In memoriam Honorary Doctor Robert E. Slavin (1950-2021)

On Saturday 24 April, Robert E. Slavin unexpectedly passed away at the age of 70. Slavin was a distinguished professor at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he further served as director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education. He received an honourary doctorate from the UG in 2014 on the occasion of its 400-year anniversary.

Success for All

Slavin was devoted to high quality education for everyone, including struggling students. He argued that research and evidence were of great importance to teaching. Besides publishing countless articles on the effectiveness of various teaching practices, he created the Success for All approach to education with his wife Nancy Madden, which has since spread across the globe. This programme is aimed at primary schools and is based on empirical knowledge about factors that play a role in the improvement of teaching quality and learning performance. Success for All has been in use in the Netherlands since 2015, with support from the UG.

Open letter to Biden

Slavin was involved in the writing of 24 books and more than 300 articles on topics such as the effectiveness of teaching practices, effective forms of collaborative learning and group formation in and outside of the classroom. Last November, he wrote an open letter to President Biden on his blog, in which he called for the establishment of a ‘Tutoring Marshall Plan’, through which 300,000 tutors would be employed to help students who were struggling as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Two days after Slavin’s passing, his ProvenTutoring project was launched with precisely this goal in mind.