reminding you that, while we didn't cover "how do i work through a coup" in the faculty development workshop (FWIW my answer is "don't", seek breath and togetherness instead), we DO have the gift of trauma-informed pedagogy. here are a few links for the coming days/weeks/months:

reading or listening to Mays Imad's work (@lrningsanctuary) always helps me so much and is a great place to start. this interview with @Bali_Maha is medicine.

"Trauma-informed Pedagogy and How is Your Heart?": https://t.co/dPAqeV9B3w
https://t.co/oaEvSLYE6b

"Hope can be a passive gesture: “let’s hope it all turns out OK.” But hope can also be active, as a resistive act of defiance, self-empowerment & enduring resilience even in the face of uncertainty."
here's a slightly different framing from @bethmcmurtrie , one that I think has the very, very useful addition of "don't take things personally". we're all whole humans. what your students are doing (or not doing) right now is often very little about you. https://t.co/TQrY6tAxKH
if a video (or just its audio) is more your speed today, here's a fantastic UC Berkeley program that critically centers racial trauma, and how we can teach in the context of racial violence (of which our classrooms are a part):

https://t.co/dsDsBteIaS
and here's @karenraycosta (another key follow!) on the #TeaforTeaching podcast interviewed by @john_kane_osw and Rebecca Mushtare about trauma-informed teaching. listen while you make lunch or while you go for a walk this afternoon:

https://t.co/Sllyc5meRf
the @WabashTeaches podcast is a balm for the teaching and learning soul. today i needed Nancy Lynne Westfield talking with Amy Oden about breath and breathing in the classroom.

https://t.co/NeaDRH1aKo
"The physical act of breathing makes a big difference in our ability to think...so where do we have room to breathe? Where do we create that? Not just expect people to do that on their own time, but actually see it as a value,"

Breathe with your students. It is so powerful.
White people, we also *need* this episode on white rage with Melanie Harris & @drjenharvey. American politics is white rage. Yesterday was a death cry emanating from the very heart of this country. How do we teach given that?

Make time to listen:

https://t.co/aMs0tKWCNF
No matter what, I encourage you to be human w/ your students & allow them the same dignity in return. Help them breathe. Stretch together. It takes 5 min & is more important than your content. Tell them this is hard but that you have hope, and then cultivate that hope with them.

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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