Marshall Memo 617

A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education

December 21, 2015

 

 


In This Issue:

1. Turning “I can’t” into “I can” in a high-school chemistry class

2. A teacher shadows a struggling high-school student

3. An Israeli study of girls’ middle-school math challenges

4. Does a growth mindset make students better math problem-solvers?

5. High schools that combine academic and social-emotional learning

6. Anti-bullying insights from Sweden

7. Dealing successfully with traumatic memories

8. The debate on inclusiveness in college science classes

 

Quotes of the Week

“Is this hard?” “Will I look smart?” “What will happen if I don’t do this?” “I’m not good at math.”

            Carol Dweck on the math worries of students with a fixed mindset (see item #4)

 

“The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM, are a messy tangle of experiments, misunderstandings, dead ends, insights, collaborations, accidental discoveries, desperation, triumph, and the rest of the human saga focused on understanding the world around us.”

            Jedidah Isler (see item #8)

 

“More than ever students need teachers who are stewards of deep and respectful learning and who are hopeful and critically curious learners themselves.”

            Margery Ginsberg (see item #2)

 

“[I]n my class, I make failing harder work than passing.”

            Angela Campbell (see item #1)

 

“Childhood fears and adult traumas are stored differently in the brain than happy memories. They are buried like porous capsules deep in the primitive regions, below awareness and beyond easy reach of conscious thinking and talking. They are buried so deep that they are separated from the normal flow of life, and so time cannot work its natural healing powers.”

            David Brooks (see item #7)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Turning “I Can’t” Into “I Can” in a High-School Chemistry Class

            In this Edutopia article, high-school science teacher Angela Campbell says that “Chemistry seems to inspire a ‘D’ mentality. A significant number of students just want to pass the class, meet their graduation requirement, and do it with as little effort as possible… Many students will avoid working hard in a class that they see as challenging because of the risk involved. If they work hard and fail, then they’ve proven their inadequacy. But if they don’t work hard and manage to get a ‘D,’ then their pride remains intact and they haven’t lost anything. That’s the reason why, in my class, I make failing harder work than passing.”

That’s how Evelyn, a junior in her class, boosted her grade from 60 percent to 85. As the course began, Evelyn didn’t see chemistry as relevant to her present or future life, kept her head low in class, was absent one day a week, and aspired to scrape by with a D. How was this girl transformed to sitting in the front row, volunteering to solve problems, working hard, taking risks, and showing real annoyance when she didn’t get an A? Here’s Campbell’s method:

            • Clear objectives – She presents students with a concise list of “I can” learning objectives up front. In a unit on dimensional analysis of the mole, here’s what it looks like:

-   I can identify the mole as the unit used to count particles, and use Avogadro’s number to convert between moles and particles.

-   I can calculate the molar mass of an element or compound.

-   I can perform molar conversions.

Guided practice – Each of these objectives has do-able work activities and formative assessments (homework, quizzes, or labs) that count for very little in the overall grade. “The point of these assessments is to give kids a lot of practice with the material in a low-risk environment,” says Campbell, “and to provide feedback on their progress toward mastering the objectives.”

   • Checks for understanding – After a period of guided practice, students take a short assessment, get feedback, and review for the summative assessment, which carries the most weight in final grades. This puts the incentive on understanding the material and preparing for the type of question that the final test will contain.

   • Summative assessments – The passing grade on these is 70 percent, and students who don’t clear the bar get feedback on which items they didn’t master, an “intervention worksheet” to get them up to speed, and are required to take the assessment again.

   • Differentiation and incentives – All students can shoot for a higher percentage on summative assessments, and Campbell reports that a significant number of students who scored in the 70-89 range choose to study the intervention worksheets to retake the test. “Students who are content to score at or below 60 percent are faced with extra work that they would not have to do if they were scoring just ten points higher,” she says. “The cycle helps students begin to understand that, if they can do the work required to get 70 percent, it’s not much more work to get an even higher grade. And the progress is addictive.”

Campbell creates her own tests, quizzes, test maps, intervention worksheets, homework assignments, and labs, using state tests as a guide for rigor and content. “I do all of the grading and fill out the test maps by hand,” she says. “It’s time-consuming, and I have to take work home with me every single day. I do my grading while my own children do their homework.” But she says her students’ results make it all worthwhile.

 

“Making Failure Harder Work Than Passing” by Angela Campbell in Edutopia, September 30, 2015, http://www.edutopia.org/blog/making-failure-harder-work-angela-campbell

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2. A Teacher Shadows a Struggling High-School Student

            In this Kappan article, Margery Ginsberg (University of Illinois/Chicago) describes how a high-school math teacher observed Ahmed, one of her students, for his morning classes and then followed up with a home visit. Ahmed loves soccer and his dream is to play on the Somali Olympic team. He is in supportive ELL classes and his conversational English is better than that of his mostly Latino classmates, but he continues to struggle with academic work. Each year, teachers have been frustrated with Ahmed’s chronic tardiness, lack of effort, and goofing off and have pushed for him to be evaluated for special education. However, Ahmed’s family won’t allow it – they want him to be strong and work hard to achieve success.

            Observing Ahmed in the first three classes of a regular school day, Ahmed’s teacher took careful notes. In the first-period language arts class, the teacher said that it was Valentine’s Day and asked students to read several quotations about love, select one, and draw a visual image of what the quote expressed. At first, Ahmed seemed happy, joking with the other boys, but then he stared at his paper in silence, clearly unsure of his drawing ability. The teacher spoke to him about completing the assignment, but by the time the bell rang, Ahmed had produced virtually nothing. His second-period writing teacher had a similar reading and drawing assignment, and as soon as Ahmed began to make mistakes, he slid lower in his chair, crumpled up his paper, asked for a new one, tried to get another student to draw for him, but was told by the teacher to do his own work. Things didn’t go any better in the third class.

            What struck the teacher/observer was how Ahmed managed to stay busy and out of trouble and yet remain disengaged from the learning activity and produce virtually no work. During one 15-minute period, she saw Ahmed organize the papers on his desk, ask to go to the bathroom three times (denied), ask a series of questions (“How many minutes do we have?” “How many words do we need to write?”), open and close his notebook four times, put the date on his paper, stare out the window, stare at the clock, speak Somali with a classmate, stare at the overhead and copy the quotations, ask “We have to write 200 words?”, flip through his notebook, read previous entries, put dates on future papers, look at his watch, talk to the student next to him, ask more questions, and write, “Half way is good enough for me.” She wondered, How can Ahmed stand this day after day? How can he remain so agreeable?

            The teacher’s home visit filled out the picture. Ahmed’s family of five boys and six girls is very close, bound together by their Muslim faith. The parents rarely speak about their lives in Somalia and the dangers they escaped. They owned their own home and had a store that sold food and other merchandise, but lost everything when they fled the country. Now they are having financial difficulty – the father can’t work because of a back injury and the mother is incapacitated by diabetes. Ahmed’s education is very important to his parents and they hope he will become a doctor or engineer. As they talk, it becomes apparent that Ahmed has been successful in hiding his academic problems from his parents – they believe despite some skill problems, he’s on track to graduate from high school on time. Ahmed knows this isn’t true and that he’s not in mainstream classes, but he doesn’t want to let his parents down and is intentionally positive (though vague) about what’s going on in school.

            The teacher comes away from the shadowing and home visit deeply troubled. How can a student who is enrolled in classes designed specifically to provide extra help learn so little? “In spite of rich life experiences,” says Ginsberg, “the education of immigrant and refugee youth who have not had comparable educational experience in their country of origin is a ticking clock. Once they age out of the school system and are adults, their options for a job that is rewarding and pays a living wage for a family are limited.” Ahmed’s teachers believe the problem is his own lack of motivation, but it’s clearly much deeper. The school is not providing four key elements essential to academic success:

-   Inclusion – A learning environment in which students feel respected by and connected to teachers and classmates;

-   Mindset – Creating or affirming a favorable disposition toward learning through personal and cultural relevance and student choice;

-   Meaning – Creating engaging and challenging learning experiences that include students’ perspectives and values and potentially serve the broader community;

-   Competence – Helping students understand that they are becoming proficient in ways that further their personal goals.

Chastened by this realization, the math teacher resolves to pass along key insights to her colleagues and improve her own classes in several ways: incorporating skills involved in owning a small business; using project-based learning to scaffold Ahmed’s thinking about the uses of mathematical reasoning (perhaps using his interest in soccer); and getting Ahmed doing a self-assessment so he can realistically communicate about his development as a student, especially with his parents. She also plans to suggest questions for other teachers who make visits to the homes of their immigrant students, including:

-   What aspects of school has your child enjoyed thus far?

-   What do you see as your child’s greatest strengths or skills? Can you tell me about a time when you saw your child demonstrating these skills?

-   What are some of the skills, talents, and interests that your family has developed over time?

-   At the end of the year, what do you hope your child says about his or her experience in school? What’s the story you hope to hear?

-   How and when would you like me to be in touch this year? What would you like me to communicate about?

-   What are some of the things that are different in schools in the U.S. and schools in your home country?

-   What is something you have learned since coming to the U.S. or moving to the community that you might not have imagined?

-   Are there members of your family who were not able to come with you when you moved here and to whom you hope your child will remain close?

-   What gives your family strength?

“More than ever,” Ginsberg concludes, “students need teachers who are stewards of deep and respectful learning and who are hopeful and critically curious learners themselves.”

 

“Shadowing a Student Shows How to Make Learning More Relevant” by Margery Ginsberg in Phi Delta Kappan, December 2015/January 2016 (Vol. 97, #4, p. 26-30),

http://pdk.sagepub.com/content/97/4/26.full; Ginsberg can be reached at

[email protected].

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3. An Israeli Study of Middle-School Girls’ Math Challenges

            In this article in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim (Israel Institute of Technology and University of Pittsburgh) reports on the story of Idit, a student who was getting honors grades in math through seventh grade and ended up failing the subject two years later. Idit’s story shows how the emotional, social, and cognitive aspects of learning mathematics interact with one other – in this case, negatively. The case is more poignant because Heyd-Metzuyanim personally tutored Idit and wasn’t able to rescue her academically.

What happened? Idit and her mother reported that the cause of her failure in ninth grade was extreme anxiety during math tests. They said she knew the material “perfectly well” at home, but when it came time to take a test, she experienced a “blackout” and forgot everything she’d learned. Math had been easy for Idit in elementary school – except for fractions, which she said she hated. In Heyd-Metzuyanim’s interviews with Idit and her family, several other facts emerged:

-   Idit’s math classes in grades 7-9 were taught in traditional fashion, with direct instruction, memorization, and lots of drill and practice.

-   Idit tended to do math in a “ritualized” manner, blindly following rules and working largely from memory rather than deep understanding.

-   Idit was very shy about asking and answering questions in class, especially when she wasn’t sure of herself.

-   It appeared that Idit’s parents had instilled in her a fixed mindset about her math ability – that she was smart at math – which may have prevented her from grappling with frustrating areas like fractions and increased her anxiety about difficult math tests.

-   In middle school, there was increasing tension between Idit and her parents over studying and grades.

Heyd-Metzuyanim says that Idit’s math meltdown is an example of a “vicious cycle” in which the girl’s superficial knowledge of math procedures collided with increasingly difficult material in a classroom that didn’t get into conceptual understanding. Before long, the chickens came home to roost – her fixed mindset caused her great anxiety in evaluative situations and, ultimately, failure.

The problem for Idit and many other girls, says Heyd-Metzuyanim, is that “ritual participation deludes both the student and the teacher that the student is advancing satisfactorily. Thus, the ritual shortcut ‘works’ for the student as well as the teacher, which might explain the prevalence of ritual instruction, especially in settings where students are not equally ready for more-advanced domains… It may also explain why students such as Idit, who seem to be doing fine up until the higher grades of middle school, suddenly fail, which for them can only be explained by a noncognitive factor such as math anxiety. In that sense, ritual performance produces a sort of frail skating on thin ice trajectory in which the student appears to be advancing satisfactorily while in fact the foundations of his or her mathematical knowledge are very weak.” What makes the situation even worse is that students need to go back and learn basic material but resist doing so because it seems childish and degrading.

How can schools help students escape this unfortunate spiral of failure? For starters, says Heyd-Metzuyanim, “Had Idit been participating in a milieu that construes mathematics as an activity worth pursuing for its own inherent motives (such as discovering mathematical truths), and not just as a tool for identifying herself as a competent individual, she might have avoided the vicious cycle of ritual mathematizing.” Here are her other suggestions:

-   More classroom emphasis on conceptual understanding of the math and less on drill and practice;

-   Less emphasis on grades and ability grouping that link students’ math performance to their fragile adolescent identities;

-   Less adult chatter about math as a gatekeeper for prestigious careers;

-   Early intervention, preferably before middle school, to address gaps in students’ math knowledge and understanding;

-   More emphasis on hearing each student’s way of looking at the world.

“When students do not speak up or do not argue or question my claims,” concludes Heyd-Metzuyanim, “I now explicitly talk to them about the dangers of being silent and blindly following rules… I do this so that my students understand that their negative feelings about mathematics are a result of social forces that are mostly transparent to them. Only through awareness and active resistance can routinized ritual participation, like that in the case study of Idit, be changed.”

 

“Vicious Cycles of Identifying and Mathematizing: A Case Study of the Development of Mathematical Failure” by Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, October-December 2015 (Vol. 24, #4, p. 504-549),

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508406.2014.999270; the author can be reached at [email protected].

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4. Does a Growth Mindset Make Students Better Math Problem-Solvers?

            “Having a positive mindset in math may do more than just help students feel more confident about their skills and more willing to keep trying when they fail,” reports Sarah Sparks in this article in Education Week. “It may prime their brains to think better.” Recent neuroscientific research at Stanford University is showing how students’ beliefs about math learning can produce more efficient brain activity. Lang Chen and his colleagues studied elementary students’ brains with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and found that those with a “growth” mindset about math did better at spotting correct and incorrect math problems than those with a “fixed” mindset, even after controlling for differences in IQ, age, working memory, reading level, and math anxiety. The brains of students with high positive-mindset levels had greater activity and faster, smoother connections in the areas associated with quick recall of facts and math problem-solving.

            “This is very, very exciting,” said Stanford professor Carol Dweck (who was not part of this research project). “My hunch is that often in the fixed mindset your mind is preoccupied with ‘Is this hard?’ ‘Will I look smart?’ ‘What will happen if I don’t do this?’ ‘I’m not good at math,’ instead of getting that brain ready to do it.” It’s analogous to warming up a car on a cold morning before driving off – the engine is primed to work more efficiently. The key insight from this research is that the brain isn’t compartmentalized, with motivation separate from math problem-solving. “The emotion and thought structures in the brain are totally entwined, totally docked in the brain,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang at the University of Southern California. “If you are trying to do math and worrying about whether you are going to fail or not, rather than the process of doing math… that is not deep learning.”

            Chen and Jo Boaler (also at Stanford) are hard at work on figuring out how to help students shift from a fixed to a growth mindset. “Mindset can change quite a lot across age and grade level,” says Chen, “so we really want to see how that change can relate to different brain functions and different math achievement.”

 

“In Math, Positive Mindset May Prime Students’ Brains” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, December 9, 2015 (Vol. 35, #14, p. 6), www.edweek.org

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5. High Schools That Combine Academic and Social-Emotional Learning

            In this American Educational Research Journal article, Stacey Rutledge, La’Tara Osborne-Lampkin, and Ronnie Roberts (Florida State University) and Lora Cohen-Vogel (University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill) compare four urban high schools in Broward County, Florida, two with impressive student achievement and two with lower results. The researchers’ goal was to identify the programs, policies, and practices that produced better results for these schools’ mostly poor, minority, and ELL students.

There were many similarities among the schools in curriculum alignment, classroom instruction, and parent outreach, but the researchers identified some key differences. They believe the secret sauce of successful schools is the way they combine academic and social-emotional programs. This, they say, allows students to “effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.” Here are the key differences among the schools:

            • Organizational structures – The higher-performing schools had several programs that enhanced personalization by supporting interaction between adults and students. The key features: looping of guidance counselors and administrators over several years; comprehensive and consistently enforced behavior management structures; and educators’ ready access to a rich array of data on students.

            • Administrators’ involvement – In one of the high-performing schools, the principal met regularly with students to inquire about their classroom experiences. In one of the less successful schools, teachers expressed deep frustration at the lack of useful feedback after administrators’ frequent classroom visits.

            • Connecting with students – Adults in the higher-performing schools made deliberate efforts to personalize learning – for example, making sure all students were involved in at least one extracurricular activity. Students in these schools described teachers and administrators as “caring” and “involved.”

            • Academic supports – Higher-performing schools inculcated a culture of learning and college attendance for all students, while the lower-performing schools focused this message mostly on high-achieving students. The more-successful schools used advanced courses as a way to institutionalize rigor; made the guidance department the “hub” for academic support (in one school, counselors made a point of visiting classes at every grade level); and explicitly taught academic and social-emotional skills in classrooms and tutorials.

            • Use of data – All four schools were systematic in this domain, but the higher-performing schools had a more positive attitude about how student learning results could be used to improve students’ schedules and educators’ practices.

            • Social-emotional supports – The more-successful schools frequently used the language of personalization and pushed staff to know students and connect with them. There were also more formal and informal adult-student connections, which included being present during lunch periods and intentionally checking in with students. “You can talk to anybody if you have trouble or something,” said one student.

 

“Understanding Effective High Schools: Evidence for Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning” by Stacey Rutledge, Lora Cohen-Vogel, La’Tara Osborne-Lampkin, and Ronnie Roberts in American Educational Research Journal, December 2015 (Vol. 52, #6, p. 1060-1092), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1QUZEW4; Rutledge can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Anti-Bullying Insights from Sweden

            In this Elementary School Journal article, researchers Robert Thornberg and Tomas Jungert (Linköping University) and Tiziana Pozzoli and Gianluco Gini (University of Padova) report on their study of how moral emotions and disengagement affect bullying and children’s willingness to defend a bullying victim. Here is their analysis of each dimension:

            • Moral emotions – Empathy, sympathy, and guilt are linked to prosocial, moral behavior. The stronger these emotions, the less likely children are to engage in bullying and the more likely they are to defend someone who is being bullied; the weaker the emotions, the more likely children are to bully others and display pro-bullying behavior.

            • Moral disengagement – This, explain the authors, is a “sociocognitive process through which people can disengage from moral control and thus commit inhumane acts toward other people without suffering negative self-sanctions.” Some examples: (a) cognitive restructuring (“Stealing is not really harmful when compared to murder”); (b) minimizing one’s agentive role (“I wasn’t the only one acting that way”); (c) minimizing, disregarding, or distorting the consequences (“I didn’t really hurt him; he’s okay”); and (d) dehumanizing or blaming the victim (“He’s an animal and deserves what he got”). Moral disengagement is positively associated with aggressive behavior, including bullying.

            In their study of 561 Swedish elementary students, Thornberg, Jungert, Pozzoli, and Gini found that the level of children’s moral emotions – empathy, sympathy for victims, transgressive guilt, and guilt for bystander inaction – goes a long way toward explaining bullying and defending. These findings, conclude the authors, “suggest that anti-bullying programs can discourage bullying behavior and encourage defending behavior among students by counteracting and deconstructing moral disengagement and fostering and strengthening moral emotions. Developing a sense of personal responsibility is crucial. To reduce moral disengagement among students, teachers and other school staff need to make students aware of and challenge moral disengagement mechanisms when they emerge among them as well as enhancing the moral atmosphere of the school and classroom, because school climate or moral atmosphere has been found to be negatively associated with the prevalence of bullying and students’ tendency to blame the victim of bullying.”

A key school and parental role is to provide clear, explicit moral instruction, calling attention to victims’ distress and highlighting the actions that caused distress to elicit empathy and sympathy and counteract disengagement.

 

“Unique and Interactive Effects of Moral Emotions and Moral Disengagement on Bullying and Defending Among School Children” by Robert Thornberg, Tiziana Pozzoli, Gianluco Gini, and Tomas Jungert in The Elementary School Journal, December 2015 (Vol. 116, #2, p. 322-337), http://bit.ly/22l2ER5; Thornberg can be reached at [email protected].

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7. Dealing Successfully with Traumatic Memories

            “Childhood fears and adult traumas are stored differently in the brain than happy memories,” says David Brooks in this New York Times column. “They are buried like porous capsules deep in the primitive regions, below awareness and beyond easy reach of conscious thinking and talking. They are buried so deep that they are separated from the normal flow of life, and so time cannot work its natural healing powers.” That’s why many victims of traumatic experiences have a vague, inchoate feeling of unease or depression and cope by emotional detachment, compartmentalizing their lives, shying away from commitment, suffering from nightmares, and sometimes numbing themselves with substance abuse.

            The process of unearthing and dealing with these memory capsules is difficult, says Brooks, but with patience and resolve, people can do it: “They face their fears, integrate the good and bad memories – recognizing that many different truths lie side by side. After years, many build a sturdy sense of self and make lasting commitments that bring joy, strength, and peace.” There’s a parallel with broader social traumas like racial injustice and religious conflict. Brooks mentions three concepts that are helpful in the personal and societal arenas:

            • Soft differences – This is the art of avoiding a binary, good/evil view of the world and allowing others the space to be themselves.

            • Responsibility versus blame – “If you emigrated from Norway to the United States last year,” says Brooks, “you’re not to blame for the history of racism, but as a new American, you probably have a responsibility to address it. An ethos of responsibility is less defensive than an ethos of blame and provides a better context for cooperation, common action, and radical acceptance.”

            • Asymmetric rhetoric – If one person turns the volume up to 10, the other feels the need to match it – or become resentfully silent. “Rhetorical passion, which feels so good, can destroy conversation and mar truth and reconciliation,” says Brooks.

            “Even after a tough year,” he concludes, “we are born into a story that has a happy ending. Wrongs can be recognized and put into context. What’s the point of doing this unless you’re fueled by hope and comforted by grace?”

 

“The Year of Unearthed Memories” by David Brooks in The New York Times, December 15, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1kcj0Jq

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8. The Debate on Inclusiveness in College Science Classes

            In this New York Times article, Jedidah Isler (Vanderbilt University) quotes U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s questions in the recent Fisher v. University of Texas case: “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class? I’m just wondering what the benefits of diversity are in that situation?” Isler describes her reaction: “As a black woman and astrophysicist, I immediately became defensive of my own worthiness, and that of the black students I mentor and support every day. I wanted to scream my credentials from the rooftops… Of course, I deserved to be an astrophysicist, and my achievements prove it; but that’s not the point. I was worthy the first day I walked into the classroom… [M]y professors asked me if I wanted to understand physics, not what ‘unique perspective’ I might bring. I did want to learn physics, so they told me that I was in the right place.”

            Scientific knowledge isn’t purely objective, Isler continues. It’s an evolving organism within the culture in which it’s taught: “The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM, are a messy  tangle of experiments, misunderstandings, dead ends, insights, collaborations, accidental discoveries, desperation, triumph, and the rest of the human saga focused on understanding the world around us.” Because of this, classroom instruction can’t be through lecture, memorization, and regurgitation. Students need real-life examples of how Newton’s laws, for example, apply to the world.

“The purpose of the classroom is to build a tool kit and to understand what we know in the hopes of uncovering something that we don’t,” says Isler. “It’s the door through which we create new physicists. Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills. A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge. Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe.” If we limit access to those classrooms, she concludes, “we also limit the production of new information about the world – and whose perspective that world will reflect. If that’s the case, then we all lose.”

 

“Being Black in Physics Class” by Jedidah Isler in The New York Times, December 17, 2015,

http://nyti.ms/1S6wy77

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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 44 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 64 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).

 

Subscriptions:

Individual subscriptions are $50 for a year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and how to pay by check, credit card, or purchase order.

 

Website:

If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.com you will find detailed information on:

• How to subscribe or renew

• A detailed rationale for the Marshall Memo

• Publications (with a count of articles from each)

• Article selection criteria

• Topics (with a count of articles from each)

• Headlines for all issues

• Reader opinions (with results of an annual survey)

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• A free sample issue

 

Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:

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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

American School Board Journal

AMLE Magazine

ASCA School Counselor

ASCD SmartBrief/Public Education NewsBlast

Better: Evidence-Based Education

Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter

District Administration

Ed. Magazine

Education Digest

Education Gadfly

Education Next

Education Week

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Educational Horizons

Educational Leadership

Educational Researcher
Edutopia

Elementary School Journal

Essential Teacher

Go Teach

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Educational Review

Independent School

Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)

Journal of Staff Development

Kappa Delta Pi Record

Knowledge Quest

Literacy Today

Middle School Journal

Peabody Journal of Education

Perspectives

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

Teachers College Record

Teaching Children Mathematics

Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children

The Atlantic

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The District Management Journal

The Journal of the Learning Sciences

The Language Educator

The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The Reading Teacher

Theory Into Practice

Time Magazine

Wharton Leadership Digest