Award winning physics teacher, author Activate/Oxford Revise&more Ballroom dancer. Loves cogsci, joined up curriculum, summaries. Owns It's A Learning Curve LLC
Tucson, AZ
Joined February 2009
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Super excited to announce that I am now a company! My days teaching in a school are at an end.
My new venture is tutoring + providing professional development + outreach in physics and cogsci.
Here's the site - if you find anything amiss let me know! 😊
itsalearningcurve.education/
This.
Are there more Ss with ADHD? Autism?
It's all about what we measure, and how we measure it.
Thanks @thebandb ... great analysis (as always!)
theeconomyofmeaning.com/2026…
I may be wrong (feel free to indicate that!) but I'm beginning to see a correlation between (in education):
-Direct Instruction (DI, Englemann, scripts etc.) is the Answer
and
-AI is the Answer.
Make sense. If you can script it you can put it in an algorithm and optimize it.
🤷
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
There is no bunch of 'neurotypical' people for whom the world is perfectly smooth and nothing goes wrong.
These people do not exist.
To the extent that they have no idea about very hard struggles, there probably are a bunch of people.
We commonly call them "the rich".
Another piece of this puzzle
-Are there actually more children with ADHD and autism?
-Have we become better at recognizing them?
-Has the threshold for a diagnosis changed?
-Or do the demands of school +society cause some children to run into problems more quickly nowadays?
Why are there more diagnoses of ADHD and autism now? theeconomyofmeaning.com/2026… ICYMI
A blast from the past and my O level Computing course... all on tape. Our computer dating program took 14 hours to run.
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
Hard to imagine a better podcast than Anna Stokke interviewing Hector Ruiz Martin. Super Bowl good! They ought to book Taylor Swift to do a halftime show!
❓ Why do students forget what they learn, and struggle to apply it in new situations?
On October 30, I am joined by researcher and author Héctor Ruiz Martín to talk about his book How We Learn. We discuss what cognitive science tells us about memory, learning, effective teaching.
🎙️Don't miss the next episode of Chalk & Talk!
@hruizmartin
#ChalkandTalk #ScienceOfLearning #EducationResearch #Teaching
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
School reform in England that produced significant improvements in Ss achievement were built on knowledge-rich curricula AND external exam/accountability AND direct instruction.
Not DI/scripted + tech enabled.
It's not criticising DI, just saying it's not the only option.
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
I have been told in the past to not use the word academic when talking about curriculum. Apparently it might 'put parents off'. I think what it revealed was an inverse snobbery and some very worrying attitudes towards parents.
Being aware of code switching and when to does matter
I remember this, and @olicav's impassioned discussions about the importance of transience, and how we should think more about THAT.
I didn't really get it then to the extent that I do now, thank you. Critically important.
Wow. 6 years ago we were in lockdown and I was getting my kiddos to put force arrows on things.
My example on the left. one of many furry friends of the kiddos on the right.
Great stuff.
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
“The teacher following Engelmann’s DI is essentially a deliverer of instruction prepared elsewhere.
The teacher following Rosenshine’s principles is a professional shaping what happens in their own lessons.”
I feel that most of things I'm posting atm rely on know the difference between DI (Direct Instruction) and di (direct instruction).
This is really helpful, because DI is NOT the only alternative with issues about intstruction:
danielmuijs.substack.com/p/d…
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
"Students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans and the desire for an antidote to The Machine.
“A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience,” said a government and neuroscience major “The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI.”
"At the core of the humanities is, of course, humanity...."
wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl…
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
Somehow we've reached a point in education where:
- teaching kids explicitly is controversial
- academic rigour is treated as a threat to student wellbeing
- memorizing math facts is discouraged or considered unnecessary
- practice is dismissed as "drill and kill"
Low expectations are not kindness, and nothing hurts someone's confidence more than falling further behind every year.
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
'All can learn' isn't only in DI. It's a principle of di (direct instruction) also.
Working brilliantly well here, and great to see it in a subject that isn't math(s) or reading.
School reform in England that produced significant improvements in Ss achievement were built on knowledge-rich curricula AND external exam/accountability AND direct instruction.
Not DI/scripted + tech enabled.
It's not criticising DI, just saying it's not the only option.
Helen Reynolds MBE retweeted
Si vamos a hablar de profecías, conviene tener en cuenta que “donde hay predicciones, hay estafadores, poder y abuso de poder” volcanicas.com/detras-de-las…
The learning styles myth may not just be a mistaken neutral belief... it may have consequences.
nature.com/articles/s41539-0…
Element interactivity is the BIGGEST cognitive science lens through which to view planning.
EXCELLENT blog on the subject here, thanks @AmmarMerhbi
ammaramerhbi.substack.com/p/…
