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Some thoughts on why I think the science of learning movement in England has been so effective, after attending their national conference last weekend:
1. It's by teachers for teachers. Hundreds of teachers from across the country come because they are dissatisfied with outcomes they're seeing and are personally motivated to make a change. Because the message they receive is delivered by their peers, who know the reality of managing a classroom, a (sometimes) delusional school principal, and uncooperative parents, the message is much more likely to land than if it comes from someone at the top who hasn't been in front of a class in decades.
2. It's holistic. There were sessions on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and crucially teacher coaching and development. Many attendees not only teach students, but also influence other teachers as headteachers or coaches. This extends the influence way beyond this room. After over a decade of doing this, it's likely that a significant portion of English teachers has come in contact with ResearchED and the science of learning in some way.
3. They keep it simple. The sessions on instruction and the science of learning focussed on the few things we really know to be effective. Spacing, working memory capacity, cognitive load, cognitive processing and memory consolidation. They also tied this to immediate improvements you can make in your classroom.
4. They say it how it is. Phones are bad. Behavior matters. Students sometimes cheat. Parents don't wanna be confronted. AI will be a huge challenge to deal with. Policy makers are afraid to say these things, teachers aren't. Sharing best practices how to handle these problems every teacher faces was what brought many of them there, more so than the messages about instruction.
The clear message: if we can create and environment that's safe for students and teachers, where everyone knows and follows the rules, learning will happen. That's also what teachers will still be responsible for 10 or 50 years from now.
Congrats to Tom, researchED, and the sceince of learning community in the UK. You've made a massive difference for your country and your message is starting to spread.
New PISA data out- and a huge success story. England is now a top-10 education system in the world. Outside of Asia, one of the highest.
New PISA 2025 results:
Science: 8th in the world, up from 13th
Reading: 9th, up from 13th
Maths: 10th, up from 11th.
While much of the OECD has gone backwards, England has has held its ground while most of the world has gone backwards. Huge achievement by school staff.
Panic attack inducing thought:
If you had no ailments
The world pure abundance
Your life void of friction
And the universe no mysteries
What would you do on Monday?
Nils retweeted
Some personal news:
I've joined the Learning Science team at Alpha. You can probably guess what I'm there to do.
I suspect this news will come as a surprise to many. Frankly, it surprised me!
More in my latest post.
Nils retweeted
I'm listening to the Sold a Story podcast season two, which is on math education in the US, and it is enough to give me an aneurysm, seriously. The season opens with a bunch of little kids' voices doing very basic algebra, and you learn later that these are poor Black four-year-olds, and all of them are getting the problems correct. Oh, and they're super engaged.
Apparently, there was a group that figured out you can have kids go very fast in math if you just did direct instruction. But somehow, culturally, this was deemed "too hard" and too much of a "pressure cooker" for little kids.
It's pretty funny because it's not like there was any high-stakes testing or anything. It literally was just teaching the kids instead of "letting them discover it themselves."
I did a master's in education, and there was a lot of content in the program about equity, and how socioeconomic class, parental habits and attitudes, and level of education really shape a kid's academic achievement. It's just infuriating to hear that when they discovered a teaching method that works in spite of these disadvantages, it was thrown out as being, I guess, somehow not "fun" enough. It's difficult to believe that they didn't actually have ulterior motives.
Nils retweeted
If you’re producing music with ai & machine learning —> lean all the way into it, expose the wires, make it obvious, show us the ugly parts, show us it-being-itself.
Make it glitch. Don’t just generate “glitch music”, or what it thinks is a glitch— show it Actually Glitching. Show it fucking up while trying not to fuck up. Push your process till it rips apart at the seams.
Don’t rear view drive. Take us somewhere new, drive like a crazy person. Throw away the desire to become the idols of the past. Kill the rock star. The DJ. The singer-songwriter.
This is hard. The controls exposed to you want you to rear view drive. It’s literally maybe the only thing it lets you do. It takes some genius to break it.
Do the hard thing. Start with beginner’s mind. Trust your instincts. Reset.
Governments are competing with hyperscalers and AI labs for debt now.
The implications of this will be wild once they fully unfold.
What is happening here.
The bond market is now pricing-in 4 more 25 basis point rate hikes by June 2027, a total of +125 basis points including September's hike.
Just 9 months ago, markets had expected at least 100 basis points of rate CUTS by June 2027.
That's a +225 basis point differential in interest rate expectations in a matter of months.
Meanwhile, the 10Y Note Yield is up nearly +70 basis points in 30 days with no comment from the Trump Administration.
To top it all off, after a failed attempt at intervention, the US Treasury is now completely silent as long-term yields surge to their highest level since June 2002.
The bond market is trading like 7%+ inflation is back and the Fed is about to start raising rates by 50 basis points at a time.
This is unsustainable.
Why do this if GauntletAI is free?
Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates.
We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past.
The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley.
The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website.
We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board.
Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university.
We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco:
theacademysf.com/
Early LLMs got smarter by absorbing more knowledge during pre-training.
Current LLMs get smarter by learning to look things up during post-training
For humans, we have figured out that the former yields smarter and more creative individuals.
Food for thought?