In This Issue:

  1. Nine suggestions for righting the errors of education reform

  2. How a new principal can get off to a good start

  3. Facing the issue of race in schools

  4. A white teacher’s suggestions for doing right by students of color

  5. Practical advice for successful project-based learning

  6. Jennifer Gonzalez on teaching narrative writing

  7. Ice-breaking and norm-setting in the first week of school

  8. A teacher tells his own story on Day One

  9. Survey data on teacher professional development

10. A study of Reading Recovery

11. Research findings on open-plan offices

12. Short item: A survey to get to know students

 

Quotes of the Week

“When I first began teaching, calling parents terrified me. Each time I had to pick up the phone to talk about grades or behavior issues, I would panic, overthink it, and start looking for other pressing matters to take up my time.”

            Iowa instructional coach Clint Heitz in “Good Reasons to Call Home” in Education

Update, August 2018 (Vol. 60, #8, p. 8), https://bit.ly/2PpoZvC

 

“Any teacher will tell you that when students are placed in a group, there is always at least one ‘free rider,’ and it is very hard to tell what students are actually learning.”

            Jenny Pierpatt (see item #5)

 

“It’s always about slavery and racism. Once in a while, can’t we read about black kids just chillin’?”

            A student commenting about multicultural books in school (see item #4)

 

“White teachers like me have to love our students of color enough to learn how to teach them well.”

            Justin Minkel (see item #4)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Nine Suggestions for Righting the Errors of Education Reform

            In a concluding chapter of his book, The Testing Charade, Daniel Koretz (Harvard Graduate School of Education) suggests these principles for improving school accountability:

            • Pay attention to factors beyond standardized test scores. “We don’t want our kids to loathe school or be turned off by learning,” says Koretz; “after all, their well-being will depend on a huge amount of learning they will need to do after leaving school. We want them to be able to work collaboratively when jobs require it. We want them to be able to adapt their knowledge and skills to meet the changing demands that will confront them throughout their lives.” 

            • Monitor those factors. Among them: evaluating teachers’ practices, which Koretz concedes is sometimes difficult, “but we will have to go much farther than we have to date.”

            • Set reasonable targets. Once we agree on what to measure, says Koretz, we have to set outcomes “that the majority of educators can reach by legitimate means… while still exerting pressure to lessen inequalities in education.” This speaks to Campbell’s Law – that increasing pressure to an unreasonable level may corrupt the process and the people within it.

            • A punitive approach doesn’t work. The assumption among some education reformers, says Koretz, was that teachers knew how to produce better results but were holding back – hence the need for tough sanctions and incentives. But a more reasonable hypothesis is that some teachers don’t have the right curriculum materials, an orderly and well-managed school environment, or specific training to get better results. “If we are going to make real headway,” says Koretz, “we are going to have to confront the simple fact that many teachers will need substantial supports if they are going to markedly improve the performance of their students.” 

            • Don’t expect schools to do it all. There must be a full-court press that includes quality preschools, health care, nutrition, parenting support, crime prevention, and more. 

            • Pay attention to context. “To intervene effectively, we need to know more than howthe students in a school perform,” says Koretz; “we need to know something about why. This is true of both schools that do poorly and those that do well.” In some cases teachers need professional development, in others they need to be replaced. In some cases unstable and problematic home situations are a major factor, along with absenteeism and transience. And in schools with high student achievement, the educators may not be adding value; students’ entering advantages may explain their success.

            • Accept the need for human judgment. Impersonal standardized measures are always incomplete, says Koretz, and we must bring informed professional judgment (however imperfect it sometimes is) to the table. “We will need to find better ways to use judgment,” he says, “not avoid it.”

            • Create counterbalancing incentives. “One of the reasons that test-based accountability has failed so badly,” says Koretz, “is that the advocates who designed it… gave everyone in the system the exact same incentives: to raise scores and not worry about how.” This has sometimes resulted in excessive test prep and occasionally, cheating scandals. There must be built-in roles to limit these tendencies – people whose job it is to blow the whistle on cheating, to push back when a principal eliminates recess to squeeze in more test prep. 

            • Monitor, evaluate, and revise. “[B]ecause we will always be designing interventions with less hard information than we ideally would have,” says Koretz, “we need to be on the lookout for problems. We need to evaluate what we do, and we need to do it on a far greater scale than we have to date. This will be costly both politically and financially, but we simply have to do it, for both ethical and practical reasons.” 

 

The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Betterby Daniel Koretz (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Koretz can be reached at [email protected]. 

Back to page one

 

2. How a New Principal Can Get Off to a Good Start

            In this article in School Leadership 2.0, David Franklin (The Principal’s Desk) says leaving a principalship after 1-3 years is rarely good for a school, but it’s a common occurrence. Franklin suggests ways that a newly arrived principal can maximize the chances of leading the school long enough to make a significant difference:

            •Check things out before making sweeping changes. “Principals need time to learn the history of the school, get to know stakeholders, and work with them to map out the future together,” says Franklin. “Making too many large-scale changes up front will result in distrust and frustration from teachers and staff.” The only exception is when a principal is hired specifically to shake things up.

            •Get to know the school’s history and people. “All schools have a pulse,” says Franklin. “Find it and get to know the rhythm.” Above all, a new principal shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on recent events that might not be a fair reflection of the school’s long-term trajectory. It’s vital to do a comprehensive needs assessment and make time to talk individually with staff members.

            •Get teachers on your side. It’s not a good idea to change teachers’ assignments in the first year, says Franklin. Better to visit classrooms frequently and get a feel for colleagues’ strengths and areas for growth.

            •Under-promise and over-deliver. “By promising to ‘fix’ a school in the first year, new principals are just setting themselves up for failure,” says Franklin. Better to have a five-year time horizon and shape an agenda that will bring about significant improvements over time.

            •Be diplomatic. “New principals need to be seen as being able to work with all different types of stakeholders,” says Franklin. He advises against drawing lines in the sand with a stakeholder group or faction to prove a point. 

 

“5 Things New Principals (and Principals That Are New to Their Job) Should Never Do Their First Year on the Job” by David Franklin in School Leadership 2.0,August 12, 2018, 

https://bit.ly/2MmmOuO; Franklin can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

3. Facing the Issue of Race in Schools

            In this Education Weekarticle, LaShawn Routé Chatmon and Kathleen Osta (National Equity Project) say that troubling racial incidents around the U.S. in recent years make it imperative that schools address what’s happening. “If we don’t acknowledge this context,” say Chatmon and Osta, “students are left to assume that we think these conditions are acceptable, that we are unaware of the impact of these harmful policies and practices on students and their families, or, worse, that we don’t care.” 

            “Most educators value fairness and equality and want the best for all their students,” they continue. But “how learning is organized and evaluated is still rooted in an acceptance of whiteness as ‘natural’ and ‘normal.’ The presumption that students from a culture outside this ‘norm’ come to school with deficits – in their intelligence, families, culture, or communities – is built into the DNA of public education… Students of color often must attempt to learn in an atmosphere that feels unwelcoming and sometimes hostile to them and their families.” Chatmon and Osta suggest five social-emotional practices to build on students’ strengths, develop agency, and maximize achievement:

            •Invest time in professional learning. “Educators need regular opportunities to increase their self-awareness about how their various social identities, including their race, have shaped their own education experiences and inform their interpretations of student behavior,” say the authors.

            •Identify and eliminate biases in student placement and discipline. Who is disciplined and who has access to advanced classes, student leadership, and extracurricular activities?

            •Use practices that promote the intellectual achievements of students of color. For example, having students write about values that are important to them and their families has been shown to reduce stress for students of color, promote their sense of academic belonging, and improve engagement and achievement.

            •Build trust across racial, class, and cultural barriers. This starts with learning about individual students’ passions and interests and weaving them into the curriculum.

            •Build “race literacy” by having productive dialogues about the issue. “Teachers should engage all students in deep listening and reflection on complex issues and current events surrounding race, racism, and exclusion,” say Chatmon and Osta. Handled well, this will develop communication skills, self-management, and responsible decision-making.

 

“5 Steps for Liberating Public Education from Its Deep Racial Bias” by LaShawn Routé Chatmon and Kathleen Osta in Education Week, August 17, 2018, https://bit.ly/2L8COLG

Back to page one

 

4. A White Teacher’s Suggestions for Doing Right by Students of Color

            In this article in Education Week Teacher, Arkansas teacher Justin Minkel notes an 

important “disconnect” in U.S. schools: 80 percent of K-12 teachers are white, while 51 percent of students are children of color. “White teachers like me have to love our students of color enough to learn how to teach them well,” says Minkel. His suggestions:

            • Small daily actions– “Our students of color are often starved for anything and anyone relevant to their identities and experiences,” he says. His first graders were enraptured when he showed a YouTube clip of the Hamiltoncast performing at the White House.

            • Literature– “Children of color need books to be mirrors as well as windows,” says Minkel. There’s no shortage of material, starting with Scholastic’s We Need Diverse Books catalog https://bit.ly/2MEaiX3. High-quality books and magazines need to be prominent in guided reading groups, readalouds, and classroom libraries for independent reading. Texts about people of color shouldn’t shy away from issues of oppression, but there should be a balance. One mother reported that her children had this to say about the books they were reading in school: “It’s always about slavery and racism. Once in a while, can’t we read about black kids just chillin’?” 

            • Guest speakers– There are all too many negative images of African Americans and Latinos in the media, says Minkel: “We have to provide our students a constant stream of writers, artists, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and other competent and caring men and women of color to counter that poisonous programming.”

            • Upstanding– “When you hear other white people – including fellow teachers – make racist comments, speak up,” says Minkel. “It’s OK if your face turns red, you blurt out something that doesn’t quite line up as a sentence, or it takes you 12 hours to come up with the line you wish you had said. The important thing is to make a little gash in that conversation so the comment does not go unnoticed or unchallenged. Part of white privilege is the ability to speak against racism without being quickly discounted by white people in power as people of color often are.”

            • Listening – “I continue to marvel at the patience, kindness, and generosity of spirit shown to me by African-American and Latino friends and colleagues,” says Minkel. “To learn from them, I have to remind myself to stop talking and instead listen deeply to their experiences, perspectives, and advice… We can’t be afraid to ask a question of a colleague of color for fear we’ll look foolish or clueless.”

 

“How Can White Teachers Do Right by Students of Color?” by Justin Minkel in Education Week Teacher, August 15, 2018,https://bit.ly/2KXdsQD

Back to page one

 

5. Practical Advice for Successful Project-Based Learning

(Originally titled “God Save the Routine”)

            “Truth be told,” says Jenny Pierpatt (CraftED) in this Education Updatearticle, there’s “anarchy” in many project-based learning (PBL) classrooms. Teachers may think there’s a productive “buzz” as students work on their projects – “papers shuffling, little fingers typing or building, and low voices discussing the task in front of them” – but in reality, many teachers haven’t taken the steps necessary for project-based learning to be rigorous and effective for all students. Pierpatt debunks five common misconceptions and offers practical suggestions:

            •Myth #1: All projects must be collaborative. “Any teacher will tell you that when students are placed in a group, there is always at least one ‘free rider,’” she says, “and it is very hard to tell what students are actually learning.” Group grades, group research reports, and group presentations are problematic: “Although there is great value in having students working together,” says Pierpatt, “and some projects truly do require diverse strengths, knowledge, and perspectives, not all projects actually require a collaborative effort. Many can be done independently.” In addition, before students can work well in groups, they need explicit protocols that get everyone thinking, doing, and assessing learning.

            •Myth #2: Students should always have “voice and choice.” Pierpatt believes that when students have too much choice, classroom management and checking for understanding become much more difficult. She recommends starting with the end in sight – enduring understandings and driving questions – and then having students choose one content area or one of several projects. 

            •Myth #3: The teacher should always take a back seat. “Teachers have been shamed away from being a ‘sage on the stage’ in the past few years,” says Pierpatt. “I’m here to ask you not to throw the baby out with the bathwater… Contrary to what is often messaged about PBL, the teacher must be very present and still does a good deal of heavy lifting.” That means identifying the standards that drive a project, clarifying what students know and need to know, strategically using mini-lessons, short lectures, and videos, monitoring projects as they unfold, and intervening when necessary. “As they become copilots to students’ deeper learning,” says Pierpatt, “teachers will undoubtedly become more committed to nontraditional teaching practices, but we need to be sure they experience success first.” 

            •Myth #4: “Management” is so 20th century. For teachers getting started with project-based learning, “messy is not sexy,” says Pierpatt. “In fact, it’s a hot mess for both the teacher and the students!” Effective PBL teachers “are orchestrators that have put in place a great deal of structure and routine.” That includes group contracts, daily game plans, rubrics, benchmark and process charts, daily reflections as warm-ups or exit tickets, and a SCRUM board (from the design industry). With time, students will take more ownership of the process. 

            •Myth #5: Assessment is a dirty word. On the contrary, says Pierpatt, assessment, accountability, benchmarks, and pacing are vital components of progressive teaching: they set students up for success and provide early warning for students who are not learning. 

 

“God Save the Routine” by Jenny Pierpatt in Education Update, August 2018 (Vol. 60, #8, p. 1, 4-5), www.ascd.org/eu0818pbl. 

Back to page one

 

6. Jennifer Gonzalez on Teaching Narrative Writing

            “With a well-told story we can help a person see things in an entirely new way,” says Jennifer Gonzalez in this Cult of Pedagogyarticle. “We can forge new relationships and strengthen the ones we already have. We can change a law, inspire a movement, make people care fiercely about things they’d never given a passing thought. But when we study storytelling with our students, we forget all that. Or at least I did.”

Over time, Gonzalez developed a way to get her middle-school students writing effective narratives. For starters, she let them decide whether they would (a) write a true story from their own experience, but written in the third person, with fictional characters; (b) write a completely fictional story told in the first person; or (c) tell a true story that happened to someone else, written in the first person (for example, a grandmother’s experience getting lost as a child, written in her voice). 

Gonzalez found that the best way to get students ready to do their own writing was writing a narrative “live” on the classroom projector, “doing a lot of thinking out loud so they could see all the decisions a writer has to make… I have seen over and over again how witnessing that process can really help unlock a student’s understanding of how writing actually gets made.” Here are the eleven steps she suggests:

• Show students that they tell stories all the time. “Students are natural storytellers,” says Gonzalez; “learning how to do it well on paper is simply a matter of studying good models, then imitating what those writers do.” She suggests having students tell brief anecdotes in journal quick-writes, think-pair-shares, or playing a game like Concentric Circles. Hearing classmates’ stories (and the teacher’s) will bring back memories of their own experiences. 

• Study the structure of a story. A simple diagram shows students the classic sequence: exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. 

• Introduce the assessment criteria. Students are told what they need to produce and how it will be evaluated. Gonzalez suggests a single-trait rubric (see the link below for details).

• Study models. Students should then read at least one example of a well-written narrative to which they can relate. She suggests lots of possibilities. 

• Have students map their stories. At this point, students need to decide what they’re going to write about and complete a basic story arc. If they’re stuck for a topic, Gonzalez suggests having them write about something they canwrite about. “A skilled writer could tell a great story about deciding what to have for lunch,” she says. 

• Write quick drafts. Students get their story down on paper as rapidly as possible – perhaps a long paragraph that’s basically a summary. Having the teacher model the process is helpful.

• Plan the pacing. “Now that the story has been born in raw form,” says Gonzalez, “students can begin to shape it. This would be a good time for a lesson on pacing, where students look at how writers expand some moments to create drama and shrink other moments so that the story doesn’t drag.” Students could do a rough diagram showing the components of their stories and how much detail each one contains.

• Write long drafts. Next, students can slow down and write a proper draft with a beginning, middle, and end, expanding some sections and adding details.

• Workshop. Gonzalez suggests devoting a week to this step, starting with a mini-lesson on some aspect of the craft of narrative writing and then letting students work, collaborate with peers, and conference with the teacher. Possible topics for mini-lessons: selecting effective dialogue; how to punctuate and format dialogue to imitate the natural flow of conversation; using sensory details and figurative language; choosing precise nouns and vivid verbs and varying sentence length and structure; starting, ending, and titling a story.

• Do final revisions and edits. Students shift from revision (playing with the content) to editing (making smaller changes to the mechanics). It’s important that students save the latter for this stage, so they aren’t nit-picking as their stories take shape. Reading their drafts aloud is a helpful way of focusing on revision and editing. Missing information, confusing parts, unintentional repetitions, sentences that sound weird – all these are readily apparent with oral reading. 

• Produce final copies and “publish.”Rather than trying to grade more than 100 papers, teachers might consider several options: Caitlin Tucker’s station rotation model, which keeps the grading in class, or Kristin Louden’s delayed grade strategy, where students don’t see their final grade until they have read the teacher’s written feedback. Students might also publish their stories on a collaborative website or blog, create illustrated e-books, or create slideshows to accompany their stories and record them as digital videos.

 

“A Step-by-Step Plan for Teaching Narrative Writing” by Jennifer Gonzalez in The Cult of Pedagogy, July 29, 2018, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/narrative-writing/

Back to page one

 

7. Ice-Breaking and Norm-Setting in the First Week of School 

            “Where do I sit?” is many students’ anxious question as they enter a classroom for the first time. In this article in Education Week Teacher, Arizona teacher Sandy Merz describes how he used seating assignments for maximum benefit over the first five days of the year. His middle-school classroom had five large tables seating a total of 32 students. In preparation for these days, he labeled each seat with a number.

            • Day 1– Merz greets students at the door, makes sure they’re in the right classroom, and directs them to follow the posted instructions: Sit in birthday order so the person with the birthday closest to January 1st sits in Seat 1. The year you were born doesn’t matter. Don’t skip seats. When everyone is seated, the student in Seat 5 raises his or her hand to report that the class is ready to begin. Merz observes the interactions as students grapple with a routine they’ve never seen before: who are the organizers, refusers and disrupters, the active and passive participants? By the time the activity is finished, students will have interacted with a number of classmates in a safe, nonthreatening way, and the lesson can begin. 

            • Day 2– Merz posts these instructions: Line up in alphabetical order by the name you like to be called. Use last names and then middle names as tie-breakers. Then sit with an equal number of students at tables 1-4. Remaining students sit at Table 5. When all are seated, the last student raises his or her hand and reports that the class is ready. “Adjusting to have an equal number at each table produces a lot of interaction and some tension,” says Merz. “Watch closely how students with different ideas negotiate. Don’t intervene with the answer, but mediate if necessary. Have students quickly report out their names. Treat alphabetizing mistakes kindly, of course.” 

            • Day 3– Merz hands students a card that says: Read this card completely. Do not enter the room until you understand the instructions. You may talk about the instructions before you enter the room. When you understand the instructions, give the card back to Mr. Merz, enter the room, and begin.The card’s instructions (they are also posted in the classroom):

-  Complete this challenge in complete silence. Remain silent for the entire activity. Do not talk or whisper after you enter the room.

-  In the room, line up in order by height. 

-  Then take your seats with the shortest person in Seat 1. 

-  Do not skip seats.

-  When the class is seated, the student in seat 12 raises his or her hand, and when called on, reports that the class is ready.

“Although the task is easy,” says Merz, “the silent rule adds some stress, so observe which defense mechanisms students display. Note who is comfortable reading the cards and who avoids the task.”

            • Day 4– The posted instructions: Sort yourselves into two groups: sneaker wearers and non-sneaker wearers. Next, each group forms two subgroups: students with curly hair and those with straight hair. (You have curly or straight hair if you think you do.) Each sub-group finds enough chairs and sits in order from the person with the shortest hair to the person with the longest hair. (A tree diagram with the groups might be helpful.)

            • Day 5– The instructions: Form two groups: students who prefer to spend free time indoors and those who prefer to spend it outdoors. You may like both, but choose just one. Within those groups, define your own subgroups based on the last thing you did when you spent free time the way you wanted to. Find a place to sit together and talk about your free-time activity.

            By the time these daily 10-15-minute activities are completed, says Merz, “you will have a good idea about how your classes will function and have a sense of the key players and personalities… And by training students to rely on each other and work together, you’ve demonstrated your norms rather than explaining them.”

 

“Teaching Secrets: Get to Know Students Through Seating Challenges” by Sandy Merz in Education Week Teacher, June 27, 2012, https://bit.ly/2MZGMI6(see the lively responses to the article online); Merz can be reached at [email protected]. 

Back to page one

 

8. A Teacher Tells His Own Story on Day One

            In this article in Education Week Teacher, Seán Arthurs (National PTA) describes how he kicks off the first day of the school year with students. He projects a series of photos that, with his commentary, explain “who I am, how I got into education, and why I continue to work to scale effective teaching and learning.” Here’s what students see and hear:

-  A photo of Arthurs’s mother and father holding him as a baby at his father’s graduation from Queens College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Arthurs talks about his parents’ belief in education and his mother’s secondary-school teaching career.

-  A photo of himself at age 10 (this generally gets a laugh from students); he tells more about his mother raising four children and going to night school to earn her PhD in math education.

-  A photo of his first teaching cohort; he talks about his teacher preparation program and how he was bitten by the teaching bug.

-  A photo of his education school classmates when he returned to get a doctorate in educational leadership.

-  A photo of Arthurs lying in a hammock with his two children; he talks about his strong conviction that all students should have the same opportunities as his own children to succeed in school.

After sharing his story, Arthurs asks students to look through their cellphones and choose one photo that represents something important about them – their families, friends, hobbies, dreams – and share it with others in small groups, telling why they chose that photo and what it means to them. Finally, Arthurs asks one student in each group to share with the whole class (with permission) the photo and story of another student in their group. 

            This activity, concludes Arthurs, “serves as an ice-breaker and accomplishes the important objective of getting every student to talk on the first day. But it’s also much more. It helps students get to know and trust me and, equally as important, it helps them get to know and build relationships with one another.”

 

“Build Student Trust by Sharing Stories on the First Day” by Seán Arthurs in Education Week Teacher, August 15, 2018,https://bit.ly/2nKd2nv

Back to page one

 

9. Survey Data on Teacher Professional Development

            A new report from Project Tomorrow confirms that K-12 U.S. teachers are increasingly taking care of their own professional learning using digital tools. Some survey data for 2017 (all of which increased from 2010):

-  Watched videos or TED talks – 46%

-  Participated in webinars or online conferences – 34%

-  Used social networks to seek help from other teachers – 33%

-  Took online courses on their own – 23%

-  Used Twitter and social media to follow education experts and other teachers – 23%

(40% of teachers attended a face-to-face conference, down from 47% in 2010.)

Here is the surveyed teachers’ wish list for professional learning:

-  Using technology to differentiate instruction;

-  Using technology tools for on-the-spot assessment of student learning;

-  Implementing blended learning.

Teachers said they were not very comfortable with:

-  Facilitating student collaboration using digital tools (78%)

-  Personalizing learning for each student (76%)

-  Creating project-based learning experiences for students (75%)

-  Using student data to inform instructional practice (70%)

61% of administrators said training teachers in how to use student data was imperative, but only 25% of teachers listed this as a priority.

 

“Teachers’ PD: What Teachers Need, What Districts Are Offering” from Project Tomorrow, August 2018, http://blog.tomorrow.org/2018/07/30/teachers-pd-what-teachers-need-what-districts-are-offering/; for the complete infographics from this article, see 

http://tomorrow.org/speakup/speakup-2017-professional-learning-for-teachers-may-2018.html

Back to page one

 

10. A Study of Reading Recovery

            In this article in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Philip Sirinides and Abigail Gray (University of Pennsylvania) and Henry May (University of Delaware) report the results of an evaluation of a national scale-up of Reading Recovery with 6,888 first graders in 1,222 schools. The result? “[C]onsistent findings of medium to large effects on student achievement in reading over the course of this 4-year study offer evidence that Reading Recovery is an effective intervention that can help reverse struggling readers’ trajectories of low literacy.” Students in the study showed a growth rate 31 percent greater than the national average for beginning first graders, the rough equivalent of 1.6 months of additional learning. After the intervention, Reading Recovery students tested at the 36th percentile nationally, compared to the 18th percentile for the control group.

 

“The Impacts of Reading Recovery at Scale: Results from the 4-Year i3 External Evaluation” by Philip Sirinides, Abigail Gray, and Henry May in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, September 2018 (Vol. 40, #3, p. 316-335), https://bit.ly/2vTLPDx; the authors can be reached at [email protected],[email protected], and [email protected]. 

Back to page one

 

11. Research on Open-Plan Offices

            In this Research Digestarticle, Christine Jarrett reports on a pair of British studies showing that open-plan offices, touted as a way to increase collaboration and creativity (and save money) are actually reducing face-to-face interactions (people in one study spent 73 percent less time talking with others) and increasing e-mail traffic (by 67 percent) and instant messaging (by 75 percent). What’s more, open-plan offices were unpopular with the people who worked in them. The reason? People’s fundamental need for privacy and control over their environment. 

 

“Open-Plan Offices Drive Down Face-to-Face Interaction and Increase Use of E-Mail” by Christine Jarrett in Research Digest, July 5, 2018, https://bit.ly/2L2iFdY

Back to page one

 

12. Short Item:

            A survey to get to know students – This free online survey from Panorama Education https://backtoschool.panoramaed.comis a quick way to make teacher-student connections. Research has found that simple commonalities (for example, we both like the Yankees) improves students’ sense of belonging and gets their year off to a better start.

 

“Get to Know Your Students from Day One” from Panorama Education, 2016

Back to page one

 

            

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2018 Marshall Memo LLC

 

If you have feedback or suggestions,

please e-mail[email protected]

 

 

About the Marshall Memo