Marshall Memo 659
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
October 31, 2016
1. Five steps to addressing implicit bias in schools
2. Perversions of “data-driven instruction” – and how to do it right
3. Suggestions for supporting a person who’s lost a loved one
4. Some leadership do’s and don’ts
5. Effective use of Google Docs in Colorado middle schools
6. A syllabus that invites students into a course
7. Using correct mathematical language through the grades
“Without realizing it, I had selectively noticed the misbehavior of just one subset of students.”
Sarah Fiarman (see item #1)
“School leaders need to help their staffs understand that unconscious bias is not deliberate; it doesn’t reflect our goals or intentions.”
Sarah Fiarman (ibid.)
“Authority, position, and title won’t make you a leader. Don’t worry about being a leader. Worry about being the kind of person others want to follow.”
Dan Rockwell (see item #3)
“A letter of condolence to a friend is one of the obligations of friendship.”
Millicent Fenwick (quoted in item #2)
“Struggling readers know they’re struggling readers. They do not need to see this confirmed every day.”
Susan Neuman (see item #4)
“At its root, assessment is how we determine if students have reached the places we promised they would be in our course goals. Do they learn what we say our courses will teach them? Assessment is nothing more than the tools we use to answer that question.”
Kevin Gannon (see item #6)
“I know how to find the least common bottom number!”
Jack, a fourth grader who got an assessment item wrong because he hadn’t been taught
the terms numerator and denominator (see item #7)
(Originally titled “Unconscious Bias”)
In this article in Educational Leadership, Sarah Fiarman remembers an epiphany she had as a teacher. Between classes, she expressed annoyance that a few students were frequently having side conversations while she was teaching. A colleague said she might be noticing this behavior among black students but not among whites. “Sure enough,” says Fiarman, “when I observed more carefully in my next class, white students were doing the same thing. Without realizing it, I had selectively noticed the misbehavior of just one subset of students.” As a white teacher who prided herself on racial sensitivity, she was chagrinned that she, like so many others, had absorbed an unconscious bias “in the same way we breathe in smog – involuntarily and usually without any awareness of it.”
Implicit biases are present in people of all backgrounds – unconscious preferences based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity, usually favoring one’s own group, but sometimes, among stigmatized populations, favoring the dominant group. Researchers have found that black students are often punished more harshly than white students for the same infractions, and there are differences in who gets called on in class, the level of questions, praise and correction, how educators communicate with families, and whether a parent’s assertive advocacy is seen as pushy or appropriate. Fiarman’s suggestions:
• Increase awareness. “School leaders need to help their staffs understand that unconscious bias is not deliberate,” she says; “it doesn’t reflect our goals or intentions. Normalizing talking about it allows educators to examine and discuss their biases more freely and productively.” Two free online tools are https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/unbiasing and https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. Leaders can also suggest articles or books and give staff time to read, reflect, and discuss. This can lead to the kind of realization Fiarman had about her chatty students.
• Name it. The teacher who helped Fiarman see her blind spot wasn’t trying to make her feel bad; she was being helpful and her words were received in that spirit. How does a school facilitate such interactions? Singleton and Linton (2006) suggest four agreements for courageous conversations about specific incidents:
(Originally titled “Code Red: The Danger of Data-Driven Instruction”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Susan Neuman (New York University) reports what her team of researchers saw in 4th- and 7th-grade literacy classrooms in nine New York City public schools:
In this New York Times article, author Bruce Feiler says that 90 million sympathy cards are sold in the U.S. every year, but many people haven’t mastered the art of writing a condolence note. These days, he says, “the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. ‘Sorry about Mom. Sad face, sad face, crying face, heart, heart, unicorn.’” For those who are inexperienced or out of practice at expressing sympathy about a loss, Feiler has these suggestions:
• Being tongue-tied is okay. A rabbi told Feiler, “Admitting you’re at a loss for words is far more caring and helpful than writing pithy statements like ‘he’s in a better place’ or ‘your child was so perfect, God wanted her to sit beside him.’” After Chanel Reynolds lost her 43-year-old husband in a bicycle accident, she became so impatient with inappropriate sentiments (including “At least he died doing what he loved” and “At least you weren’t married for so long that you can’t live without him”) that she started a website called GYST – short for Get Your S--- Together. Her advice: “Zero platitudes. If you’re feeling the urge to panic-talk and fill the air with clichés, don’t.”
• Share a positive memory. After poet/professor Kevin Young lost his father, he especially cherished notes from people who shared a recollection of a specific interaction. “At the time,” says Young, “you’re only thinking of your own relation to the loved one. You realize this person had impact beyond you. That was comforting.”
• No comparisons. It’s tempting to bring it back to yourself – “I know what you’re going through.” “I couldn’t sleep all night long.” “I cried so hard.” – but everyone experiences grief differently and “this is not about you,” says Reynolds. “You can absolutely express your sadness and sorrow, but remove yourself from the conversation.”
• Don’t dodge the ‘D’ words. “Passed on” “Carried away” “Resting peacefully” “Lost” and “Expired” are words of denial, says Feiler, and the last one is more appropriate for a driver’s license and can sound disrespectful. Don’t be afraid to use simple, straightforward language – dead, died, death.
• Get real. Grievers hear so many empty phrases that “a little straight talk can often be a welcome relief,” says Feiler. He believes the three-part format from Millicent Fenwick’s 1948 book of etiquette is still appropriate today:
“Authority, position, and title won’t make you a leader,” says Dan Rockwell in this Leadership Freak article. “Don’t worry about being a leader. Worry about being the kind of person others want to follow.” Here are some leader types that don’t inspire followers:
In this Teachers College Record article, Soobin Yim and Mark Warschauer (University of California/Irvine) and Binbin Zheng (Michigan State University) note that only 40 percent of U.S. teachers report using computers frequently in their classrooms (mostly for presentations, administrative tasks, and class preparation), and only 9 percent say they use more innovative Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis. Yim, Warschauer, and Zheng report on their study of middle-school ELA teachers in Littleton, Colorado who bucked this national trend and made extensive use of net-based Google Docs in their classrooms.
The year before the study, this district invested heavily in netbooks, then proceeded to give every student in grades 4-12 a Google account and encouraged the use of Google Docs to further improve students’ writing skills. Middle-school students made extensive use of Google Docs, with the two top activities being writing and revising their own compositions and collaboratively writing and revising texts with classmates (they also made presentation slides, chatted online with peers, filled in teacher templates, took class notes, and worked on spreadsheets).
Teachers said the quantity and quality of students’ use of computers increased markedly because of the easy access and user-friendliness of the Google platform. Teachers were especially impressed with the way Google Docs got students immersed in the process of drafting, revising, and peer editing. Classrooms developed a strong sense of community and audience as students used the commenting and chatting features to read, revise, and discuss each others’ writing. One student commented, “With this program, people can help me with my writing. When I share with a friend, they give me constructive feedback… so if you have questions, you can ask and they can help you understand what is wrong with your paper.”
Teachers liked the fact that students could choose the peers from whom they would get comments (versus working with anonymous critics) and were empowered to decide whether or not to accept comments on their writing. Another positive feature was that Google Docs recorded the time, date, and content of each entry into a document, making students accountable for their contributions to a group effort. This made it easier for teachers to hold students accountable for their work in collaborative groups. In addition, the ability to highlight and annotate in a cloud-based document made revision easier and more effective for students and teachers. Students were excited to start writing and produced finished products more quickly than when they were using paper or word processing.
Yim, Warschauer, and Zheng also note several downsides to this approach to writing instruction. First, there was the danger of students becoming dependent on the software to correct their spelling mistakes and their peers to clean up sloppy drafts, which prevented some students from learning self-monitoring skills and taking responsibility for producing high-quality work on their own. Second, some students were uncomfortable having others see their writing as it took shape on the screen or having others reading unpolished drafts. Third, there were some technical glitches with editing and printing that interfered with the writing process in some cases.
These downsides were addressed to a greater or lesser degree in district PD around the Google applications. Some teachers took the training and ran with it, setting up informal support groups (one was dubbed Google Gals) and using Google Docs extensively in their classrooms. Others held back and used technology less frequently.
“Google Docs in the Classroom: A District-Wide Case Study” by Soobin Yim, Mark Warschauer, and Binbin Zheng in Teachers College Record, September 2016 (Vol. 118, #9, p. 1-32), http://bit.ly/2erm8zy; Yim can be reached at [email protected].
In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Kevin Gannon (Grand View University) says the purpose of a course syllabus should be to invite students to become active learners of the content and provide the tools with which they can do just that. Here are his syllabus desiderata, which could apply to high-school courses:
• Who I am and how we can interact – Students should have the instructor’s e-mail address, phone number, and office hours, as well as a sense of how office hours work so students feel welcome to use them effectively.
• My pedagogical approach to the course – “Sharing our philosophical approach with students via the syllabus allows them to see the course as a product of careful decisions intentionally made,” says Gannon. “That helps them see who we are as instructors, and gives them insight into the type of environment we’re hoping to create in the classroom.” Student-led discussion? Socratic dialogue? Problem-based learning? Lectures?
• What students will get out of the course – Where will it take them? What will they build? What lasting value will they gain for the rest of their academic careers and lives? Framing the course around these questions is much more powerful than a list of “student learning outcomes.”
• A road map – Students need a thorough and specific calendar of topics and assignments and how the components of the course fit together: general topics, specific issues, and guiding questions (for example, What’s more important, race or class? Is there a link between education and health?) “Students should be able to look at the calendar and know not only what’s due for a particular day, but where that class session fits into the larger framework of the course,” says Gannon.
• Clear and assessable outcomes – “At its root, assessment is how we determine if students have reached the places we promised they would be in our course goals,” he says. “Do they learn what we say our courses will teach them? Assessment is nothing more than the tools we use to answer that question.”
Gannon concludes, “If there’s one recurring theme here, it’s putting student learning (not institutional policy) at the heart of the syllabus… The overarching theme here is one of invitation.”
“Supporting Clear and Concise Mathematics Language” by Elizabeth Hughes, Sarah Powell, and Elizabeth Stevens in Teaching Exceptional Children, September/October 2016 (Vol. 49, #1, p. 7-17), http://bit.ly/2dUVkLH; Hughes is at [email protected].
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 45 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 60 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year).
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief
Communiqué
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Essential Teacher
Exceptional Children
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Journal of Staff Development
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Literacy Today
Mathematics in the Middle School
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The District Management Journal
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine