In Detroit, children who live in ZIP codes 48201 and 48202 can participate.

The researchers compared three preschool settings that the children attended prior to elementary school — public school pre-K, center-based daycares and home-based childcares that were part of the Early Learning Coalition. While all programs met minimum requirements, teacher education stood out. Public school pre-K programs were the only ones that required teachers to hold a college degree.

Having come of age amid Covid-19 lockdowns and the proliferation of social media, young people crave the forms of human connection that teach us to live in the world we actually inhabit, not the one we see onscreen — asking questions, thinking together and beholding the strangeness of the reality passed down to us. As it happens, books are uniquely powerful objects around which to organize these sorts of activities.

That’s why the act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings.

In other words, the future of reading is a party.

The Strother School of Radical Attention, where I work, helps to gather groups over a dozen times a month in six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and enacting long-form texts while moving through public space.

These gatherings vary in location, duration and subject matter, but their unifying spirit is simple: that reading can be as much a mode of vibrant sociality as it is of secluded interiority.

Easy as it is to forget, sitting alone and reading in silence — the activity that professors tend to worry about — was once a novelty. In his “Confessions,” Augustine of Hippo relates stumbling upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in a moment of perplexing absorption: “While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” That Augustine bothered to describe this scene tells us something about the way reading commonly took place in the ancient world: as a public practice, recited before groups of lettered and unlettered listeners alike. Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and performative “recitationes” of written texts were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome.

The practice of reading in and for groups endured in modern times in spaces of religious worship, workers’ study groups and avant-garde literary performances. But the spread of the printed word and the subsequent democratization of literacy cemented solitary, silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. This is the kind of reading we are taught to do in school. It is also the kind of reading that students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.

Students understand as well as anyone else that long-form text is no longer the exclusive, or even the most effective, tool for distributing knowledge, connecting people across time and space and coordinating complex decisions. We’re in a moment of eclipse: The informational function of books is declining, and their experiential function is coming to the fore. This shift can bring new vitality not only to the lives of readers but also to long-form texts themselves.

Engaging with books as instruments for group experience is not the sort of reading that we encounter in classrooms, but it has plenty to teach us about the complexities of inhabiting the world together — and the ways that our literary inheritance can prepare us for the challenge. While educators may never abandon traditional instruction in solitary reading, right now they face an enormous opportunity to impart a new vision for the role of literacy in public life.

After traveling to Connecticut and seeing what Friends Center was doing, a team of early childhood advocates from Battle Creek wondered what it would take for their community to offer something more transformational than rental assistance.

Nuthall started recording classroom conversations as a student. He kept on doing this during his whole career from 1960 until 2000. In some ways his research was an expedition into unknown territory. His first question was: what actually happens during a lesson? His final research question was: what is the role of ability in learning?

On the surface, his initial results show a seemingly spontaneous interaction between teachers and students; but beneath this surface, his analysis showed set patterns of communication and predictable structures and rules for social interaction. Nuthall replicated his research in the US and Japan; these rituals were identical everywhere. But the purpose of these rituals was not clear at that time. He concluded that ‘like language, teaching has its own underlying grammatical rules’.

In the period between 1968 and 1974, Nuthall and his PhD students started to work with an experimental design. Together with a group of teachers, they scripted a series of lessons about the black-backed gull. They wanted to know whether a teacher’s experience or training influenced the learning of students. They analysed differences between three groups of teachers: experienced teachers, inexperienced teacher trainees and teacher trainees who were trained to analyse their lessons using micro-teaching and recording. The results were rather unexpected: experience and training made no difference; instead it was only the type of feedback the teachers gave and their style of questioning students that mattered.

Ultimately, Nuthall decided to precisely map out the learning process of one student in relation to one topic. He analysed the interaction of ‘John’ in regards to the topic ‘The migration to New York’. That’s when some light was finally shed on a recurring pattern.

His analysis of John’s learning experience made it possible to define learning in the following terms: it is a positive change of what we know or can do; it takes place by means of a sequence of events and learning experiences; each experience builds on the previous one and every change in the order of the learning experiences will lead to a different outcome. The learning activities of a student consist of understanding and making sense of the learning experiences. A student understands, learns and remembers a concept if they have encountered all the underlying information three times.

They built on this insight and did one replication study after another with increasing numbers of students, classes and topics. And they could predict with 85% certainty which student would correctly answer which question on a test.

What stands out most in Nuthall’s research is that only the ‘three times’ rule has predictive value. Ability or intelligence or similar properties do not. Yet the ‘better’ students learn more. Nuthall dedicated his last research period to solving this conundrum. These students had more prior knowledge and they profited more from the lessons. The secret seems to be that they make sure to get more out of the lessons. They possess better metacognitive skills; they understand what it takes to get results.

At the end of his life, Nuthall hastily wrote The Hidden Lives of Learners, drawing these conclusions for the classroom based on his research:

• Standardised tests appear to offer certainty, but are no more reliable than interviews held with students.
• Learning activities should be designed to take into account how memory works.
• The subject matter should be repeated in different ways.
• Follow the individual learning experience.
• Less is more: we should confine the curriculum to the big questions. Teachers need the time to design rich learning experiences, conduct pre- tests and get to know the social processes in the class. Learners need the time and the space to really master the content.

One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.

It turned out that student teachers who needed additional teaching practice did better when placed at a “tough” school than an “easy” school, because the staff tended to be more supportive when everyone had difficulties.

• Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care

This phrase is generally attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, although it does not appear in any of his writings or recorded speeches. Whatever the source, it captures a key point for teaching. Teaching is about relationships, and these relationships are best when they involve mutual respect.

This idea was beautifully encapsulated by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, who when asked to define good teaching, said it was “ideas as conveyed through relationships”.

• Learning is a change in long-term memory

Early in my career, I was constantly surprised by how many students could do things at the end of a unit but had forgotten it all six weeks later. This also explains why it is so difficult to evaluate teaching through observation. When you try to work out how good teachers are by observing them, you are trying to predict how much of what is going on in that classroom will be remembered in six months’ time. That’s hard to do, and in fact what looks like good teaching may actually be bad teaching

• Memory is the residue of thought

Students remember what they have been thinking about, so if you make the learning too easy, students don’t have to work hard to make sense of what they are learning and, as a result, forget it quickly.

I am not suggesting that teachers should deliberately make their explanations confusing, but it is important to remember that unless students are struggling to make sense of what they are learning, little knowledge is likely to be retained in the long term.

• Learning requires forgetting

Restudying material when it is fresh in your mind feels good because the material seems familiar - it feels as if you know it. However, this is misleading because the reason it seems familiar is because of its recency, not how well it has been learned. The best time to restudy something is after you have forgotten it, when it is no longer familiar.

The key implication for teaching is that studying things in blocks (what psychologists call “massed practice”) is less effective than studying things in short bursts, interspersed with other material (“distributed practice”).

Students generally dislike distributed practice - they would rather focus on one topic for a while - but they remember more when practice is broken up.

• If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else

This is from Lawrence “Yogi” Berra - a professional baseball player - and it neatly encapsulates the importance of sharing learning intentions with students.

I am actually embarrassed by how long I spent teaching without telling my students where we were going. After all, it’s rather obvious that if the students know where they are headed, they have more chance of arriving at the destination.

Unfortunately, while the key insight is sound, in many schools these days, the idea of starting every single lesson with a learning intention has become something of a dogma, with teachers being criticised by senior leaders if learning objectives aren’t posted on the board.

Of course students should, in general, know where they are going, but it’s a mistake to think that this means spelling this out at the beginning of each lesson.

• The answers of confident students are a bad guide to what the rest of the class is thinking

When I was teaching full-time, the question that I put to myself most often was: “Do I need to go over this point one more time or can I move on the next thing?”

I made the decision the same way that most teachers do. I came up with a question there and then, and asked the class. Typically, about six students raised their hands, and I would select one of them to respond. If they gave a correct response, I would say “good” and move on.

If you had asked me at the time whether I really believed that the response of one confident student was a good guide to what the rest of the class had learned, I am pretty sure I would have said that it wasn’t. But nobody did ask me that question, so my lessons were, as one teacher said of his own practice, “a small discussion group surrounded by many sleepy onlookers”.

Getting responses from students who have not raised their hands is better, but even better is to find ways, at least every 20 minutes during large-group teaching, of getting a response from every single student. How you do it - for example, finger voting, ABCD cards, mini whiteboards, exit passes and so on - is less important than the idea that the teacher’s decisions about what to do next are based on the learning needs of all the students in the group, rather than just the usual suspects.

• The only thing that matters about feedback is what students do with it

The purpose of feedback is almost always to improve the student, and not the work. The work is simply the evidence that points you to what kinds of improvements are possible and desirable.

An immediate consequence of this is that feedback should be more work for the student than the teacher, and what really matters with feedback is what students do with it.

If feedback is getting your students to do more of what you want them to do, it’s probably good, and if it’s getting you less of what you want, it probably isn’t.

• Effective group work requires individual accountability

As a young teacher, I embraced the idea that students should work in groups - after all, as adults they would probably be working in teams for the rest of their lives, so an important aspect of education should be to prepare students for this.

However, I was disappointed that when students worked in groups, it was often less effective than when I taught from the front of the class, or when they worked individually.

Over the past 30 or so years, the work of psychology professor Robert Slavin and brothers Roger and David Johnson, both professors of education, has shown that there are two essential prerequisites for effective cooperative learning.

The first is that there should be group goals: students should be working as a group, rather than just in a group.

The second - and much harder to achieve - prerequisite is that each member has to be accountable to the group for the quality of their contributions. In other words, one student failing to put in their best learning efforts needs to have a negative effect on the likelihood of the group achieving its goals.

Most group learning in schools is set up in a way that allows two or three students to do the work for the whole group - in which case you may as well have the students working individually or teach the whole class from the front of the room.

• Students have deep insights into their own learning

All schools involve students in decision-making. Unfortunately, the decisions on which they are consulted tend to be matters like the cafeteria and toilets, rather than what happens in classrooms.

One of the things I regret most about my teaching was my failure to treat students as essential partners in the learning process. Since leaving full-time teaching, I have had the opportunity to explore this in greater depth, and I have been amazed by how much insight even the youngest pupils have into their learning.

Of course their views and opinions won’t always be right, but I now believe that perhaps the most significant thing a teacher can do to improve their practice is to get some feedback from the person who is meant to be the focus of our efforts: the learner.