The Insurgents

How a small but growing group of teachers is bringing learning research to classrooms

Thanks for joining The Bell Ringer, my coverage of the science of learning and the national movement of the same name. Today’s first story concerns a growing group of educators that didn’t learn about the scientific evidence behind teaching and learning in their teacher training—they learned it from their own curiosity, and sometimes from other teachers on social media like X (Twitter). If you want access to all of my “how to understand” journalism, consider becoming a paying subscriber. Enjoy! 

High school AP psychology teacher Blake Harvard was scrolling through X (formerly Twitter) one evening seven years ago when something called ‘The Learning Scientists’ popped into his feed. He clicked and found a story about strategies for effective learning written by scientists, each one tested by decades of cognitive research. The article explained how to increase learning using techniques like spacing, interleaving and retrieval practice. 

At the time, Harvard had been teaching for a decade. His college training hadn’t covered anything he was reading, and neither did his professional development. This article was distinctly different: straightforward overviews on topics like how to space out information for students, or how and when to administer short quizzes to help students retain what they learned. He could apply it directly to working with students. 

The research-based practices he found online “just made so much sense,” he said.  

Buoyed by new knowledge, Harvard embarked on a bit of a quest to find out more of what he was missing about how students learn, and how to teach. He got comfortable with Google Scholar, staying up late reading research papers on how memory works or how much information the brain can handle at a time, then tweaking how he was teaching. He soon found a group of teachers on Twitter who were also obsessed with improving their practice through research. Though there was no official group or #hashtag to unite them, they all seemed to have one thing in common—they were one of a handful or often the only teacher in their buildings who had an interest in research on learning. They became a sort of rebel group threaded together across the nation through the internet, often going against the grain of what most schools were doing. 

Though difficult to measure, this group of teachers, once small, is now growing, adding teachers and principals, and in a few cases entire districts, to their ranks. Buoyed by recent media attention to the scientific research on reading, they have banded together to share and spread ideas based in research. They’re using online methods—social media, blogs, Substacks and podcasts—like an educator Bat-Signal, getting the word out to other teachers about the science of learning. 

The grassroots group of teachers is looking to carefully, respectfully disrupt the forces keeping teachers and many Americans in the dark about how children learn.

Learning on their own

The reasons why so many teachers may not know founding principles about how the brain learns vary widely. But teacher education and American ideas of how learning happens play big roles. 

In talking with teachers over the years in my reporting, one thing comes up again and again: many teachers head into classrooms with an understanding of different learning ideologies from educational philosophers like John Dewey or Paulo Freire, but possess little knowledge of specific information on how the brain learns to read, how to build math skill or retain information.  

Cognitive scientist and author Daniel Willingham described talking to a convention center full of four hundred teachers in Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap. He led with the assumption that teachers already knew the basics of “how attention works, how working memory can get overloaded, how the mind interprets written and spoken text.” But he was wrong. When his talk ended, teachers approached him to say how much they learned.

“Everything I said was surprising and novel to the teachers,” Willingham told Wexler. 

In my reporting on reading, I’ve interviewed many teachers charged with teaching young readers who didn’t know how the brain learns to read, or how to help students who were struggling readers. Like Martha Youman, who told me how she used “seat work” like coloring pages for her second grade students who struggled with reading because she wanted to help them, but didn’t know how. “I had a master’s in teaching, and didn’t know how to deal with these students,” she told me. 

Once teachers get into classrooms, they are often surrounded by widespread ideas about learning that aren’t necessarily supported by scientific evidence—ideas like students retain information longer if they discover it on their own; kids are so different it’s impossible to teach them all equally; or teachers shouldn’t be guiding the learning but letting kids take the lead. 

These ideas are often promoted by big-name education “gurus” or popular TED talks that play into American cultural attitudes about learning. Americans are particularly wedded to the idea that geniuses are born, not made through (often challenging) classroom instruction. Romantic, child-centered philosophies like Montessori and Waldorf often get twisted into a belief that children should be free to learn in ways that suit them, or they won’t become critical thinkers or creative adults. 

The teachers I spoke with spend a lot of time trying to combat those myths, especially online. Within school buildings, they often walk a fine line: they want other teachers to know about learning research, but don’t want to get tuned out. Teaching is already hard enough, many say, and educators are constantly presented with the “next new thing” that’s going to change everything. (Common Core, education technology, “critical thinking,” social-emotional learning—you get the idea.) Most are rightfully exhausted and skeptical.

A recent Australian study confirms their concern. In focus groups and interviews, researchers found that most teachers believe they are implementing research-backed practices, even when the majority of those practices were derived from observational studies, not research evidence, and “change fatigue” was a barrier to implementing research-based practices.

Led by research, teachers take on classroom practice

While the science of reading movement has made significant headway over the last couple of years—37 states have enacted some kind of legislation to train teachers and improve elementary reading practices—older grades teachers haven’t experienced the same shift. Many teachers I talked with are middle and high school teachers concerned with more general science of learning ideas, like how memory and attention work, and how students can retain the most content—and they’re often working alone, or maybe with one other teacher, to implement what they’ve learned. 

Middle and high school English teacher and author Eric Kalenze was an early adopter in the 2000s, calling books like Diane Ravitch’s Left Back and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy “gateway drugs” to the science of learning. But he was often swimming against the tide. “My instruction started to take a whole different turn, but I had to do all the homework,” he said. “That was difficult because I had none of the materials, there was no manual of how to do it.” 

Zach Groshell, a Seattle-area middle school instructional coach, has a large social media following and produces a popular blog and two podcasts, all focused on explaining and dissecting the tenets of the science of learning. Teachers from around the world engage with his content online—a recent podcast on direct instruction, he said, got 10,000 listeners. Yet Groshell said most teachers inside his school have “no idea” what he works on outside of school.

Groshell chooses to show educators the principles he’s podcasting about teacher-to-teacher. As a coach, Groshell often “takes what teachers are already doing and say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s a principle here from cognitive science you’re harnessing right now.’” 

Former Spanish teacher Amy Pento first got hooked on the science of learning from the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column by Daniel Willingham in American Educator magazine. Now an instructional specialist, she provides teachers with information like research on how classroom seating arrangements affect learning. 

Teachers who gained knowledge of the science of learning, even when they have done most of the learning on their own, say it has considerably improved their teaching practice, and parents and students notice the difference. 

Nova Scotia middle school teacher Eric Proctor began learning about the science of learning more than a dozen years ago, and says it has transformed how he teaches. His students consistently perform better than their peers, Proctor said, and believes it’s because he’s following the best practices backed by learning research, like simply making sure it’s easy to pay attention to what he’s teaching.

“It is considerably easier to pay attention in a science-of-learning-informed classroom because extraneous stimuli are limited/removed,” Proctor told me in an email. “Students know what to expect based on well-established and consistent routines. This is particularly supportive for students with additional needs like ADHD, ADD, anxiety, and ASD.”

Are big changes to education ahead?  

Even as their ideas become slightly more mainstream, the grassroots group gets their fair share of pushback, in person and online. But one reason they’re gaining traction is precisely because they are teachers, a trustworthy source for other educators. Groups that have amassed big followings, like the UK-based, grassroots group ResearchED, have done so in part because they honor and share the science-of-learning experiences of teachers themselves—something that doesn’t often happen in the high-pressure environment of “reading wars,” “math wars” and various other education wars. 

Like good American educators, though, the insurgent teachers I spoke with are skeptical that a massive sea change toward research-based learning principles is coming to all schools any time soon—even though growing popularity can sometimes make it feel that way in social media spaces.

“Not in my experience,” Groshell said in an interview. “It might feel like it is [growing] when you’re online, but it doesn’t feel like that in school every day.”