Strategy 1: The Power of the Brain Dump

Instead of encouraging students to reread their notes or class slides to study for a test, leverage the power of retrieval practice. Research shows that retrieving information from memory strengthens memory pathways more effectively than rereading and helps students perform better on complex tasks. 

The Strategy: 

1. Encourage students to do a “Memory Dump” on a blank sheet of paper (or digital equivalent) for 5 minutes before they even look at their review materials. The only prompt needed is the content topic or unit title.
2. Then have students pull out their review material to fact-check their brain dump. Have them correct any misunderstandings and then highlight or underline to color-code their recalled information:
   • Green: Things they remembered instantly (representing a high level of fluency)
   • Yellow: Things they remember after a few minutes of thinking (representing developing fluency)
   • Red: Key information they knew they needed to remember but couldn’t recall until checking notes or slides (representing the “gap” areas)
3. Students now have a clear path for studying:
   • They do not need to review the green information.
   • They can then turn the yellow information into flashcards for further review. Consider using Quizlet (reviewed here) or Cram (reviewed here) for digital options. Cram offers various review modes, including self-paced learning and spaced repetition, in which information is revisited at varying intervals.
   • Students focus their study time on the red information, potentially using Strategy 2 below to help solidify understanding. 

The Research Tie-In: Retrieval practice pushes students to actively produce answers rather than simply recognizing correct ones. Research highlights that retrieval practice greatly benefits long-term memory. In particular, spaced retrieval practice, such as a cumulative review “Memory Dump,” produces “desirable difficulty” because recall occurs long after the initial period of learning and forgetting. Research also suggests that retrieval practice can protect against the effects of acute stress, such as a high-stakes testing environment, on memory inhibition.

Read this TeachersFirst blog post for even more ways to tap into retrieval practice for test review. 

Strategy 2: Connect the Dots with Concept Mapping

Concept mapping can be a powerful tool for connecting prior knowledge with new learning. It involves using nodes to represent central concepts and links between nodes to represent relationships among them. In cumulative test review, concept mapping serves both as a creative form of retrieval practice and as a way to leverage elaborative interrogation—asking how and why concepts work or are similar/different. 

The Strategy Flow:

1. Provide students with a list of the semester/year’s big ideas that will serve as anchor nodes. Students can build their concept maps on paper or digitally; consider Canva (reviewed here) mind map templates, Figjam (reviewed here) for a collaborative option, or Diagramo (reviewed here) for a simple, no-account-needed option. 
2. Ask students to spend 10 minutes mapping from memory only to initiate retrieval practice.
3. Then ask students to spend 5 minutes filling in the gaps using their textbook, notes, or other review materials. Consider having students use a different color for this information to make knowledge gaps visible and help them focus future study.
4. Push students to write linking verbs on the connecting lines to define the relationships rather than just acknowledging them. Finding cross-links between content taught at different times will help with Strategy 3 on the test day.

When students spend time organizing information into a hierarchy, they move beyond memorizing isolated facts and begin building an organized mental filing system, ready for retrieval on test day.

But even when knowledge is well-organized, students must still manage the cognitive demands of accessing and applying it under pressure—especially in a testing environment. This is where Strategy 3 becomes critical.

The Research Tie-In: As noted in Chapter 3 of Smart Teaching, Stronger Learning, research consistently shows that concept mapping leads to better performance than more traditional study methods, such as discussion or reading summaries. Further, students who construct concept maps outperform those who simply read them. The use of linking words combines elaboration with retrieval practice, strengthening later recall.

Strategy 3: Practicing “Offloading” on Practice Tests

Cognitive Load Theory, developed by John Sweller, suggests that our working memory has limited bandwidth. Test anxiety can increase extraneous load, leaving little room for actual problem-solving. Cumulative review practice sets or tests provide an opportunity to simulate testing conditions and intentionally regulate cognitive load.

The Strategy:

1. Students can “offload” any high-stakes formulas, acronyms, or dates onto scratch paper or test margins before starting. For students who regularly engage in retrieval practice, this serves as a short-form brain dump, conserving cognitive resources for the higher-level thinking required to apply the recalled information to the test questions.
2. Encourage students to flag or note questions they feel stuck on. Rather than staying stuck, shifting that content to a diffuse mode of thinking allows them to continue making progress. Other questions may help trigger recall of the “stuck” material by connecting it to a big idea or by recognizing similarities or differences between two concepts. 

The Research Tie-In: Reducing extraneous cognitive load is critical for performance, particularly for students who struggle with executive function skills such as prioritization and time management. Research by Sian Beilock and colleagues indicates that anxiety can be a source of additional cognitive load and rob students of their working memory capacity. Starting with a brain dump builds confidence and helps students enter focus mode. When students flag and move on from difficult questions, they remain productive on new tasks while the brain continues processing the “stuck” problem in the background—referred to as diffuse mode thinking in Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn.

By shifting from passive study strategies to active, brain-based approaches—such as retrieval practice, concept mapping, and cognitive offloading—we can empower students to approach high-stakes testing with greater confidence and less anxiety. These strategies do more than improve test scores; they help students organize their learning in ways that support long-term retention and mastery.

As you prepare for the final push towards testing season, consider integrating one of these routines into your review sessions—and share your results in the comments below.

This post asks a different question, and one I think is particularly relevant for educators and professional learning communities: not whether the argument is right, but how it worked so effectively. Horvath’s influence offers a case study in how audience targeting, format choice, and platform amplification can move a message far beyond the strength of its evidence. That case study connects directly to the communication skills we teach every day.

It started in our OK2Ask chat window. A teacher who has shown up every week for more than three years—someone whose engagement I know well enough to read even in text—typed a question that stopped me mid-session. She wanted to know what Horvath’s Senate testimony meant for her second graders. Before I could respond, several others had already asked to be included in any resources I could share.

These are educators who come voluntarily, week after week, because they care about getting it right. The fact that this question had reached them told me how far the message had traveled—and how effectively.

So let’s talk about how it got there.

He Knew His Craft

Before Jared Cooney Horvath studied neuroscience, he earned an undergraduate degree in cinema and television production. The book he published before The Digital Delusion was called Stop Talking, Start Influencing: 12 Insights From Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick—a practical guide to shaping messages for specific audiences. He runs LME Global, a consulting company focused on translating complex science into accessible communication for educators and organizations.

His Harvard Medical School credential—a research fellowship in neuroscience, not a degree in education—is real, and the neuroscience he draws on is his strongest academic footing.

But his communication expertise predates his neuroscience training. He had already studied, practiced, and written professionally about how to make a message land with an audience and stay there. That context matters for understanding what followed—because the skills he applied are ones educators recognize immediately. We teach them.

If you’ve ever asked students to consider how media messages are constructed and for whom, you already have the framework needed to read this story clearly.

He Knew His Audience

In November 2024, Horvath published his central argument not in a peer-reviewed journal or an education policy publication, but on Jonathan Haidt’s Substack platform, After Babel. That choice deserves attention—because it wasn’t just a distribution decision. It was an audience-identification decision.

Haidt had spent years cultivating a large, engaged readership of people deeply concerned about screens, social media, and children’s well-being. His book The Anxious Generation had primed that audience to be receptive to exactly the kind of argument Horvath was making.

When Haidt introduced Horvath’s piece to his readers—calling it “powerful and well sourced”—that introduction functioned as a trust transfer, extending Haidt’s credibility, to a new voice making a compatible claim.

Your middle school ELA students know this concept: identify your audience. Understand what they already believe, what concerns them, and what they’re primed to receive. Write to that reader—not to an imagined general audience, but to the specific person on the other side of the page.

Horvath did this with precision. He didn’t write a research paper. He wrote a compelling, accessible, emotionally resonant argument for readers already inclined to trust the platform delivering it.

It’s worth naming explicitly: concerns about children’s well-being and screen time use are legitimate. This post is not asking whether those concerns are real. It’s asking how a specific argument moved through specific channels to shape policy—and what that process looked like.

He Matched Format to Purpose — Every Time

The Substack post established the argument. The self-published book, The Digital Delusion, gave it permanence, scope, and the authority that a multi-hundred-page treatment confers. Each format was chosen for what it could do—not for what was most rigorous, but for what would reach and persuade the intended audience.

This is a standard your students learn early: match your format to your purpose and your audience. A text message and a formal letter can carry the same information, but they do very different things for the reader who receives them.

A Substack post reaches people already engaged with a topic. A book signals that an argument is substantial enough to sustain two hundred pages of treatment.

Think about the word choice in the title of his After Babel piece: “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.” Not “my analysis suggests modest negative adjusted effect sizes in certain technology categories.” Not “the evidence on educational technology is mixed and context-dependent.” Failed. Present tense. Declarative. Final. That word choice tells the reader what to feel before they’ve read a single sentence.

Tone, word choice, and the feeling a message is designed to produce — these are tools of effective communication. They were all present and working here. This kind of craft analysis belongs in any serious conversation about why media literacy matters.

How a Substack Post Earns a Senate Invitation

This is the part of this story I find most instructive.

The Substack post and the book circulated. They were quoted, shared, forwarded, and discussed widely enough that Horvath—a neuroscientist based in Australia for over a decade, with no peer-reviewed research in educational technology—was invited to testify before the United States Senate Commerce Committee specifically about K-12 educational technology, a field outside his research expertise.

Pause on that.

How does that happen?

One plausible explanation is that audience-aware, purposefully crafted communication builds momentum that policy channels can respond to. Each piece of the message—the Substack post, the book, the interviews, the citations in parents’ social media feeds—reached its intended audience. Accumulated attention created the conditions for a Senate invitation.

The invitation didn’t validate the argument’s evidence base. But it conferred the appearance of authority—enough to earn a seat at one of the most visible policy tables in the country.

This is what effective communication can do at scale.

Your students learn to identify their audience and purpose, to craft messages that reach specific readers, to use language and style appropriate to their topic and their listener. Those skills, applied with professional sophistication across multiple platforms over months, can move an argument from a Substack post to a chamber of the Senate. That is not an abstraction. That is the pattern the publicly visible sequence suggests.

The Coalition That Saw It Coming

Two days before the testimony, seventeen national education and library organizations—including the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), and the American Library Association (ALA)—sent a joint letter to the Senate Commerce Committee.

Getting those particular organizations on the same letter is itself worth noting. The NEA and AFT represent over four million classroom teachers and bring a labor-union identity and policy agenda. AASA, NAESP, and NASSP represent the superintendents and principals those teachers work with daily. These groups collaborate regularly on infrastructure and funding questions—such as E-Rate, broadband access, federal appropriations—but rapid consensus across all of them on a question of classroom pedagogy is not routine. It reflects how seriously the educators and leaders closest to classroom practice viewed what was coming.

Their letter was precise, professional, and carefully reasoned. They asked the committee to distinguish between unsupervised, entertainment-driven technology use at home and the intentional, monitored, carefully curated use of technology in schools. That distinction is exactly what decades of research and professional practice in educational technology supports.

This letter was written for a Senate committee audience. It was not designed for the broader public audience that had already been shaped by months of platform‑targeted communication. The coalition’s argument was better aligned with the research—but it arrived without the infrastructure to carry it as far, or as fast, as the narrative already circulating.

The Testimony, the Clip, the Cascade

What happened next is worth understanding as a sequence, not just a single event—because cumulative amplification matters more here than any one moment.

Horvath testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee in January 2026. The chamber itself did communicative work: a witness at a table, senators leaning forward, the formal architecture of a hearing room. That visual language signals authority and importance before a single claim is evaluated.

The testimony was clipped and uploaded to YouTube, where it reached over two million viewers (NBC News, March 2026). Those clips were shortened again for multiple social platforms—thirty seconds, credential and conclusion, with little context or qualification. Then quoted on other platforms. Forwarded between colleagues. Shown at school board meetings.

Each format shift altered the argument. As the message moved from long‑form writing to testimony to clipped video, the evidentiary scaffolding narrowed while expressive emotional certainty remained intact. This is a pattern students need help learning to recognize: format does not merely carry ideas—it reshapes them.

By March 2026, lawmakers in at least sixteen states were debating legislation to restrict or ban educational technology in classrooms (K-12 Dive, March 2026). Some proposals were sweeping—banning digital devices from elementary classrooms entirely, prohibiting digital textbooks, or capping all technology use at 45 minutes per day regardless of subject, grade level, or instructional purpose. Two states had already signed legislation into law.

Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, argued that proposals failing to distinguish math software from Netflix or assistive technology from TikTok “guarantee that the students who can least afford to fall behind will be the ones hurt most.” A New America policy analysis reached a similar conclusion from a different angle: blanket bans miss the mark precisely because they make no distinction between harmful and beneficial uses—the same failure the coalition letter had tried to prevent.

At no point in that chain—from Substack post to enacted policy—did the argument appear to pass through the kind of independent expert scrutiny that peer review requires.

What moved instead was a message whose clarity and expressive emotional conviction survived compression, while its complexity did not. By the time that message reached policy spaces, its momentum was strong enough that the coalition letter—despite its professional weight and evidence base—could not slow it. This fall, teachers who have spent years learning to use technology thoughtfully will be preparing for policies shaped by that trajectory.

What This Means for What We Teach

We teach these communication skills because they are powerful. This story shows that power in action.

Audience identification. Purposeful format choice. Strategic word selection. Platform amplification. Confidence paired with credentialing. These are not abstract concepts. They are the mechanics through which ideas travel, gain authority, and shape public response—executed with precision by someone who had studied communication craft explicitly before he ever picked up a neuroscience textbook.

These are also the same constructs we ask students to grapple with every day: audience awareness, purpose, evidence evaluation, and the difference between credibility and authority. When students analyze how an argument is shaped, circulated, and reframed across platforms, they are practicing the same critical reading, writing, and media‑literacy skills embedded in ELA standards, civic education goals, and research‑based argument instruction.

If you teach these skills, this story belongs in your curriculum—not as a cautionary tale about one specific claim, but as a live case study in how communication works, and why teaching students to analyze media messages is as important as teaching them to create them. There’s more to say about that companion skill — and the next post in this series takes it up directly.

The teacher who paused during our OK2Ask session and asked what the testimony meant for her students was already practicing exactly what we hope learners will do: slow down, examine a claim carefully, and look for the fuller picture before acting.

The message traveled a long way to reach her.

The fact that she questioned it when it arrived is the point.

In appreciation of all you do, here are some free, practical tech tools you can use right away to save time and simplify your workflow. But here is the most important instruction: Pick just one to try this week. That’s enough. Teacher appreciation should never feel like you are being asked to add one more thing to your already lengthy to-do list.

Save Time Where It Matters Most

Time is your most limited resource. Even saving 10–15 minutes a day adds up to nearly an hour each week. These tools help reduce the time-consuming work of planning and grading:

• MagicSchool AI (reviewed here) – Generate lesson plans, rubrics, and parent communications quickly and easily. Paste your standard to receive usable, standards-aligned content in minutes. For example, creating a rubric for a creative project no longer has to be a drawn-out chore. You can have a solid draft ready before your coffee even cools.
• Diffit (reviewed here) – Create multiple reading levels from the same text, freeing you from rewriting or hunting for new materials for different learners. If you find a perfect primary source written at a tenth-grade level, Diffit can simplify the vocabulary for your fifth graders in 30 seconds—even adding summary questions to match.
• Canva for Education (reviewed here) – Use templates to quickly build slides, worksheets, and visuals. You don’t have to start from scratch, and the “Magic Switch” feature can turn a presentation into a handout instantly.

Take One Thing Off Your Planning List

Some tools work best when they remove small, repeated planning tasks. The goal here isn’t a whole new routine—just finding small ways to save time inside the one you already have.

• Padlet (reviewed here) – Create bell ringers or quick response activities. Students can post ideas in seconds, and you get instant visual feedback on the room’s understanding.
• Google Forms (reviewed here) – Create one “universal exit ticket” template. Instead of rebuilding it every day, just duplicate it and change the header.
• Book Creator (reviewed here) – A flexible way for students to show understanding through audio, video, or text—without you designing three different assignments.

Use Ready-to-Go Prompt Templates

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you open an AI tool. Creating a few “golden prompts” for tasks you do often—and keeping them in one place—saves you from typing the same directions again and again.

To help you get started, here are some AI prompting templates. They include several proven frameworks, along with example prompts you can adapt right away.

The Power of Google Gems

Google Gems are available for free to everyone with a personal Google account. You can find them in Google Gemini by locating the left-hand sidebar and choosing “Explore Gems.” 

Think of a Gem as a digital teaching assistant you’ve already trained to work the way you do. By setting one up once—for example, a parent communication helper or lesson architect—you skip the repetitive task of explaining your grade level or tone every time you open the chat.

Want to explore Google Gems more deeply? Visit the TeachersFirst OK2Ask Session Archive to watch an on‑demand professional learning workshop that walks through creating and using Google Gems thoughtfully in classroom contexts.

The Micro-PD Mindset

You don’t need long, grueling training sessions to learn something new. A few focused minutes can be enough.

Try the 10-minute rule: If you can’t see the immediate benefit or learn the basics of a tool in ten minutes, it might not be the right time-saver for you. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad tool—just one for later.

Collect those “later” ideas in a parking‑lot document to revisit when you have more space. Wakelet (reviewed here) is an excellent tool for curating and organizing resources.

Explore the Tech Tool of the Month posts here on the TeachersFirst blog. Each post highlights one tool, explains the why, and offers classroom ideas you can use tomorrow. Recent highlights include Adobe Podcast (reviewed here) and Wordwall (reviewed here) for quickly finding and creating review games.

Teacher Appreciation Week is about recognizing your work—but it’s also about supporting it. If one tool mentioned here saves you 15 minutes this week, that’s 15 minutes you get back for yourself. 

You already do incredible work. We hope these tools make that work just a little lighter. 

What is one tool you’ll try this week? Let us know in the comments!

As Autism Acceptance Month comes to a close, it’s a meaningful time to reflect—not just on awareness, but on what acceptance looks like in everyday classroom life. Awareness opens the door, but belonging is built through daily choices: the routines we establish, the language we use, and how we design learning environments to support neurodivergent learners while ensuring all students feel seen and included.

Acceptance isn’t about singling students out or creating separate systems. It’s about human‑centered practices that make learning more predictable, accessible, and emotionally safe for everyone. Small, intentional adjustments can support neurodivergent learners and improve learning conditions for all students. Below are five practical classroom shifts you can use right away, each paired with a tech tool to make implementation easier—and worth carrying forward well beyond the month of April.

Shift #1: Move from Ambiguous Transitions to Predictable Routines

The “Hidden” Rule: We often assume students know exactly how long an activity will last or what materials they need to have ready when class begins. Transitions can be stressful for many learners. A visual schedule reduces anxiety, supports executive functioning, and helps students anticipate what’s coming next.

Tech Tool: ClassroomScreen (reviewed here)
ClassroomScreen makes it easy to display a visual agenda, timers, icons, and reminders. You can adjust schedules on the fly, and students can see changes in real time—no surprises, no confusion. It also allows students to quickly see what materials they need to have ready.

Try these ideas:

• Post the day’s flow at the start of class on a whiteboard or screen.
• Use icons for younger learners or multilingual students to visualize schedules and routines.
• Preview routine changes in advance so students know what will be different from the usual routine.

Shift #2: Move from Enforced Stillness to Regulated Engagement

The “Hidden” Rule: Teachers often interpret fidgeting or standing as off-task behavior, even though it’s sometimes how students regulate their focus. Many learners can’t remain still for long periods. Incorporating purposeful movement supports regulation, reduces stress, and improves attention.

Tech Tool (Elementary): GoNoodl (reviewed here)
GoNoodle offers short, structured movement breaks that feel purposeful and fun — perfect for transitions or energy resets.

Tech Tool (Middle & High School): Include strategies from 4 Stress-Relieving Exercises for Teens and Students That Can Be Done at School. This article offers simple, age‑appropriate exercises, like shoulder rolls, wall push‑ups, and grounding stretches, that older students can do discreetly at their desks or during transitions. These moves are age-appropriate, accessible, and focus on self-regulation.

Try these ideas:

• Build brief movement into your routines. A simple change, such as including a movement minute between activities, gallery walks for presentations or demonstrations, or “find someone who…” activities, helps create movement in the classroom.
• Offer fidgets or chair bands to keep students’ hands occupied, support focus, and relieve stress.
• Normalize standing, stretching, or pacing during independent work time.

Shift #3: Move from Constant Sensory Input to Intentional Resets

The “Hidden” Rule: Free time isn’t always restorative. Noisy or chaotic spaces, such as the playground or cafeteria, can be exhausting for students who experience sensory overload or emotional fatigue. Quiet recovery time helps prevent escalation and supports self-regulation. Everyone benefits from structured reset moments.

Tech Tool: A Soft Murmur (reviewed here)
A Soft Murmur creates offers customizable ambient soundscapes—such as rain, waves, or white noise—to create a calming atmosphere in the classroom.

Try these ideas:

• Offer students a pass to a calm corner with headphones.
• Use ambient sound and a countdown timer during transitions to give students a mental break and prepare for the next activity.
• Build two‑minute reset moments into your daily schedule after demanding tasks.

Shift #4: Move from On-the-Spot Verbal Processing to Multimodal Visible Thinking

The Hidden Rule: We often associate intelligence with quick verbal responses. Many neurodivergent learners think deeply but need more time to process or alternative ways to express their ideas. They may struggle with rapid verbal processing or on‑the‑spot responses, so making thinking visible and allowing time to respond reduces pressure and gives all students multiple ways to participate.

Tech Tool: Padlet (reviewed here)
Padlet allows students to share ideas using text, images, audio, or video—making participation flexible and inclusive. It’s perfect for warm‑ups, exit tickets, brainstorming, and collaborative thinking, and it levels the playing field for students who need more processing time and different ways to express their thoughts.

Try these ideas:

• Use Padlet for silent discussions, post a weekly question about a current unit, or ask students to share their favorite study routines.
• Create a Padlet sandbox for students to post questions anonymously, and if necessary, set Padlet to moderate posts either manually or with AI before posts are visible to others.
• Offer multimodal ways to contribute, such as sticky notes and reaction cards, and create collaborative activities that require one contribution from each student.

Shift #5: Move from Standardized Output to Flexible Demonstration of Mastery

The “Hidden” Rule: We often assume that fairness means everyone doing the exact same task in the exact same way. Choice builds confidence, reduces performance anxiety, and honors differences in communication and learning styles. When students can choose how they demonstrate learning, they’re more confident and more engaged.

Tech Tool: MagicSchool (Choice Board Generator)  
MagicSchool’s choice board generator makes it easy to create differentiated, multimodal options aligned to your lesson goals and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. You can customize, export, and adapt boards for different learners to match any learning objective.

Try these ideas:

• Include as many options as possible for students to share ideas and information, such as written, oral, and visual (e.g., drawings).
• Provide multiple project formats that allow students to share information through infographics, presentations, poetry, or models.
• Let students choose how they show understanding. Provide clear rubrics for projects, but include flexibility in the format so students can share their understanding.

These five shifts aren’t specific to autism. They are effective teaching strategies that support autistic students, strengthen access for neurodivergent learners, and improve learning for everyone through clearer routines, flexible participation, and predictable ways to engage.

As Autism Acceptance Month comes to an end, consider which of these shifts you’ll continue using moving forward. What unspoken rules are worth making visible in your classroom every day? I’d love to hear how you are carrying this work beyond April—let’s learn together in the comments.

If you’ve been in those conversations, you already know the name: Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, whose argument that educational technology actively harms student learning has traveled from a Substack post to a Senate testimony clip viewed over two million times on YouTube to proposed or enacted legislation in sixteen states — all in roughly eighteen months. Whatever you think of his argument, the effect on educator communities has been real. Teachers who have spent years learning to use technology thoughtfully are second-guessing themselves. Coaches who have built their practice on research-based frameworks are being asked to defend ground they didn’t think was contested.

Central to Horvath’s argument is international test score data from the OECD — the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which administers the PISA assessments used to compare student performance across countries. His claim, stated plainly, is that students who use computers heavily at school perform worse on those assessments, and this is evidence that educational technology harms learning. It sounds like a straightforward reading of the data. It isn’t.

Does Screen Time Actually Hurt Learning? What the OECD Data Really Shows

Here’s what the OECD actually found — in its own analysis of its own data. The 2024 OECD report Managing Screen Time, which draws on PISA 2022 results, distinguishes between using devices for learning and for leisure, a distinction Horvath’s presentation ignores entirely. Students who spend one to five hours per day on digital devices for learning score twenty PISA points higher in mathematics than students who use no devices at all. The negative correlations — the ones Horvath presents as evidence that technology harms learning — are tied to leisure use. Social media. Unsupervised browsing. Entertainment during class time. Not a teacher using an adaptive reading platform with a struggling reader. Not a student working through a purposefully selected math application. The OECD’s own conclusion, in plain language: students who use digital devices moderately for learning tend to perform better and report a greater sense of belonging at school.

There’s one more detail worth knowing. That 2024 report was published in May 2024 — six months before Horvath’s most widely shared piece appeared. The updated data was already available. The distinction the OECD draws between learning use and leisure use was already in the literature. Presenting the OECD data without that distinction, at a time when a huge audience was primed to receive an alarming conclusion, is not a neutral analytical choice. It’s the kind of choice that media literacy teaches us to notice.

Here’s what I think this conversation deserves: not a quick reassurance, and not a dismissal of legitimate questions about technology use in classrooms. It deserves a look at what the research actually shows. Because there is quite a lot of it — decades of peer-reviewed, rigorously designed studies examining whether educational technology improves student learning. And the picture it paints is considerably more nuanced, and considerably more encouraging, than the narrative that’s been traveling at viral speed.

Let’s look at what the evidence actually says.

The Research Base Is Deeper Than You’ve Been Led to Believe

One of the most consistent features of Horvath’s argument is the framing that educational technology simply doesn’t work — that decades of implementation have produced little or no learning benefit. That framing does not hold up to a careful look at the research literature.

Start with a foundational meta-analysis from the North Central Regional Education Laboratory. In 2003, Waxman, Connell, and Gray synthesized findings from 42 studies involving approximately 7,000 students, calculating 282 separate effect sizes across cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning outcomes. Their finding: teaching and learning with technology produces a small but statistically significant positive effect on student outcomes compared to traditional instruction alone — with a mean effect size of 0.41 (p < .001). That held across cognitive outcomes, yes, but also across measures of student engagement and behavior. Technology integration, when studied rigorously, doesn’t just show up in test scores. It shows up in how students engage with learning.

The picture holds when you move to literacy specifically. A 2011 meta-analysis by Cheung and Slavin at Johns Hopkins University examined 85 studies involving more than 60,000 K-12 students, focused squarely on reading achievement. The overall finding was positive — educational technology generally produced meaningful improvement in reading outcomes compared to traditional methods. But Cheung and Slavin found something more specific that’s worth sitting with: the strongest effects weren’t associated with basic computer-assisted drill programs. They were associated with innovative technology applications paired with extensive professional development. The technology mattered. The teacher’s preparation to use it well mattered more.

That finding connects directly to more recent, targeted research. In 2020, Hillmayr, Ziernwald, Reinhold, Hofer, and Reiss published a comprehensive meta-analysis in Computers and Education — a peer-reviewed journal — examining 92 studies of digital tool use in secondary school mathematics and science, covering grades 5 through 13. Their overall effect size: 0.65, statistically significant (p < .001). That’s not a small finding. But the moderating factor that stands out is the same one Cheung and Slavin identified a decade earlier: the provision of teacher training on digital tool use significantly increased the overall effect. When educators understood how to use the tools in the context of their content and their students, the tools worked better. Notably, the effect was larger when digital tools were used alongside other instructional methods — not as a replacement for them.

This brings us to two more recent and more specific studies in this conversation, both of which examine the youngest learners and both of which deserve to be far better known than they currently are.

In 2021, Kim, Gilbert, Yu, and Gale published a meta-analysis in AERA Open — a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association — examining 36 rigorous studies of educational apps for children from preschool through grade three. Ninety-two percent of those studies were randomized controlled trials, which is the gold standard in research design. The finding: meaningful positive effects on both literacy and mathematics outcomes for our youngest learners. These weren’t passive screen-time studies. They were studies of intentional, purposefully designed educational applications used in structured learning contexts.

And in 2024, Silverman, Keane, Darling-Hammond, and Khanna published a meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research — one of the most respected peer-reviewed journals in the field — examining 119 studies of educational technology literacy interventions specifically in K-5 classrooms. Positive effects across reading, comprehension, and writing. Silverman’s framing of what the research actually asks us to do is precise and important: the right question isn’t whether educational technology works. It’s which products, with which characteristics, under which conditions produce meaningful learning. That’s not a defense of every app on the market. It’s a call for the kind of careful, evidence-informed selectivity that good technology coaching has always been about.

Five meta-analyses. Preschool through high school. Literacy and STEM. Consistent positive effects — strongest when teachers are prepared, when tools are chosen thoughtfully, when technology complements rather than replaces good instruction.

That is the type of research base Horvath’s argument bypasses.

The Frameworks Your Practice Is Built On

Here’s something worth naming directly: the field of educational technology has been doing serious, peer-reviewed work on the question of how to use technology effectively for decades. Two frameworks in particular represent that work, and if you’ve been integrating technology with any intentionality, you’ve been working within their logic — whether you used those names or not.

The TPACK Framework: Why Technology Knowledge Isn’t Enough

TPACK — Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge — emerged from the research of Mishra and Koehler in the early 2000s and has since accumulated a substantial body of peer-reviewed study across content areas and grade levels. The framework’s core insight is both elegant and practical: technology knowledge becomes meaningful in a classroom only when it is genuinely integrated with a deep understanding of the content being taught and the pedagogical strategies that serve that content and those students. A teacher who knows what she’s teaching, knows who she’s teaching it to, and knows how a specific tool can serve both — that is categorically different from undirected screen time. TPACK gives us the language to articulate exactly why intentional, content-driven technology use is not the same as parking students in front of a screen without purpose or guidance. Much of the current policy debate treats those two practices as equivalent. The research does not support that.

The Triple E Framework: A Practical Classroom Test for Every Edtech Tool

Dr. Liz Kolb’s Triple E Framework, developed at the University of Michigan and validated by independent research as both reliable and valid, adds a practical classroom-level lens. It asks three questions about any technology-integrated lesson: Does the technology meaningfully engage students with the learning goal — not distract from it, not entertain alongside it, but genuinely engage with it? Does it enhance student understanding in ways that would be harder to achieve without it? Does it extend learning beyond what the classroom and the school day could otherwise provide? The framework’s organizing principle is four words: learning first, technology second. Not technology always. Not technology instead of teaching. The question the framework asks is always whether the tool is serving the learning goal — and if it isn’t, you choose a different tool, or no tool at all.

These aren’t aspirational documents. They’re peer-reviewed, widely implemented, and grounded in exactly the kind of research that shows up in the five meta-analyses above. When the coalition of seventeen education and library organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, AASA, NAESP, NASSP, and the American Library Association — wrote to the Senate Commerce Committee two days before Horvath testified, they made precisely the distinction that TPACK and Triple E are built around. They asked lawmakers to “distinguish between largely unsupervised, entertainment-driven technology use at home and the intentional, monitored, and carefully curated use of technology in schools.” That is TPACK in plain English. It’s Triple E with the academic framing removed. It’s what forty years of coaching has taught me to recognize when I see it in a classroom.

What This Means for Your Classroom and Your Coaching

The anxiety circulating in educator communities right now is understandable. A message arrived with impressive packaging, at a moment when educators were already tired and already uncertain, and it spread very quickly. Some of what Horvath raises about distraction, about undirected screen time, about the cognitive conditions that support deep learning is grounded in legitimate neuroscience and worth taking seriously. The concern that technology has sometimes been adopted too quickly and implemented poorly is real and widely shared among thoughtful people in this field.

But the leap from those legitimate concerns to the conclusion that educational technology should be removed from students’ hands — a leap Horvath makes based on evidence that, read in full and in context, does not support that conclusion — is not one the research justifies. The five meta-analyses above don’t prove that every piece of educational technology in every classroom works well. No honest researcher would claim that. What they show, consistently, is that technology integrated with intentionality, with appropriate teacher preparation, with clear learning goals, and with the right tools chosen for the right purposes — produces meaningful positive outcomes for students from preschool through high school, across literacy and STEM, across a wide range of contexts and demographics.

If you are making deliberate decisions about when and why technology serves your instructional goals — if you’re asking whether a tool engages, enhances, and extends learning before you put it in front of students — the research is on your side. The OECD is on your side. The coalition of professional organizations that represents your colleagues is on your side. You don’t have to navigate this alone. Edtech professional development grounded in these frameworks, not vendor demos or sit-and-get sessions, is what OK2Ask has been designed to provide.

The teacher who raised her hand in our OK2Ask session to ask what Horvath’s testimony meant for her second graders was doing the right thing. She paused. She asked. She looked for resources before she acted. That instinct — to examine a claim before accepting it, to seek evidence before changing practice — is exactly what good teaching, and good technology coaching, and good media literacy all require.

The research on educational technology has been doing the same thing for decades. It’s time more of us knew what it found.

Resources and References

Frameworks

• Mishra, P., & Koehler, M.J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017–1054. | tpack.org
• Kolb, L. (2017). Learning First, Technology Second. ISTE. | tripleeframework.com

Research cited

• Waxman, H.C., Connell, M.L., & Gray, J. (2003). A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning With Technology on Student Outcomes. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.
• Cheung, A.C.K., & Slavin, R.E. (2011). The Effectiveness of Education Technology for Enhancing Reading Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Center for Research and Reform in Education, Johns Hopkins University. ED527572
• Hillmayr, D., Ziernwald, L., Reinhold, F., Hofer, S.I., & Reiss, K.M. (2020). The potential of digital tools to enhance mathematics and science learning in secondary schools: A context-specific meta-analysis. Computers and Education, 153, 103897. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103897
• Kim, J., Gilbert, J., Yu, Q., & Gale, C. (2021). Measures matter: A meta-analysis of the effects of educational apps on preschool to grade 3 children’s literacy and math skills. AERA Open, 7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584211004183
• Silverman, R.D., Keane, K., Darling-Hammond, E., & Khanna, S. (2024). The effects of educational technology interventions on literacy in elementary school: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 95, 972–1012. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543241261073
• OECD (2024, May). Managing screen time: How to protect and equip students against distraction. PISA in Focus, No. 124.

The full case study this column draws from:

• Okoye, R. (2026). “A Media Literacy Lesson Hiding in Plain Sight.”

Poetry is everywhere: in music, nature, traffic, pain, laughter, and growth. It shapes us personally and culturally. As teachers, it’s our job to help others discover poetry they connect with. If you haven’t fully engaged with National Poetry Month yet, don’t worry—April 28th is National Great Poetry Reading Day (#GreatPoetryReadingDay), a whole day dedicated to reading, writing, analyzing, and enjoying poetry. I can’t wait.  

I believe poetry should be part of daily classroom conversations and taught weekly to students. On poets.org, the Academy of American Poets’ website (reviewed here), you can sign up to receive a daily emailed poem. This is an easy way to broaden students’ exposure to poetry while introducing new ideas. Often, Poem-A-Day gives you the poem, an audio recording of the poem, and information about the poet—all valuable entry points for readers.

Here’s an example of Poem-A-Day featuring “Our Books of Delights” by Arielle Herbert on April 15, 2026.

Now that we’ve explored the importance of poetry, you may be wondering: How can we honor National Great Poetry Reading Day with our students? Below are some lesson ideas and tools—each reviewed and contextualized by TeachersFirst—that can be used to help students read, listen to, write, and perform poetry in meaningful ways.

• Poetry Read-a-Thon (reviewed here) – From the Academy of American Poets, this activity encourages students to read as many poems as possible within a set time. After reading, students write brief responses reflecting on each poem—focusing on a favorite line, its meaning, or the emotion it evokes. Decide whether students track poems individually, in pairs, or as a group, then invite them to share at the end. 
• Poetry Everywhere (reviewed here) – This poetry collection from PBS LearningMedia (reviewed here) is an excellent listening resource for grades 6–12. Explore this site too for poetry-enhancing materials. I love the Transformation: Get Lit and the Power of Poetry collection too!
• AI Poem Generator (reviewed here) – Poem‑generator‑io introduces students to a variety of poetic forms. Students can enter a few ideas and generate a haiku, then use the same ideas to create a limerick. This makes it easy to compare poetic forms and examine how meaning changes across structures. 
• Living Nation, Living Words (reviewed here) – This educator’s guide from the Library of Congress offers a rich collection of current Native and Indigenous American poetry and cultural connections for students to explore. Have students find their favorite poem and research the poet and the culture from which it comes. 
• #TeachLivingPoets (reviewed here) – This is one of my favorite poetry resources. It’s a collection of poets, poems, and classroom‑ready lessons created by living poets—which is refreshing, considering how often students encounter poetry written exclusively by long‑past voices. Students are introduced to contemporary poets they could actually see perform, making poetry feel current and alive. One standout feature is the March Madness Poetry Brackets, which highlight spoken‑word poetry throughout the month and invite students to experience daily poetic performances. 
• TeachRock (reviewed here) – To integrate poetry and music, start with a song featuring meaningful lyrics. After listening, distribute the lyrics and ask students to identify poetic devices such as metaphor, simile, or repetition. Discuss how those devices shape meaning, then invite students to bring in their own song selections.
• Poetry in Translation (reviewed here) – This Academy of American Poets lesson guides students through reading translated poems and considering how language and culture influence meaning. Ask students to write a short reflection explaining how translation could affect the poem’s meaning or tone. Recommended for grades 11–12. 
• Voice (reviewed here) – This multi‑lesson unit explores spoken and written poetry, examining how voice is created and how poetry functions as social commentary. A strong fit for high school classrooms.
• Poetry Out Loud (reviewed here) – This is a perfect closure to this lesson highlight list. A national recitation contest for students in grades 8–12. You can host a classroom or school‑level version or participate in the full program. Through memorization and performance, students gain a deeper understanding of their chosen poem—and it’s a lot of fun.

Planning ahead for National Poetry Month 2027? Students in grades 5–12 can participate in the Dear Poet Project. Students read and listen to poems by award‑winning poets, then write letters responding to the work. Some students may even receive replies, and all participating letters are published in a summer PDF. Letters for the 2026 project are due by May 15, 2026.

No matter how you choose to celebrate National Great Poetry Reading Day, take action and honor this timeless art form. Mark April 28 on your calendar now, and invite students to share how they celebrate—through social media using #GreatPoetryReadingDay or within your classroom’s online space. Join them in celebrating and sharing. You lead by example! I can’t wait to see your #GreatPoetryReadingDay stories.

World Intellectual Property Day on April 26 provides a natural opportunity to explore that question together. The day highlights how creative work and inventions are protected, while helping students understand why attribution and ownership matter in a digital world.

For students, intellectual property (IP) is not an abstract legal concept. It connects directly to the work they create and the media they use every day. Exploring these ideas through research, discussion, and student-created media helps learners understand why attribution, ownership, and ethical sharing matter—and how those ideas apply to their own creative choices.

One way to guide this learning is through inquiry and student research using NotebookLM (reviewed here). NotebookLM is an AI-powered research and content-generation tool that helps users refine and organize content by creating simplified learning resources.

To begin using NotebookLM, users add resources. The tool can locate resources, or you can curate your own. Here are three options that work well for helping students understand intellectual property:

• Copyright – Copyright Basics is a PDF from the United States Copyright Office that explains what types of work are protected and the rights of copyright holders.
• Patents – Google Patents allows users to search patents and explore the history of inventions. Demonstrate how to use the tool by searching for familiar items such as wireless earbuds or a mechanical pencil. Ask students to research what is required to apply for a patent, then explore real examples to see how inventions are documented and protected.
• Patent/Trademark Dispute Example – Share a real-world example, such as a trademark dispute over something as simple as the number 8. Discuss why ownership and protection matter to those involved.

Students can import these sources into NotebookLM to organize and synthesize information. This approach keeps the focus on content rather than the tool itself, encouraging students to examine multiple perspectives and support their thinking with evidence.

Teacher Tip: Limit the number of sources students import to three or four links. A smaller, curated set helps NotebookLM produce clearer summaries and keeps students focused on the most relevant information.

Once students build a source set, they can use NotebookLM to generate materials that reinforce understanding. For example, the tool can create a short video summary. Here’s one made using information from the World Intellectual Property Day website:

Students can use their videos to:

• Preview key ideas before a discussion
• Check their understanding against a concise summary
• Model how research can be transformed into accessible resources for peers

NotebookLM can also generate infographics that visually explain selected content.

Teacher Tip: After viewing, ask students to compare the video or infographic with the original sources. What information is included? What might be missing? This comparison encourages critical thinking and source evaluation.

Students can also ask NotebookLM to generate:

• Vocabulary flashcards for key terms
• A short quiz to check understanding
• A glossary of intellectual property concepts

Students engage more deeply with intellectual property when they connect these ideas to situations they recognize from everyday digital life. Brief discussions can help them explore how IP issues surface online.

Consider posing questions such as:

• Should memes be protected by copyright?
• If someone remixes a song, who should receive credit?
• Should fan art be considered copying or creativity?
• Should AI-generated art belong to the person who created the prompt?

Tools like Kialo Edu (reviewed here) can help structure these conversations by allowing students to map arguments and explore multiple viewpoints. You can also incorporate Project Zero Thinking Routines (reviewed here), such as those below, to encourage students to support their ideas with evidence and reflect on new questions that arise:

• Claim, Support, Question
• Think, Puzzle, Explore
• Circle of Viewpoints

Teacher Tip: Provide time for students to write before discussion begins. This often increases participation from quieter students and supports more thoughtful contributions.

A culminating, “show-what-you-know” activity allows students to apply what they’ve learned about intellectual property in a meaningful way. Students might choose from the following options:

• Protect an Invention – Students invent a product and explain which type of intellectual property would protect it and why that protection matters.
• Investigate a Real Example – Students research a real-world case involving a logo, song, or patented invention and explain how intellectual property applies.
• Reflect as a Creator – Students consider their own personal creative work and respond to questions such as: What have you created that others might copy? How would you want to be credited?

Offer students multiple ways to share their thinking using tools that match their interests, such as:

• Canva (reviewed here) for infographics and visual explainers
• Adobe Express Video Maker (reviewed here) for short videos
• Google Slides (reviewed here) for presentations
• Padlet (reviewed here) for a digital gallery walk or showcase

Teacher Tip: Ask students to share one new insight about intellectual property as a final reflection. This might be a sticky note, a brief written response, or a short discussion post.

Students live in a world where ideas move quickly, and content spreads instantly. Teaching intellectual property helps build essential digital literacy skills while reinforcing the value of students’ own creative work. When students research, discuss, and create around IP, they begin to see themselves as responsible creators and informed consumers of digital content.

World Intellectual Property Day is more than a date on the calendar—it’s an invitation to explore questions of ownership, credit, and ethical sharing alongside students. How do you help learners think about ownership of ideas in the digital age? Share your strategies in the comments to inspire others.

National Library Week is more than a date on the calendar—it’s an open invitation to build a culture of reading, curiosity, and community that lasts well beyond seven days. Sponsored annually by the American Library Association (ALA) and typically held during the second week of April, National Library Week overlaps with School Library Month. Each year carries a fresh theme, and this year’s theme—Find Your Joy—offers educators, a timely, meaningful reason to celebrate reading and collaboration.

For educators, this week is a golden opportunity: a built‑in, culturally resonant moment to celebrate reading, collaborate with your school librarian, and help students see themselves as part of something bigger. Research consistently affirms what many educators already know—students with access to strong school libraries and engaged school librarians demonstrate higher reading achievement, stronger information literacy skills, and greater academic confidence overall. Celebrating the library isn’t just feel-good work; it’s closely tied to student outcomes.

Build a Schoolwide Culture Around Reading

Some of the most memorable library week moments happen when the entire school community is in on it together. The ideas below scale well and don’t require enormous lead time, making them accessible even during a busy spring calendar.

Coordinate a school-wide Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) flash mob at a surprise time mid-morning. An announcement goes out and every student, teacher, administrator, and staff member pauses to read silently for 15 minutes. The power is in the universality—when the principal, the custodian, and the art teacher are all reading, students internalize that reading is for everyone. Consider photographing the moment and sharing it with families through your school newsletter or social channels.

Create a Community Reading Wall—a bulletin board, hallway display, or digital version using a tool like Padlet— where students, staff, and families post book recommendations with a brief explanation of why the book matters to them. By the end of the week, you’ll have a crowd-sourced reading list that reflects your community’s tastes and shows students how reading connects generations and experiences.

If your school does not have a full-time librarian, reach out to your local public library. Many public librarians are delighted to visit schools during National Library Week. In the mood for a field trip? Set up a visit to your local public library. It may even be within walking distance! Students can apply for library cards and expand access to reading resources for their families.

Connect Classroom Learning to the Library

One of the most powerful things you can do during National Library Week— and honestly, throughout the year—is make explicit classroom learning and what the library makes possible.

Here are a few cross-curricular lesson ideas that work well this week. Use the week to teach older students how to evaluate sources. A simple, adaptable framework works across grade levels: Who wrote it? When was it written? What evidence is offered? Present two sources on the same topic—one credible, one questionable—and have students compare. Your school librarian is a natural partner in this work.

Work with your school librarian to design a scavenger hunt that challenges students to visit different genre sections, read book descriptions, and decide whether a book “speaks to them.” Ask students to write a brief reflection explaining their choice. This helps demystify library organization while building the habit of browsing—a lifelong library skill.

Invite your librarian to curate a collection of engaging nonfiction texts tied to your curriculum. During a library visit, provide students with a checklist of text features—table of contents, glossary, index, captions, sidebars, and headings—and have them identify how each feature supports understanding. This strategy works across grade levels and disciplines and helps students see nonfiction as navigable and inviting.

Advocate for Equitable Access

It’s important to name directly that library resources vary widely. Some schools have a credentialed library media specialist and robust collections, while others are operating with limited budgets or shared staffing. National Library Week can also be a moment—sometimes quietly—to advocate for what students deserve.

If your library resources are limited, consider collaborating with local public libraries, applying for grants through programs such as the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, or reaching out to community organizations. State school library associations often provide advocacy tools and guidance as well.  

Every school community deserves a library that reflects its students and serves their curiosity.

Beyond the Week

National Library Week lasts seven days, but the habits and relationships it can spark endure much longer. When students see teachers genuinely excited about books, feel welcomed into a space that belongs to them, and experience the library as a place of discovery rather than obligation—that’s the work. This week simply offers a particularly good time to begin.

As always, check out TeachersFirst for resources such as “Help! I Lost My Media Specialist” and additional library-related blog posts for ideas you can use year-round.

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

—Frederick Douglass

Educators will agree that literacy (the ability to read and write) is the cornerstone of learning. Literacy opens the world and allows one to be a lifelong learner. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) summarizes it well:

“Literacy empowers and liberates people. Beyond its importance as part of the right to education, literacy improves lives by expanding capabilities which in turn reduces poverty, increases participation in the labour market, and has positive effects on health and sustainable development.”

So, literacy is not just an essential skill; it is a human right and a social justice concern. We have a concerning declining trend in literacy in the United States. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 32% of 12^th graders in 2024 were below “basic” performance in reading, which is down 3 points when compared to 2019 data, and 10 points compared to 1992. Many factors contribute to this decline, but we educators need to focus on solutions. One thing we can do to change the trajectory of literacy, specifically at the secondary level, is adopt a whole-school approach and a content area literacy focus.

• Truth #1: The majority of secondary educators do not have a background in reading and/or literacy instruction, including English teachers.
• Truth #2: A lack of literacy skills has a detrimental impact on society. According to ProLiteracy’s synopsis of the Organization for Co-operation and Economic Development’s (OECD) 2023 survey of adult skills, “28% of American adults read at or below the lowest level assessed” on the survey. This means roughly 59 million American adults lack the skills needed to successfully navigate daily life. ProLiteracy also states that “The World Literacy Foundation estimates that low literacy skills cost the U.S. economy $300 billion annually” and “94% of employers surveyed said they have employees who do not have the literacy skills to meet the requirements of the job, costing an estimated $46 billion in revenue annually.”
• Truth #3: Developing literacy skills is not easy, nor is it natural. In order for us to read, we repurpose parts of our brain to recognize letters, add sounds to those letters, and then add meaning to those sounds. If this is something interesting to you, I highly recommend the video below about the work of Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, a leader in cognitive neuroscience.

All of these truths add to the urgency of an all-hands-on-deck approach to literacy. The good news is there are many content-specific literacy-focused skills that you can bring into your classroom. I implore everyone to seek professional development in the Science of Reading, which helps educators address reading deficits with decades of research-backed practices (start by checking out TeachersFirst’s Science of Reading Resources and our professional learning units on the subject). Maybe send your principal the link to this blog with the above portion highlighted as a wink-wink hint. In the meantime, there is no one-size-fits-all literacy approach, so here are some best practices to try so you can see what works for you and your team:

WIDA Recommends

WIDA is a consortium that develops tools and standards to help multilingual learners along their educational journey. Here are a few suggestions from the article “Four Tips for Teaching Reading in Content Areas.”

• World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) is a consortium that develops tools and standards to help multilingual learners along their educational journey. Here are a few suggestions from the article “Four Tips for Teaching Reading in Content Areas:”
• Teach the organization and purpose of a text before reading it. Content area literacy depends on students’ reading and comprehension of content-specific texts, and the organization and purpose of a chemistry lab report are very different from those of a short story in English 10. Readers need deliberate and specific instruction on the purpose and organization of texts in every class.
• Have text-based discussions with the class. Present a question to students prior to the reading that they will need to answer. Ask students what a specific term in the text means, or have them explain the main topic in their own words.
• Identify the struggle areas in the text and pre-teach them. If there are any challenging or new vocabulary words, teach them to the class before the reading. If the overall concept is challenging, like stoichiometry in chemistry, explain the general concept or demonstrate a basic stoichiometry process.
• Conduct an examination of literacy skills to understand each student’s needs. WIDA suggests that educators have students complete a literacy mapping activity or conduct an empathy interview to learn about their literacy backgrounds.

Lenses of Literacy

This wonderful resource from Dr. Mikkaka Overstreet and Dr. Lymaris Satana, “Literacy Lens: Effective Literacy Practices for Secondary Students,” helps secondary teachers bring the Science of Reading into their instructional practice. These are merely highlights, so check out the resource in its entirety for more in-depth suggestions.

• Teach morphology in an authentic way. Take discipline-specific vocabulary and break the words down to their morphemes; explain the morphological meaning of the word parts and help students understand the connections between the parts and the whole—bonus if they can think of other words that use the same parts!
• Explicitly teach reading comprehension skills for content-area-specific texts. Give students math word problems and talk them through as a class before solving them.

Back to the Basics

Lindsey Barrett wrote “How To Teach Reading When You Didn’t Go to School for That” for We Are Teachers in 2023. It’s aimed at an upper elementary audience, but there are practical tips that should become standard across grade levels.

• Meet with your content area team and analyze student data. Use the data and the standards to guide a plan for these classes.
• Have students write. Students crafting meaningful sentences about what they read helps them process what they’ve learned, and is also a great way for teachers to check for understanding.

Further Suggestions

To help you navigate this a bit more, here are a few more resources that I recommend looking over:

• “How to Work Literacy Instruction Into All Content Areas” is an Edutopia article that shows how literacy inclusion works across all content areas.
• “Integrating Literacy Across the Curriculum: An Easy Way to START” is a how-to guide from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) (reviewed here) on implementing a school-wide approach to content area literacy. START is an acronym for the steps and tools needed to support teachers in this process.
• “Applying Literacy Standards Across Content Areas” by Peg Grafwallner offers detailed examples of literacy implementation in Physical Education and Science, demonstrating the same process in each.
• “Content-Area Literacy” from AdLit (reviewed here) provides teachers with lessons across a variety of content areas that focus on literacy skills and content-area standards.
• “Introduction to the Science of Reading,” “Morphology PD Part 1,” and “Morphology PD Part 2” come from the Louisiana Department of Education (reviewed here) and offer a great overview.  
• TeachersFirst has a host of blog posts about reading and The Science of Reading that focus on resources, reading methods, and enhancements that can work in all content areas.

There are many resources available to help teachers easily integrate literacy into their daily curriculum practice. Students have a basic human right to literacy, and we all need to help ensure that our students have all the skills they need to have the bright futures promised to them. 

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

—Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle

If you’ve ever looked out at your classroom and felt like you were competing with a dozen glowing rectangles for your students’ attention, you are in good company. We’ve all been there: a student nodding along to instructions while their eyes dart to the corner of the screen where an email notification just popped up. Or maybe you’ve noticed a full tab forest growing on a laptop—thirty open windows, none of which seem to be the assignment at hand.

Technology has the power to make learning more immersive and accessible than ever before—but it also has a unique ability to fragment focus. Here’s the key shift: healthy technology habits are not a personality trait; they are a literacy skill. Just like reading fluency or scientific inquiry, digital regulation requires explicit instruction, guided practice, and a whole lot of grace.

We often tell students to use tech responsibly, but for a developing brain, that phrase is incredibly abstract. It’s like telling a student to do math without teaching them the operations. To a fifth grader—or even a high school senior—responsible use might just mean don’t get caught on YouTube.

To move past compliance and toward genuine digital agency, we need to treat tech habits with the same pedagogical rigor as our content areas. Supporting healthy tech use means moving through a cycle of defining norms, modeling behavior, and reflecting on the results.

Instead of handing down a list of things not to do, try defining 3–5 shared norms that prioritize a focused classroom atmosphere. When students understand the why, they’re far more likely to buy in. Consider norms like these—and give them catchy names students will remember: 

• The Single-Task Rule (aka Tunnel Vision) – Keep only the tabs needed for the current mini-lesson open.
• The Notification Pause (aka Ghost Mode) – Silence banners and notifications during independent work to protect focused time.
• The Help Signal (aka System Alert)– Establish a digital or physical signal for when a student is stuck, preventing the “boredom browse” that can happen when they hit a roadblock.

To increase student buy-in, Canva for Education (reviewed here) to have students design norm posters. Display them around the classroom and refer to them often to reinforce the shared expectations.

Meaningful habits develop through small, consistent actions rather than sweeping changes. Look at classroom transitions and consider how simple digital routines might reinforce healthy habits while also creating smoother workflows.

• Clearing tabs reset (Digital Shred): End each period with a 30-second digital declutter—closing tabs and organizing Drive files.
• Visual Transitions (Analog Mode): Use a red-light/green-light system. A stop sign on the interactive whiteboard signals Lids Down/Screens Off for direct instruction; a green slide signals that devices are okay.
• The Focus Sprint (Deep Breath): Use a digital timer such as a Pomodoro Clock (reviewed here) for 15 minutes of focused work, followed by a brief 2‑minute, screen‑free brain break where students can stand up, stretch, or move their bodies before resetting.

Modeling matters, too. Project your screen (after checking it carefully) and narrate your own thinking, “I have five emails I want to answer right now, but I’m going to close that tab so I can meet with students at stations. I’m silencing my phone and putting it in my drawer because it helps me focus. It’s hard for me too.” By showing both the struggle and the strategy, you turn an abstract expectation into a visible, repeatable skill.

Throughout the day, we constantly check for understanding through formal and informal assessments. Tech habits deserve the same treatment. At the end of a tech-heavy lesson, take two minutes for a quick technology audit.

• Scale of 1–5: How much did your device help you learn today versus distract you?
• Reflection: What was the biggest distraction you faced today, and how can we beat it tomorrow?

These quick check-ins provide valuable data. If an entire class struggled with the same distraction, it’s a signal to adjust the routine or the environment—not necessarily to remove technology altogether.

Building a healthy digital culture isn’t about a full reset. It’s about layering. Pick one habit—maybe just closing extra tabs—and commit to it for a week. Celebrate small wins. When a student silences a notification on their own, name it.

Technology isn’t a hurdle we have to clear to get to learning; it’s the landscape we’re learning in. By giving students both a map and a compass, we help them do more than survive the digital age—we help them thrive in it.

What are your biggest challenges in teaching healthy technology habits? We would love to hear routines and strategies that help your students stay focused and intentional with their devices.