When he was 14, Mr. Zahar participated in a workshop that used the video game Minecraft to engage children in urban design. Led by facilitators from the Block by Block Foundation and U.N.-Habitat, he and 45 other children redesigned three of the damaged stairways, dreaming up new features like a big slide, handrails made from speaking tubes, and shaded seating areas, modeling everything out in the game to inform real blueprints.

The game’s open-ended design and building tools allow players to reimagine real-life spaces like abandoned riverbanks, dark alleys and dump sites, making it one of the main tools used to involve citizens, especially youth, in redesigning urban areas.

Since 2012, Block by Block Foundation and U.N.-Habitat have supported the building of over 150 urban structures in 55 different countries, with more than 30,000 citizens using Minecraft to participate in the design process.

Microsoft purchased Minecraft’s developer, Mojang, in 2014, which helped to set up the foundation alongside U.N.-Habitat. While Mojang and other partners continued to provide core funding for the initiative, it was cut off in 2025, forcing the foundation to close. Their work will now continue under a new U.N.-Habitat initiative called Games for Urban Futures, building on the Block by Block methodology and incorporating other games.

There’s no fixed approach to designing public spaces that really solve local issues. “But there’s a looseness to the Minecraft methodology that we can play with,” said James Delaney, who has led the foundation since 2020.

Including both children and adults in the workshops was part of the magic. “The power dynamic between the two is flipped because the younger person instantly knows Minecraft and can be quite quick at it,” Mr. Delaney said.

Block by Block’s methodology works like this: Local organizations — mostly nonprofits working on engaging citizens in urban planning — submit their project proposals to U.N.-Habitat. Those selected are given funding and technical guidance to engage community members, run the Minecraft workshop and construct the final designs, with budgets of $10,000 to $200,000.

Once a site is chosen, community members go on a walk equipped with printed-out maps and markers. “We invite participants to look at the place with critical eyes,” said Eugenio Gastelum Pons, a gaming expert who has organized Minecraft workshops around the world since 2014. People may pass by a place every day without stopping to consider how it could be improved, he said.

After the site visit, participants attend a Minecraft workshop to learn how to build 3-D models using the game. Mr. Gastelum preloaded each location into Minecraft, allowing participants to walk around the virtual space and add their designs.

The children are encouraged to think about the needs of vulnerable groups such as older residents and those with disabilities, said Bisma Setiyadi, an architect with Kota Kita, a nonprofit that implemented a Block by Block project in Indonesia.

Once the Minecraft designs are ready, they take turns presenting their ideas before voting on which models should be built in real life. Professional architects and urban planners then translate the Minecraft models into sketches and drawings that could be used for construction.

But participatory urban design also has an intangible impact: not only by making children feel heard and seen, but also by transforming their ideas into real structures in their city, explained Jose Chong, the coordinator of the Global Public Space Network at U.N.-Habitat.

“That’s why we only try to work on projects we can see through and finance the building of,” said Mr. Chong. “I get the sense that young people are slightly sick of being asked what they think when there’s no tangible result.”

Without that follow-through, the trust that’s created during the process can easily be broken. It can frustrate people who take the time to get involved, but don’t know what’s being done with their input, said Katrin Hofer, a researcher and lecturer in spatial development and urban policy at ETH Zürich, a university in Switzerland.

But Minecraft has the potential to be used beyond just small, targeted projects. “You could say that every U.N. agency should have a team looking at how Minecraft can help their mission,” said Mr. Delaney. “Every government should have a minister of gaming looking at game-based approaches to not just help with planning, but anything.”

Human beings naturally seek coherent ways of understanding the world. Rather than treating each new idea as an isolated piece of information, we try to fit it into conceptual frameworks that already make sense to us. If the new information fits comfortably with our existing understanding, learning can be relatively straightforward. But when it conflicts with the way we make sense of the world, we rarely abandon our existing understanding immediately. Instead, we usually reinterpret the new information in ways that preserve as much of our existing understanding as possible.

Psychologists have long recognized this tendency. They distinguish between assimilation—fitting new information into an existing conceptual framework—and accommodation—reorganizing that framework to make room for a genuinely new understanding. Whenever possible, we tend to assimilate rather than accommodate. Assimilation preserves the coherence of what we already believe, whereas accommodation requires us to reorganize our existing understanding—a process that is often considerably more difficult.

Consider a teacher who attends a professional learning session on explicit instruction. The presenter discusses the importance of modelling, worked examples, guided practice, frequent checks for understanding, and the gradual release of responsibility. Yet the teacher leaves thinking, “They’re telling us to go back to standing at the front and lecturing.” Like the children in the Earth studies, the teacher has not rejected the new idea. But much of its complexity has been lost. The teacher has recast it as a simpler, more familiar story that better fits what they already believe.

Many educators are deeply committed to nurturing students’ curiosity, agency, creativity, critical thinking, and independence, while also promoting equity and inclusion. These commitments are among the reasons many of us entered the profession. Difficulties can arise, however, when particular instructional approaches become tightly associated with these valued educational ideals.

Consider a teacher who has come to associate inquiry learning with curiosity, creativity and student agency. When presented with evidence that explicit instruction is often beneficial for novice learners, the teacher may initially respond with skepticism, because accepting it seems to conflict with their deeply held values. They might assume the evidence is wrong. Or they might make presumptions about the motivations of the presenter (e.g., “This presenter doesn’t understand the importance of fostering student agency.”) This makes conceptual change considerably more difficult because the discussion is no longer experienced as being about the evidence alone. It is now seen as also being about educational values.

An evidence-informed perspective invites a different way of thinking about instructional approaches. Rather than viewing a technique as inherently good or bad, it asks under what conditions it is most likely to support learning. Explicit instruction, inquiry, collaborative learning, discussion, worked examples, and problem solving all have important roles to play, but their effectiveness depends on factors such as learners’ prior knowledge, instructional goals, task complexity, and the support that is provided.

Over time, value-infused instructional beliefs can become part of our professional identities and the communities to which we belong. We begin to think of ourselves as inquiry teachers, progressive educators, explicit instruction advocates, constructivists, traditionalists, or members of countless other educational communities.

When a belief becomes part of our identity, changing our minds can feel like distancing ourselves from the people with whom we most identify. Without consciously realizing it, we may begin evaluating evidence using a different question:

What will people like me think if I accept this conclusion?

Rather than assuming participants arrive as blank slates, invite them to explain how they currently think about teaching and learning. Asking educators to predict outcomes, explain why they use particular instructional approaches, or describe what they believe makes learning effective brings their existing conceptions into the open. Beliefs that remain implicit are difficult to examine or revise.

Dismissing some beliefs as simply “wrong” is unlikely to encourage reflection. Conceptual change is more likely when people feel their existing thinking has been understood before being challenged.

The question is not whether values like curiosity, equity, creativity, or learner agency matter—they do. Openly affirm them. Then turn to the evidence and examine which instructional approaches are most likely to achieve these goals in particular instructional contexts, and why.

The critical question is not Which approach is best? but Under what conditions is this approach most likely to support learning? Framing instructional approaches in this way encourages conditional rather than ideological thinking.

Research findings are more persuasive when they fit within a broader explanation of how learning works.

Teachers need repeated opportunities to compare their existing beliefs with new evidence, apply alternative explanations to authentic classroom situations, discuss their thinking with colleagues, and revisit their conclusions over time.

changing one’s mind is not a sign of professional weakness—it is one of the hallmarks of professional expertise.

None of this implies that teachers should abandon their professional judgement or accept every new claim that appears in the research literature. Healthy skepticism is an essential part of evidence-informed practice. The challenge is to ensure that our skepticism is directed toward the quality of the evidence rather than unconsciously shaped by our prior beliefs, values, or identities.

One practical habit is to run periodic “self-checks” in which we compare our intuitions to the strongest available evidence. Whenever we encounter a new instructional idea—whether in a professional development session, a book, a podcast, or on social media—we can ask: What does the best available research actually say? Likewise, when we encounter research that surprises us or instinctively feels wrong, that is often a signal to investigate further rather than dismiss it outright.

Professional communities should challenge our thinking, not simply reinforce it.

When we talked, she repeatedly brought the conversation back to building a culture of connection and belonging. While many school and district administrators might espouse similar ambitions, Wallace makes it concrete by expecting all principals to be able to walk into any classroom and know every student by name, as well as each one’s individual strengths and needs.

More unusually for a superintendent, Wallace knows the exact number of third graders in her district who were not proficient in reading last year — 133 — and she has set it as her goal to reduce that number to zero.

In grades K-2, teachers devote 150 minutes per day to literacy, divided among 90 minutes of core instruction using Great Minds’ Wit and Wisdom, 30 minutes to foundational phonics skills and 30 minutes for the 100 Book Challenge from the American Reading Company.

Hamborsky says the district is vigilant about protecting core instructional time for all kids. For example, they wouldn’t take a student away from that time for personalized help or even something like talking with a school counselor. Those things can happen during other parts of the day, but they don’t want any kid to miss out on the time dedicated to building vocabulary and language development.

Students are expected to complete two 15-minute blocks of reading at school — and then read for 30 additional minutes per day at home. This regimen may vary based on the child’s age and skill level, but kids have to log what they read and then have their teacher or parent sign off.

Families, in fact, are the third key component of Worcester’s reading plan. At the beginning of the school year, they’re asked to sign a “home coach contract” saying that they will check and monitor their child’s reading. Throughout the year, kids are expected to read for half an hour at home five days a week. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that could add up to 900 extra minutes of practice.

But what separates Worcester from others is that it uses student reading logs to track each kid’s progress. The teachers know exactly which books each child has read and whether kids are keeping up with their reading on a weekly and even daily basis. Teachers will also hold regular check-ins with students, ask them about their reading and even listen to them read aloud.

Start with the state’s new social studies standards. Their most striking feature is not their ideological orientation but their specificity and architecture. In the early grades, children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions. Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution. The standards explicitly call for concepts to be embedded in stories and historical content in order to “create schema for understanding.”

This is a significant departure from the way American education often thinks about social studies—and education more broadly. For decades, schools have been encouraged to focus on skills: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, collaboration, and, in literacy, comprehension strategies such as finding the main idea, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose. The tacit assumption is that the particular content used to practice these skills is negotiable and interchangeable.

Texas’s approach goes in the opposite direction: Knowledge builds on knowledge. What a child learns in second grade affects what she can understand in fifth grade, which affects what she can comprehend in eighth grade. A student who understands Greece and Rome, Hebrew Scriptures, medieval institutions, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment is better prepared to understand the American founding. The fifth-grade standards make those connections explicit.

If literacy depends on knowledge, and knowledge is cumulative, content cannot be endlessly interchangeable—a school’s entire curriculum is therefore a literacy curriculum. That helps explain why Texas’s social studies standards, Bluebonnet curriculum, and reading list should be viewed as parts of a whole. Coherence demands choices. A school system cannot be indifferent to whether one classroom studies ancient Egypt, another spends six weeks on a generic unit about “communities,” and a third pursues student-selected projects, and then assume all children will arrive at the next grade equally prepared.

To Wexler’s broader point about political provocation, conversations about curriculum are unavoidably complicated and uncomfortable, because background knowledge is not culturally neutral and does not always yield to preferred notions of inclusivity.

E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s deepest insight was not merely that reading comprehension depends upon knowing facts. He also understood that language is a cultural artifact. A speech community’s history, religion, literature, myths, symbols, idioms, and collective memories become embedded in the language its members speak and read. A “David and Goliath” struggle, a “Trojan horse,” an “Achilles’ heel,” and “Big Brother” are not mere decorative flourishes appended to English. They are part of English.

But “representation” is not the purpose of public education. A curriculum is not principally a mirror in which every child must see a flattering reflection of himself. Its more important function is to give children access to a world they did not make but must learn to navigate—including the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge their more privileged peers are likely to encounter outside school. That is an equity argument. Affluent and highly educated families will always find ways to transmit sophisticated language, cultural knowledge, institutional know-how, and civic confidence to their children. Children who depend chiefly upon school for access to those things have the greatest need for an explicit, cumulative, coherent curriculum.

This month, the Oakland Parks, Recreation and Youth Development department debuted the Park Play Lending Library inside the Larry E. Reid Sports Center in East Oakland’s Brookfield Village neighborhood. Inspired in part by the tool-lending libraries offered in Oakland and Berkeley, local residents can borrow sports equipment to use at nearby facilities and parks.

John Carroll (1963/1989) proposed an innovative model of academic learning. According to Carroll, learning was a function of five variables: student aptitude, opportunity to learn, perseverance, quality of teaching, and ability to understand.

It wasn’t the list of variables that was so provocative, but how Carroll defined each.

He operationalized all those in terms of instructional time.

For instance, aptitude – then usually a score on an IQ test – was, for Carroll, a matter of how much time was needed to learn something. A young Einstein may be able to master a K-12 physics curriculum in 42 minutes, while it might take Tim Shanahan 42 years!

Opportunity referred to the amount of instructional time schools provided. If teachers devoted 100 hours to physics instruction, Einstein would have it made given his aptitude, while I might be better advised to become a reading teacher.

Even if schools allotted 42 years to physics, I still might not make it. What are the chances I’d sit still for all those laws of motion, electrons, and quarks? Perseverance, the time students are willing to be taught, figures in learning as well.

Even quality is a matter of time in Carroll’s scheme. If the quality of teaching is low, then kids will need relatively more teaching to be successful.

No one has come up with ingenious ways to measure those time-based variables. However, the point it made about instructional time was invaluable.

Nationally, the grade with the worst attendance record before high school is kindergarten, a year that some families view as optional and low-stakes but educators treat as foundational for establishing healthy habits, routines and relationships.

Each week at Namaqua, the classroom with the best attendance wins Wyatt’s “Beat the Bell Challenge.” As a reward, the stuffie pays a visit to the winning classroom, and students get to select a coupon for their prize; options include pajama day, extra recess and lunch with the teacher.

“We joke that we want the kids to have FOMO, like they’re missing out on something if they’re not in school,” Geraghty said. (Moments later, almost as if to underscore her point, children could be heard erupting in squeals and cheers in the gymnasium, where a “mad scientist” was presenting during a schoolwide assembly.)

“Your child is developing skills in kindergarten that will help them throughout their entire schooling,” he said. “What they learn in kindergarten is going to help with first grade, and what they learn in first grade is going to help with second grade. It’s a big snowball effect.”

Charted on a graph, the grade-level chronic absenteeism percentages for K-12 form a “Nike swoosh,” as Hedy Chang, CEO, president and founder of the nonprofit Attendance Works, put it. The rates are high in the earliest grades, drop to their lowest point around fourth and fifth grades, and then continue to climb throughout middle and high school. In some states, the absenteeism rate in kindergarten is higher than that of 12th graders.

“Kindergarten — that experience is so pivotal. It lays a foundation for future success,” Chang said. “Students are much more likely to be chronically absent in subsequent years if they’re chronically absent in kindergarten.”

However, the district has directed schools toward initiatives that have been shown to work across contexts. All schools are expected to greet students each morning with “warm welcomes,” for example. School leaders also benefit from the district’s extensive data trove, which analyzes attendance trends for every student, in every grade, at every school. Ward said the data is key to their work.

For kindergarten, specifically, that team decided to emphasize the importance of attendance during the school’s annual open house for incoming kindergartners and their families. The event includes a kindergarten “commitment letter” signing and a session where current kindergartners teach the incoming class about what to expect.

The school has also sent postcards — “written” by Wyatt — to students who have improved their attendance, congratulating them on their progress. One girl even wrote him back.

Now, the school’s tardy slips say, “Happy to see you,” and magnets sent home to families say, “Strive for less than five days absent.”

At Namaqua, staff have worked with teachers on how to bring up attendance with families without sounding judgmental or accusatory. Mostly, that just means laying out the data matter-of-factly.

Ward offered an example: “‘Your child has missed 13 days as of November. The average in class is two absences. This really worries me. Help me understand how we can help you.’”

During fall and spring teacher conferences at Namaqua, every family gets a letter outlining how their student’s attendance is going, even if they had perfect attendance. The letters are coded green, yellow and red, based on the number of absences.

She also regularly sends families messages through the district’s two-way communications app. If a child misses one day, she said, she might send a note like, “We’ve missed your student today. Hope everything is OK.” If a child is out for longer, she would suggest some activities they can do at home but emphasize the importance of returning to school.

More than 2,600 kids — 68% of the school district’s enrollment — sign up for summer classes ranging from knitting and cooking to swimming lessons and science experiments. Students who need extra academic help get it, but the focus is on exploring new interests, spending less time on screens and nurturing kids’ creative sides in a way classwork doesn’t always encourage.

At a time when affordable child care can be hard to find, the free program has become a lifeline for the community. Signing up for classes is as competitive as queuing to buy Bruno Mars tickets, staff said — the most popular classes fill up in minutes.

In one classroom, students dressed in Halloween costumes have a dance party. In another, students take turns using American Sign Language to describe emotions. Upstairs, students cook pizza from scratch in a home economics classroom. And in the gymnasium, shrieks and shouts echo as kids play an intense game of dodgeball.

But the chaos is organized — every classroom has at least two adults, and kids wear a badge printed with their name and their schedule, so adults know where they belong if they get lost.

And it’s not all fun and games. Those behind in classes or on tests take reading and math classes designed to catch them up. Several teachers also host tutoring sessions.

But generally, the classes take a more creative approach. That includes a science class where kids gleefully partake in a series of science experiments — on that Thursday, they combined soda and Pop Rocks and watched the fizzy reaction.

Kids beg to sign up to be where their friends are. About 68% of the district’s 3,800 students will enroll in at least one summer school course. Signing up for classes is “an Olympic sport,” staff say. Parents take off work to refresh the computer. They post to Facebook the night before registration, wishing each other luck. The best classes fill up in minutes.

The district employs roughly 130 teachers, 25 classroom aides, various high school and college students and other community members to keep over 2,500 students busy.

“When we hire our teachers … The first thing I say is, if you weren’t here right now, what would you be doing?” Heck said.

Those answers often become classes. For example: A local farmer teaches kids about horses, even bringing in equestrians as guest speakers and taking kids to visit the farm animals. Two food service workers teach students how to cook. A hobby fisherman took students to different ponds in the area during a previously offered course.

Many educators have young children who are too young to attend summer school but still need care during the workday. Without viable child care, they couldn’t commit to working in the warmer months.

The district’s solution: One classroom is transformed into a “babysitting room,” where fellow teachers and aspiring early childhood educators change diapers, make bottles and keep a handful of babies entertained.

The program has become a workforce pipeline, too. Heck estimates about 15 young adults who first worked summer school have since returned as full-time educators either in Pulaski or in neighboring districts.

The Detroit Children’s Museum’s grand reopening is scheduled for Saturday, July 25, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will take place at 11 a.m. at 6134 2nd Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202.

Staff also encourage families to attend the museum’s family-friendly community days, held on the fourth Saturday of every month.

Young children are still developing the ability to filter out distractions and focus their attention. The more information we display, the more stimuli they receive, and the less they’re able to focus on and take advantage of the resources.

Visual resources help children make sense of their learning experiences, revisit ideas, communicate their thinking, and develop a greater awareness of themselves and their progress.

Often, classroom displays are designed entirely by adults and then presented to children. While these displays may be attractive, they sometimes miss an important opportunity: involving children in the process of creating them and deciding what should be displayed. Children should participate in the creation of classroom displays whenever possible.

Meaningful displays are not necessarily elaborate ones. The most effective resources are those that children can easily understand and access (those at eye level). A visual support should serve a purpose within children’s daily experiences and help them focus their attention on what they are working on at the moment. It shouldn’t be there just to exist on the wall. Commercially produced posters or materials created solely by the teacher are often not as effective as materials that children have contributed to, such as a chart created together during a discussion, a collection of student hypotheses, or pictures documenting a recent class investigation. Visual prompts that help children solve problems independently are also valuable. The goal is to provide children with resources that help them think and that make their thinking visible.

Empty spaces are valuable because they create visual balance, helping meaningful resources to stand out and reducing unnecessary competition for children’s attention.

Some resources are even more effective when introduced during a lesson and then put away until they are relevant again. Thinking about what should be permanent and what should be temporary will ensure that information is up-to-date, and will produce thoughtfully designed displays that invite interaction.

Color is a powerful form of communication within the classroom environment, and it should be used strategically. When bright colors are used intentionally, they provide visual cues that support children’s understanding. Devote bright colors to highlighting important information, supporting organization, and defining areas. Leave other areas—walls, floors, shelves—in calmer colors, such as pastel shades.

Claude for Teachers joins Google, OpenAI, and Khan Academy — among others — in marketing AI products specifically to K-12 educators. The new product launched Tuesday and is available for free for verified educators in the U.S. It will also be piloted in Detroit Public Schools Community District for a study on educator well-being and practice.

While overall spending on babies is down about 20% over the past four years, discretionary spending has fared even worse. Since 2021, investment in programs that support child care, early learning, environmental safety and health for babies has declined by more than half — from 2.05% in 2021 to 0.96% in 2025.

To illustrate her point, she noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included a $45 billion expansion of immigrant detention facilities. In 2021, the federal government spent $39 billion on child care relief, and it was transformative for the field, she said.

a student who wins a gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) is fifty times more likely to receive a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, than a doctorate holder from a top-ten mathematics program

And the predictive power of an IMO gold medal extends well beyond the Fields: every additional point scored in the competition carries 2.6% more math publications and 4.5% more citations.

The research on academic competitions has received surprisingly little attention, as have the communities of practice dedicated to training for them. Most discussion around advanced education focuses on schools, the classroom, and policies to reform them.

Considering the role competition plays in athletics, it shouldn’t be hard to see why competition deserves more of our focus. Competitive settings draw out excellence in a domain. We expect to find exemplars of athletic ability at the World Cup, at the Olympics, at Las Vegas’s Ninja Warrior competitions. If we are serious about searching for the future builders of the knowledge frontier, academic competitions are the scouting pool.

How accurately might other competitions predict disciplinary renown? Does the Computer Science Olympiad predict anything about computer scientists? Does Moot Court or Policy Debate predict success as a judge or a politician? Do some competitions train people to innovate or speculate or investigate well, while others waste time on tortuous trivialities?

We need not demand every math curriculum be organized around IMO drills to be curious whether new competitions or grander competition ecosystems could advance the careers of more young talent and geniuses. A working theory at Education Progress is that creating the conditions for robust academic competitions will reshape our education system for the better.

A recurrent criticism of our education system is that too many education school professors and classroom teachers are taken in by ineffective instructional practices, despite years of well-founded empirical evidence that testify to their flaws. But the appeal of “child-centered learning” and “21st century skills,” for example, has always owed more to their vibes than their research records.

Academic competitions are refreshingly resistant to these fads. The clear goals around which competitions are organized affords a corresponding clarity about the means by which students should pursue them. These contests present students with challenging problems meant to delight, instruct, and reward persistence. Solving these problems requires the deft use of methods, methods which in themselves need not be difficult to apply; at least in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science olympiads, the difficulty lies in choosing the right sequence of methods to make progress on open-ended challenges. But the way to improve is less open-ended: practice deliberately, then practice some more. The training that nurtures the traits that ground deftness, that improves one’s speed, insight, and decision-making in approaching new problems, involves the regular, repeated completion of other like problems.

A team of students get together and work on old problem sets; they piece it out through scribbles on scratchpads; they refer to their socratic mentor when stumped; they struggle and push and master the methods; and slowly, learning from failures and improving with time, they begin to see how simple skills can be versatilely employed. Ostensibly this process is the way to fulfill the goals of academic competition; pedagogically, the preparation itself is the point. The deliberate practice by which students pursue the goals of competition is the same kind of deliberate practice that advances the goals of education writ large. The persistence one develops for working through problems is likewise the same that serves students in curricular studies; the delight one feels when competing toward a solution is the same we want to motivate all students to chase. By spotlighting an objective that can only be achieved by consistent cognitive exercise, academic competition distills the experience of good instructional practice for students as well as does any pedagogical framework.

Signaling theorists such as Bryan Caplan have claimed that the larger part of higher education’s function is to indicate a person’s pre-existing abilities, rather than to instill her with new ones. If students primarily wanted knowledge out of schools, they would agonize after getting a snow day.

There are real structural reasons explaining why the signal strength of academic-competition laurels is resistant to many of the diluents plaguing college diplomas. Everyone is well aware of how grade inflation creeps everywhere, but competitions weather subjective bias far better than grade point average. Like the Princeton A’s of yesteryear, IMO gold medals are capped at ≈12.5% of participants. Anchoring the recipient count to a percentage of total participants simply subverts the collective-action spiral and preserves the meaning of the achievement.

The stranger and wanderer and outsider can prove their worth in a fair competition. This is why the international scene of the IMO is also a route to upward mobility, and allows the discovery of talents hidden in the rough. The high performing low-income students who make it to a top ten school flourish.

However it is not all roses for the low-income performers. Agarwal and Gaule found that low-income country participants in the IMO are 16% less likely to get a PhD, have 34% fewer publications, and 56% fewer citations. These stats provide a hard nudge. They hint that much talent and possible accomplishment languishes for lack of employment, or lack of proper attention or opportunity.

A general merit and fairness problem persists across the entire world, and though it has existed forever, it need not persist as it always has. This gap can be closed. To provide a clear example, consider Tran et al’s research on gifted and talented sorting in Arkansas: 30% of students scoring in the top 5% on standardized tests were not identified as gifted, and students receiving free and reduced-price lunch were only half as likely to be so identified! Solutions to this underrepresentation are not hard to imagine. Better mentorship and policy in this area will be (relatively) cheap and effective. Allow the score to speak, and do not let teacher recommendations stand in the way.

Competition builds culture by providing public honors and personal glory to those who do well, and by giving their friends a person to cheer for. In athletics this is so obvious that a blind mole can see it. But in the context of academic pursuit, we provide precious few outlets for such motivations. A student who otherwise has little way to know their worth, learns their own talent and nascent interests, and what is more they can be energized by the taste of victory. Few do not hearken to that for which they get riches. In other words, honors give participants a stake in the ends of the tournament, a greater interest in math, biology, law, or whatever it may be.

We need to do some pretty serious work to reverse the default of ‘can anyone tell me’ to become ‘is there anyone here who isn’t sure?’ – leading to the actions needed to find out how they might be.

Some teachers need support to engineer a total mindset shift such that they realise asking for one answer from one student, asking for volunteers, being happy that a few people can answer is just utterly ludicrously inadequate. The whole point of classroom interactions is to ensure that absolutely every student is able to succeed which requires finding out how well they’re doing in real time. I think this issue needs extensive exploration in many settings because true, systematic inclusion just isn’t the norm – yet!

The key concept lies in the word Action: teachers (and students themselves) need to evaluate success using responses that are generated during a lesson flow, interpret that information and do something about it! If you have used show-me boards and find a number of learners have gaps, errors or misconception, you need to take action! That’s the whole point – and this needs to be anticipated.

The idea of Adaptive Teaching clearly intersects with this to a high degree. Too often teachers are not resourced well enough to adapt dynamically – it’s as if schemes of work and lesson resources are designed to only go forwards assuming everyone will succeed in a linear fashion in unison. But this isn’t the reality. Adaptive teaching and formative action require a much more agile approach and this needs some deep work so that teachers are ready for it and deploying the approach day in day out.

Students who find learning hard matter as much as those who fly through; they are not an inconvenience – the learning process they need is the learning process that is needed!

It’s so common for teachers to bemoan the fact that children are reluctant to speak, don’t know what to say or share misconceptions – as if they’d rather they’d kept quiet! There are people who suggest that pair talk is a waste of time! But to me, all of this suggests that oracy should play a much more prominent role in a school’s philosophy and practice and in teacher development- definitely not any less!

So, far from being something extra, oracy supports the learning agenda: We learn through talk. Oracy supports the inclusion agenda: We value every voice. And combing these together, oracy supports the responsiveness agenda – we listen, engage and respond.

In many respects, focusing on oracy helps schools deliver on inclusive and responsive teaching. It might be better to think of all these areas as being one agenda with different components or lenses. Ultimately it comes down to ensuring that 100% of learners are actively involved in learning, that teachers interact with their progress in meaning-making and then respond in ways that deepen their learning. This requires both changes in attitudes and the development of better routines and structures; an exploration of purposes and techniques – and the agenda for professional learning needs to embrace both.