Rebound: How Schools Accelerate Learning Recovery
NUMBER 4 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired in December 2021 and has been downloaded 26,813 times — the fourth most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast.
Dr. Douglas Fisher came on to talk about Rebound, the book he wrote with Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie. The pandemic framing is dated. The research underneath it is not — and it answers a question every teacher still has: when a student is behind, do you go back, or do you go forward?
Doug's answer is forward. The acceleration research says so, and it comes from a place most of us never look: gifted education. That literature has one finding that should stop you cold. On average, forty percent of instructional minutes are spent on things students already know. We call it review. Students identified as gifted have been telling us for decades what it actually is — boredom, dressed up as instruction.
So you find out where students actually are. You keep the pace brisk. You make the relevance obvious. You rebuild confidence in learners who have stopped believing their own effort matters. And you build knowledge in advance: a ninety-second video on the LMS, two concepts and two vocabulary words, so the time you have together live can move.
He is also blunt about the language we use. "This learning loss narrative is really dangerous," he says. "That's what's killing my morale right now… I'm not convinced that the ninth graders all of a sudden started reading like fourth graders." There is unfinished learning. That's a different thing, and knowing exactly where a student is and teaching them what they need next is, in his words, our superpower.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why acceleration beats remediation — and where that research actually comes from
- The 40% finding: how much class time goes to content students already know
- The four moves of acceleration: know where they are, keep the pace, build relevance, rebuild confidence
- Preview and review — a better way to think about asynchronous work than "homework"
- Why tutoring should teach students HOW to learn, not just what they missed
- "Water, water everywhere": the student data we store and never use
- Why "learning loss" is the wrong phrase, and "unfinished learning" is the right one
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e990
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