the best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story.” And a great way to get a kid interested in a story is by reading it aloud to them.
First teachers were going to make students transgender, and now they’re turning them into robots
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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 21, 2026 at 5:44 PM
I am SO tired of reading articles like these from professors who, in many cases, might just be too lazy to change how they teach their classes &, instead, want to throw up their hands & complain about the sky falling ——A Society of Cheats www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 30, 2026 at 9:06 AM
Things #Teachers don’t talk about: Teacher input is often requested after a decision has already been made. The meeting is not about choosing a solution. It is about getting teachers to accept it.
— Ken | The Real Marvel Teacher (@MarvelTeacher2) August 27, 2026
I appreciate that Dolly Parton played no part in “dress respectability” and, by her own account, modeled her aesthetic after a town “tramp,” who she thought was beautiful. She separated aesthetics from character and understood “classiness” to be about how you treat people.
— derek guy (@dieworkwear) August 26, 2026
these people threw tantrums about remote learning for years just to turn around & do this
— andrea (@teachbk) August 23, 2026