Daniel A Bruno

Tweeting on issues tied to Secondary Education and the Teaching of English

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Having 'gritty' peers in high school associated with increased adult earning. https://t.co/ME65jwktiV

[Daniel A Bruno @HSMatters]

https://t.co/6Szmn6kpga

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

All of the research actually finds precisely the opposite

Direct instruction is wildly effective

Discovery learning is an abject failure

Yet like learning styles and big foot, the myth persists

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Kim Kardashian said the moon landing was fake. Maybe your students should know that. https://t.co/uE1a8xAKcB

[Robert Pondiscio @rpondiscio]

A recent essay in @educationweek urged teachers to "stop assigning boring books in English class." On my Substack @AnnikaMHern responds that it's our job to expose students to worthwhile books that they wouldn’t pick up otherwise.

https://t.co/qG3OvddI7w

[dahlia kurtz ✡︎ דליה קורץ @DahliaKurtz]

This is one of the most beautiful moments you will ever witness.

Sir Nicholas Winton helped 669 children — most of them Jewish — escape the Holocaust.

His humanitarian accomplishments would remain unknown and unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years.

Then in 1988 he was invited to the BBC TV show That's Life!.

There he sat — unknowingly — as part of the studio audience, surrounded by the children he had rescued. They were now adults.

Then they surprised him with one of the greatest gifts of all time. Their presence.

They were there, all alive — because of him.

Not only was he reunited with dozens of children he had saved, but he was also introduced to many of their children and grandchildren.

Please remember Sir Nicholas Winton, for his humanitarian operation known as the Czech Kindertransport.

Sir Nicholas George Winton, a British stockbroker, and a gift to this planet, left us on July 1, 2015, at the age of 106.

May his memory forever be a blessing and inspiration to all.

Please share. International Holocaust Day cannot be forgotten. But many are working to make that happen.🕯️♥️

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

What? Why use education as a proxy for class when education so obviously has content knowledge relevant to the outcome measure? This is like examining the effect of socio-economic status on success in the military, and then using "parental military service" as a proxy for SES

[Liz Stepan @LizStepan]

Day 19 in my hs class of struggling readers: Executive function is what is holding these students back more than their reading skills.
They forget their pencils. The weekly packet comes out of their backpack folded up like an accordion - if they even have it. You can hear the quick vibrations of their phones dinging in their pockets.
They can't break down assignments into steps, they lose their attention to anything going on around them, and they can't stay focused on an activity for longer than a few minutes.
These are the consequences of throwing kids on Chromebooks and allowing them to redo assignments for better grades. They are bored, their brains aren't trained to learn or enjoy learning. They just coast through the day, still able to text their buddies, and just bide their time til the next school break.

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

New study on cognitive load shows it's not a single, stable thing that students carry through a lesson. It rises, falls, peaks, and interacts with motivation.
To truly diagnose learning bottlenecks,teachers should check for understanding and difficulty during the specific moments when new or complex content is introduced.
This *might* mean exit tickets are an innacurate measure: students rewrite the history of the lesson based on the peak intensity or the ending, often ignoring the struggle in the middle.
Essentially, the mean value of cognitive load across a task is a poor representation of the learner's actual experience.
https://t.co/FQ2Br7icGq

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

New meta-analysis concludes that prequestions confer an advantage to content relevant to the prequestions, but the advantage does not bleed over to other content. https://t.co/zMuJxQdQZ4

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

The 21st century skills movement has overpromised and underdelivered because it ignores the domain specificity of expertise. Critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration are not transferable generic capacities that can be taught in the abstract.
Really glad to see this point being made about generic skills in a new review of curricula in 14 school systems: https://t.co/QkTQBmFBrv

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Actually I think English teachers like and understand Shakespeare...it's the rest of us who don't, which is an excuse to suggest you follow @shakespearemadeclear on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Wonderful vids!

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Why do ppl share fake news? "While perceived message truth was the main driver of persuasion, message transmission was primarily driven by positive emotion and social engagement, indicating that social connection is prioritized during information sharing." https://t.co/7672XgcnAT

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

This is so important

[Dylan Wiliam @dylanwiliam]

Just re-read @dtwillingham's "When can you trust the experts?" I dipped into it while planning a session at the @learningandtheb conference in November, but it's so good, I read the whole thing again: authoritative, and a delight to read. It really deserves to be better known!

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

I've seen Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" prominently displayed in two bookstores in the last week. So I'm posting Sam Wineburg's critique of the book in Slate from 2018. https://t.co/9n1fARVQtB

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

"Our results suggest that word reading and spelling are one and the same, almost, but that spoken vocabulary knowledge is more closely related to reading than to spelling." Open article from the great Rebecca Treiman and colleagues. https://t.co/8oQPZ7SEry

[Daniel A Bruno @HSMatters]

I'm participating in Bike MS: Bike to the Bay (Delaware) 2025 to raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The Society is the best investment to solve the challenges of MS and find a cure. Cheer me on — donate today! https://t.co/IngQL8Kpun via @DonorDrive

[Daniel Willingham @DTWillingham]

Always loved the phrase "the windy side of care" but never knew just what Shakespeare meant by it. So I asked ChatGPT, which put the words in the mouth of the wrong character ("It's classic Benedick"), in a quotation that doesn't appear in the play. So I guess I still don't know.