Tra Hall

#txed co-founder

[Branching Minds — Your MTSS Partner @BranchingMinds]

Two literacy myths worth busting...

🔻See what changes when you have a connected system.
https://t.co/3bSgXVg4Js

#Literacy #MTSS #K12 #StudentSupport #Reading

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

@janyne_pet90786 @elonmusk @grok show the research tbat proves this nonsense about learning styles isn’t research based

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

@eduleadership 100% agree! They took down Lucy Calkins who has many research based and valid reading theories. Now they try to take each other out!

[Emily Hanford @ehanford]

Excellent piece by @LianaLoewus. Highly recommend for teachers and everyone interested in the science of reading. https://t.co/v9gps8ovmn

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A community college professor taught the same study skills lecture for 30 years, and the video quietly became one of the most watched educational recordings on the internet.

His name is Marty Lobdell. He spent his career as a psychology professor watching students fail not because they were lazy, but because nobody had ever taught them how their brain actually works under the pressure of learning something hard.

The lecture is called "Study Less Study Smart." Over 10 million views. Passed around in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and university study groups for over a decade. And the core insight buried inside it has been sitting in cognitive psychology research for years, waiting for someone to explain it in plain language.

Here is the framework that completely changed how I think about effort.

Your brain does not sustain focus the way you think it does. Studies tracking real students found that the average learner hits a wall somewhere between 25 and 30 minutes.

After that, efficiency doesn't just decline. It collapses. You're still sitting at your desk, still looking at the page, but almost nothing is going in.

Lobdell illustrated this with a student he knew personally. She set a goal of studying 6 hours a night, 5 nights a week, to pull herself out of academic probation. Thirty hours of studying per week. She failed every single class that quarter.

She wasn't failing because she lacked effort. She was failing because she had confused time spent near books with time spent actually learning. The 25-minute crash hit her at 6:30pm every night. She spent the next five and a half hours sitting in the wreckage of her own focus and calling it studying.

The fix sounds almost too simple. The moment you feel the slide, stop. Take five minutes. Do something that actually gives you a small reward. Then go back. That five-minute reset returns you to near full efficiency. Across a six-hour window, the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between thirty minutes of real learning and five and a half hours of it.

The second thing he taught destroyed something I had believed about how memory actually works.

Highlighting feels productive. Going back over your notes and recognizing everything feels like knowing. But recognition and recollection are two completely different cognitive processes, and your brain is very good at making you confuse them.

You can see something you've read before and feel completely certain you understand it, even when you couldn't reconstruct a single sentence from memory if the page were blank.

He proved this live in the room. He read 13 random letters to his audience. Almost nobody could recall them. Then he rearranged the same 13 letters into two words: Happy Thursday. The whole room got all 13 without effort.

Same letters. Same count. The only thing that changed was meaning.

The brain stores meaning. Not repetition. The moment new information connects to something you already understand, the retention changes entirely.

This is what the cognitive psychology literature calls elaborative encoding, and it is the mechanism underneath every effective study technique.

The third principle was the one that hit me hardest, and the one almost nobody applies.

Lobdell cited research showing that 80 percent of your study time should be spent in active recitation, not passive reading. Close the material. Say it back in your own words.

Teach it to someone else, or to an empty chair if no one is around. The struggle of retrieval is where the actual learning happens. Reading your notes again is watching someone else do the work.

His parting line has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about learning.

He told the room that if what he shared didn't change their behavior, they hadn't actually learned it. It would just live in their heads as something they had heard once and felt good about.

He was right. And most people leave every lecture exactly like that.

The students who remember everything aren't putting in more hours.

They stopped confusing the feeling of studying with the fact of it.

[Cary Kelly @CaryKelly11]

According to floridafunctionalrn, the following conditions are medical BS for:

"We don't know what's wrong with you."

IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)

Fibromyalgia

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Why is that and what's the solution?

I believe it's because...

Conventional medicine is great at telling us what is happening.

Functional medicine is great at telling us why it's happening.

Labels tell us which shit creek we are in.

Solutions give us a map and a paddle.

Seek functional medicine.

[Dylan Wiliam @dylanwiliam]

If you teach anyone at all, and you don't know about @helenrey's CogSci book summaries, you are missing out. It's a wonderful resource summarizing the most important books on cognitive science: https://t.co/TB0bPExfck

[Andrew Panella @Longevity_EDU]

Nattokinase is the most underrated heart supplement on the planet.

A new study of 1,062 people just showed it shrank arterial plaque by 36% in one year.

It lowers blood pressure, your risk of strokes and even protects your brain.

Here's everything you need to know about it:🧵

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

This - so much this!

[Troy Mooney @TroyMooney]

Some things I learned visiting folks turning their campuses around:

The focus is not on every individual teacher being able to develop their own separate amazing lesson plans. Instead it is on making sure that teachers meet and are prepared for each day, have some exemplars, and know what questions to ask to guide learning.

They also have to know what students need to do each day to demonstrate they learned.

And there is a plan for immediate same day intervention for those who can not demonstrate mastery

We roughly implemented some of this middle of last year and turned a campus. with 2 years of 59 into a 71.

The agreement on the daily demonstration of learning and the immediate same day intervention (as opposed to delayed) were two big levers

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

Most curriculum experts like to say they believe in fluency but interleaving is not what their products do. Rather, they have scope and sequences aligned over grades. This is not interleaving to ensure fluency, simply a progression of skills. Interleaving is the Gold! #nifdi

[Brendan Lee @learnwithmrlee]

Ever had a student ace a test on Friday and forget everything by Monday?

In this clip @KimberlyBerens5 explains exactly why that happens: we are measuring the wrong thing.

Accuracy is a false ceiling. If we want learning to actually stick we need to focus on true fluency. Watch the clip to hear why fluency is the only functional measure of mastery and how it leads to retention, application and endurance.

Catch our full chat on the latest episode of Knowledge for Teachers! 🎧👇
https://t.co/OwwEaVVyL8

[Justin Baeder, PhD @eduleadership]

It’s time to go back to paper and pencil standardized testing, so the cart doesn’t drag the horse. Students learn better and test better on paper, period. #education #teachersoftiktok #edleadership #principalsoftiktok #testing

[Jamie Clark @XpatEducator]

⚠️ POOR PROXIES FOR LEARNING! A new 6-part ⚗️DistillED series kicks off this week.

Based on Professor Rob Coe's research, this series examines the classroom signals that look like evidence of learning — but don't guarantee it: busy students, engaged students, calm rooms, feedback given, a few hands up with the right answer.

📘 To go alongside the series I've put together this NEW Poor Proxies for Learning Playbook — a printed booklet bringing all six chapters together in one place.

Six proxies. Six editions. Subscribe for free to stay updated:

👉 https://t.co/YznfhHQZGe

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

Learning styles not proven by research!

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

The education system has been lying to you since second grade.

You think you're a visual learner? Or a hands-on learner?

You're not.

"Learning styles" are a myth.

[Sean Morrisey @smorrisey]

This is a must read. It should be placed in every educators school mailbox tomorrow morning. I am honored to be included.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

"She ate lunch alone for 730 days straight. What this 16-year-old built from that pain now protects millions of kids worldwide.

Seventh grade. Natalie Hampton carried her tray through a packed cafeteria and felt it — that specific, suffocating dread of not knowing where to go.

She'd already learned what happened when you approached the wrong table. The silence. The turned backs. The whispered laughter that followed you all the way to the empty table by the wall.

The one everyone could see.
The one that said: nobody wants her.

For two full years — 730 consecutive lunches — that table was hers. Alone.

The bullying went further than whispers. She was shoved into lockers. Four physical attacks in two weeks. She came home with scratches and bruises. When she finally reported it, school administrators sent her to counseling — to find out what she was doing wrong.

The isolation grew so heavy she was hospitalized for anxiety.

Then ninth grade came. A new school. And almost overnight — everything changed. Students welcomed her. She made friends within weeks. She finally knew what safe felt like.

But she couldn't stop thinking about the kids still sitting at the wall table. Right now. Today.

She remembered what she'd needed most during all those lunches. Not a teacher. Not a pamphlet. Just one person saying: "You can sit with us."

So at 16 — with zero coding experience and "a lot of enthusiasm," as she put it — Natalie built exactly that.

She called it Sit With Us.

The idea was simple and genius: students sign up as "ambassadors," keeping their table open. Other kids privately browse available tables on their phones before ever walking into the cafeteria — and show up knowing they're already welcome.

No public rejection. No moment of judgment. Just a guaranteed seat.

Within 7 days of launching: 10,000 downloads.

Then the world found her. NPR. The Washington Post. CBS News. Messages from Morocco, Australia, the Philippines, France — kids who'd been eating alone for years, finally finding a place to belong.

Sit With Us now operates in 30 countries.

"Even if it helps one person," Natalie said quietly, "it was worth building."

She turned 730 lunches of loneliness into a lifeline for millions.

That's not just survival. That's transformation."

* Kindly Therapy

[Zach Groshell @MrZachG]

We need instructional design - no, instructional engineering - now more than ever https://t.co/fFguXlYYG9

[Tra Hall @tra_hall]

The importance of clearing Allostatic load throughout the day. The work habits of administrators and teachers are destroying their health.

[Rian Doris @RianSweetDoris]

https://t.co/bvrjupE93Q

[🇺🇸Hot Pepper @Hot_Pepper76]

So Tim Conway's pretending to be a cop. Then real cops show up and think he's a mental case! He has to tell them, "No, I'm just pretending… and I'm Tim Conway."�

[Art of Life 🦋 @Art0fLife_]

He literally teaches you how to efficiently work for hours without burning out.