Mark Pennington's Blog (2)

I just finished watching a TED TALK by Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. Sal was talking about mastery learning and the importance of building strong learning foundations before layering on additional information.

As I watched…

The Monday spelling pretest. It's as American as apple pie. Each of my three sons routinely scored 20/20 on the Monday spelling pretest throughout elementary and middle school. They were required to “study” and “practice” these words with an obligatory worksheet, crossword puzzle, or write-the-word-ten-times assignment. They were then tested on these same words on Friday. They learned zilch about spelling from this instructional practice.

Fair to say that this common instructional…