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Reading Road Trip S3 E10: The Science of Learning with Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden

By IDA Ontario Last updated 2025/08/22
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Description

Season 3 of Reading Road Trip wraps up with a jam-packed episode featuring Dr. Amanda VanDerHeyden. Kate and Amanda have a wide-ranging conversation about the science of learning and human behaviour – how do children learn new things? From the instructional hierarchy to incremental rehearsal, don’t miss this fabulous episode!

Curriculum Connection

This podcast episode broadly supports effective instruction across all curriculum areas.
Grade(s): K 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Topic(s): Understanding Reading Development
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2 Comments

  1. I wish that Dr. Vanderheyden would talk to people who from “the other side of the aisle”. She expresses quite a few misunderstandings about the hierarchy of math herself and this is often the issue with the psychology camp trying to dictate the conversation about math. We need integration of these professionals across the aisles not isolation. When people study the connections in math, they understand why it is problematic to consider correct answers as the sole evidence for understanding and fluency. I have never been in a school where teachers are consistently teaching for understanding and following the conceptual and fluency curriculum. There are many that are still teaching the algorithms and working for memorization.
    Lastly, there is no major math expert (including Jo Boaler) who is advocating that fluency doesn’t matter. Every coach and company addresses fluency. It is the “how” to achieve fluency that is being debated, not whether it should be developed. Meaning that timing facts is not the sole way students should be assessed and that algorithmic accuracy doesn’t always indicate understanding (which then impacts students through their hierarchal trajectory through math). If teachers aren’t trained to understand what to look for (students counting by ones instead of developing additive thinking in 3rd grade and beyond, students counting by groups instead of developing multiplicative thinking in 4th grade and beyond), students are locked into never making those connections that they will need to progress in math. Look up Dr. Nicki Newton, Jennifer Bay-Williams, Anne Elise-Records, Dr. Arthur Baroody and so many more that all put out research and information about how to achieve fluency (with number sense, systematic instruction following fact trajectories, and strategies that lead to automaticity).

  2. Quite possibly my favorite episode of all 3 seasons. So many mic drop moments delivered with both clarity and passion. A must-listen for all educators.

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