BLOG REVIEW: 2022

After about a decade blogging on other open sites and dabbling in social media as part of my public work, I committed to blogging at WordPress in 2013, and to date, had my highest traffic year in 2014.

Between my Twitter presence and blog, I always expected to have a greater reach at Twitter, but by 2022, I have just short of 8000 followers on Twitter and over 10,000 at this blog.

As part of my current fall sabbatical, I revised and redesigned this blog to make it more appealing and (I hope) to better present the work as professional (blogs continue to be discounted and marginalized despite the vast majority of my posts being heavily cited).

I am on track for 2022 to be the third or second best year:

And here are my top 10 posts of 2022 (eight original to this year):

Access these posts as follows:

• NYT Blasts Calkins with “Science of Reading” propaganda
• How to Navigate Social Media Debates about the “Science of Reading” [UPDATED]
• Dismantling the “Science of Reading” and the Harmful Reading Policies in its Wake [UPDATED]
• ‘Sold a Story’ Continues “Science of Reading” Misinformation Campaign: A Reader
• The “Big Lie,” American as Apple Pie
• Don’t Buy SoR Propaganda APM Reports Is Selling
• Fact Checking the “Science of Reading”: A Quick Guide for Teachers
• Don’t Buy It: The Marketing Scam of MSM and the “Science of Reading”
• Science Supports Balance, Not Intensive Phonics, for Teaching Reading
• Resignation

While the “science of reading” dominated my work, I am quite proud of my comic book posts throughout 2022, notably my series on Black Widow and my frequent posts on my collecting Daredevil.

I also want to highlight two of my scholarly projects:

• A Critical Examination of Grade Retention as Reading Policy (OEA)
• The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction (NEPC)

Why do I blog?

Primarily, I am a writer and writing is who I am so blogging is a wonderful way to write and draft, a way to think through important issues while also contributing to the public discourse that drives not only what people think but actual policy.

Also, blogs are accessible (essentially free to anyone who have internet access), and I feel far more valuable and effective than traditional scholarship that sits behind paywalls.

I have been an educator for almost 40 years, shouting the entire time that we mostly do this thing called education badly because we are thinking wrong or simply stuck in a rut of doing things only one way (for education, that way is “Crisis!> reform > Crisis! > reform, etc.).

Yet, I think we can do better, and I know we should.

Thank you for reading because that is the thing we writers are mostly seeking — those genuinely and sincerely engaged in the ideas we are drawn to interrogate and explore.

Let us hope for a better, more kind and peaceful 2023.